Fine and dande

The sun in Heidi’s back garden creates a sheltered warm patch during the middle of the day so we hunkered down there for a while. I read and made inroads to an Easter egg, which Gugs said I attacked like a wild animal. Gugs’s black and white dress blended with the black and white splotched blanket. ‘I love accidental camouflage,’ she said, and I wondered how often it must have happened to her to become a recognised thing.

I suppose if we are marooned at Heidi’s for a long time, we should make hacking attempts to keep the garden trimmed. It would be our natural inclination to promote a wildflower meadow, but Heidi might not share our vision.

The cats were nearby, pretending they weren’t hanging out with us, but secretly wanting to. I was on the bed at one point in the afternoon and had a rare bonding moment with one of them, whilst wearing a woollen jumper that makes me look like a fisherman. This attire turned out to be a mistake. When the cat’s claw become attached it created a stand-off and I was hissed at. Not wanting to bear the brunt of a problem of its own making, I hissed back and immediately reset the counter on our relationship.

I went on a bike ride for my daily jaunt and spoke to Berry and Helen on video whilst on Coldham’s Common. We were laughing about some emergency protocols now being circulated internally but drafted during some post-election insecurity in Cambodia when we were living there. The Country Representative at the time was not a confident decision-maker and was supposed to use a text message cascade system to inform the team whether a situation was escalating towards code red. Instead of giving clear instructions, he called all of the Project Managers to the office from their homes to discuss whether he needed to upgrade the risk level. It was an example of when a protocol is purely there to cover the arse of an organisation, and not to be applied in practice. Berry and Helen’s daughter’s code brown situation put an end to the call and I headed back to Heidi’s as the temperature dropped.

Areas of the gig economy seem to be continuing strongly, which is good as the furlough conditions for this sector would likely be meagre. However it does feel odd to pass through a group of delivery drivers waiting for pickups outside popular fast food restaurants. Is ordering a Mighty Meat Stuffed Crust pizza from Dominos an essential activity?