1991. Flowers on my walk...

...and a poor dead bumble bee....

A funny old day today...I’d forgotten what day it was for the umpteenth time this week and still feeling very unsettled about things...

Hubby broke the lampshade in our bathroom on Sunday so we ordered one from Dunelm which we collected today...all very slick and very careful as the shop itself is shut but you can order online and collect at the front of the store.

After that as it was a sunny day we had our usual walk after lunch and I chatted to my neighbour at a safe distance in our shared garden...still feeling so unreal....

My youngest phoned in his break and apologised for not phoning earlier but he seems ok at the moment.  Aldi are paying them double time for the bank holiday so he will be paid for 20 hours today...bearing in mind he is contracted for 25 hours...that’s pretty good.  He’s hoping to get a contractual increase to 30 hours if he can...I certainly hope he gets it because he deserves the extra hours long term after being so willing to do 40-50 hours a week during this crisis.

The last two hours have been spent watching Dominic Cummings wriggling out of admitting that he broke the lockdown rules and behaving in such an entitled and arrogant fashion that there will be no surprises that many people will just ignore the continued restrictions simply because he did.  If only he’d just apologised and said he regretted doing what he did...all of this might have just gone away...but no...too arrogant to do that...so cue many more days of this and probably more revelations about his activities. He did, however admit to the 30 mile trip to the castle that everyone including our PM denied he did yesterday....the wonderfully silly cock and bull story about “testing his eye sight” with a 30 mile trip with his wife and child in the car before driving back to London was just so ridiculous.  Who on earth would put their 4 year old in a car with them if they thought their eyesight was a bit dodgy?  I think I’m feeling so angry about all this because during this lockdown I and many others like me have had to deal with very vulnerable “at risk” family members often at more of a distance than we would have liked but obeyed the rules because it was the best thing to do for the broader community.  I am saddened that someone in authority has so little respect for the people that put him there but I guess that is where  politics in this country actually are...I feel like it’s so much less kind a country than I remember it being...