Brezzi

One of those days. Successful pumping from the well to the top holding tank - 50m along and 10m up. All sorts of bits of hose cinched together to make the distance and grade. Then trying to get a cd out of the car CD player. With no luck with the 5 million You Tubes I watched. A patio door fastening that gave up the ghost (rescued by Tito, so to speak). Chairs to be reassembled. A sea bream to cook by Stein’s Cadiz Rota recipe. Too much mosquito bites and close heavy weather that brought a spattering of rain while others were flooded - in Palermo of all places. Two people drowned in their cars in urban traffic jams.

I was saying to someone in the Poppi bread shop that some days the Covid thing just gets you so down, so blue with the uncertainty of it all. I find myself getting out of the car without a mask on. It’s that normal/it’s anything but juxtaposition that sometimes just brings me up short. Mum gone. No more visits to Wallingford. Direct flights to Edinburgh gone. And would you want to anyway. Uncertainty stacked on proximity stacked on anxiety. Doesn’t make for choral singing, I can tell you.

Sometimes it feels like a Groundhog Day repetition mixed with a Dog Day Afternoon snafu futility that seems to have, as they say, no landing zone. Just an endless lockdown of the soul. And the fear of being intubated and dying of breathlessness. If you will.

They’re thinking of having me on ‘Thought for the day’ with that nice Mr Giles Fraser.

(The shot here is of the Officina Brezzi, our local fabulous all-knowing chainsaw/strimmer/grass cutting/tracked wheelbarrow superstars. Who also supply pumps. Just brilliant. (And top gear safety wear and logging chains). The mannequin is a recent addition and lowers the tone of joyful chaos and hidden and knowing efficiency.)