Domestic drizzle

I've mentioned more than once on here that first thing in the morning is my time for doom-filled reflection. I have a feeling I've done this for a while now, probably not just since Covid_19 came slithering into our lives; I suspect it's been a growing tendency since I retired, 15 years ago now. Today the self-torture continued into the morning proper, as I looked round the kitchen in the wake of tidying up after breakfast, and became convinced that we were drifting into domestic squalor...

And so it was, O Best Beloved, that I spent the morning on my knees. No, not praying for deliverance from unhappy revelations, but in a Victorian attempt to do something about my state of creeping unpleasantness. I tackled the kitchen.

It is at this point that I need to reveal, as I may indeed have done in another post, that my kitchen is, not to put it too bluntly, small. In fact, when the Everest man came to fit our new back door, a thing of some expense and great beauty, he opined that it was the first time he'd put such a door on a scullery. Cheeky sod - but it gives you the idea. It's an add-on to our Victorian end terrace, added when the house was about 10 years old and the two houses in the block were turned into four by dint of dividing walls and added protuberances at the back, which became the bathroom and the kitchen. When we first bought this house, we had lino on the kitchen floor, but some years ago now when the washing machine had flooded the floor and rotted a big bit underneath said lino, I had it all ripped out and a new wooden floor put in. We varnished it and that was that.

Today I moved things first. I put the pedal bin out into the garden (it hadn't yet begun raining) along with the doormat. I took out the vegetable rack, the big bottles of rice; I pushed the butcher's block trolley out of the way. I swept the whole caboodle. And I spent well over an hour crawling about with a bucket of hot water and wood cleaner, scrubbing (with a scrubbing brush!), wiping, wiping again. By the time I'd finished I was boiling hot and the floor was extremely wet - but it was clean. I think I'll put a photo of the kitchen in as an extra ...

My main photo shows the other thing I did today - several Italian lessons on Duolingo, taking notes like a good student - and my new desk lamp. It arrived yesterday to replace one that was threatening to stop working because of a dodgy switch. I'm delighted with the new one. It has touch sensitive controls and variable light levels and is much less obtrusive than its predecessor.

I also went for a walk, at 6 o'clock, when I should have been thinking about dinner and about the sourdough that I had to prepare for tomorrow. We felt a walk would be a good antidote to the cleaning and tidying. It was raining and very grey and we positively bashed round the West Bay and back road beneath our church. Dinner was late, and now bed is going to be late as well. And tomorrow I can be doom-laden about the increasing number of new Covid_19 infections and what the chances are that it'll affect our attempt at a holiday ...