Flowering Osmanthus seen through a Glass Darkly

My one pleasure in life at the moment has been snatched away or will be tomorrow at 6pm when Soderberg in the Square closes its doors for at least a fortnight. It has a liquor licence. No longer will I be able to meet someone in relative comfort outside the Dower House or have some interaction with the outside world.
There is another Soderberg branch nearby which doesn’t have a liquor licence and it will stay open - I may have to change my allegiance although it is much busier and more risky, otherwise it seems I will have to endure my own company at the kitchen table again, just as things were beginning to open up.

I can’t help wondering whether bringing back thousands of students to halls of residence and inner city flats was a step too far for the circulation of the virus.
Since most of the teaching is being done online anyway, perhaps it might have been better to keep the students at home and avoid the situation we have at the moment when university cities and towns are being overwhelmed with new positive cases of the virus.

My slide into an over dependence on alcohol is underway as I slurp a large glass of wine while waiting for my oatcakes to make it out of the oven and write this blog at the same time. The joke is, I have to get down on the floor very soon to do my prescribed anti hirpling exercises, and while there might be a certain anaesthetic effect from the wine on the pain, I imagine it will definitely make the getting up from the floor that bit trickier. It will almost certainly interfere with my ability to balance on one leg for 30seconds which is an exercise with a zero result from me so far.
It is interesting that I will persevere with these stretching exercises for a young handsome Irish physio with a pony tail while had it been a matronly Amazon from the Ural Mountains, I might have been inclined to give them a miss. ‘Twas ever thus.
I found this Osmanthus for making a cup of green tea when I tidied the kitchen. It was fascinating to watch it unfurl but hideous to drink.