Not that I want to boast or anything (well, yes, I probably do!) but my fitbit usually tells me I have exceeded my stepcount goal for the day. Well, today it’s be a miracle if my stepcount gets up to 4,000 steps. This is what happens when you spend most of the day crawling around on the floor being a dinosaur, building towers with wooden blocks and making complicated structures with a magnetic construction kit - the last is an excellent way for kids to learn how shapes fit together, by the way.
Yes, Grandson Number Two arrived at our house just before 8.00 this morning, still in his pyjamas, demonstrating how he could do a wriggle dance so that his pyjama top “rubbed” his chickenpox spots. In the last few days he has learnt to do this instead of scratching. Kids are very adaptable.
And the weather hasn’t been fit for bundling him into his clothes and insisting on going for a walk, spotty or not. His mother and sister arrived late in the afternoon to join him for tea and then give Phil a lift to chess club. That’s our usual routine after I’ve collected him from pre-school, which he couldn’t attend today because of the spottiness.
At other times of the year I would have gone for an evening walk after everyone had departed but I draw the line at walking round the village in the dark at the end of January. So it goes. I count myself lucky that that’s the only problem I have.
This is a funny time of year, especially with the odd effects of climate change. And those effects are odd, at least in my garden. My snowdrops seem rather slow to flower this year. Likewise, there are hyacinths that are barely showing leaves through the soil - mind you last year they were also odd, bursting into flower before their stems were properly grown. And this year the bluebells are growing and showing already, but not yet flowering, rather earlier than usual. Oh, and there have been violas in flower! It’s not just me; here’s a link to a little article about something the writer calls “solastalgia”, apparently an Australian term to express something between homesickness, sadness at environmental destruction and a sense of impotence in the face of change.
Again, I find myself thinking that if that’s all that’s bothering me, others have it a lot worse than I do. One of the people accused of theft and fraud in the big post office scandal, a British Asian, describes how she felt that the investigation had racist elements:-
“They said, ‘We are short of £30,000, do you suspect anyone?’ I said, ‘I don’t, no.’ They said in that case you are responsible for it. One of the auditors commented to me as they were questioning me that ‘It is quite common in your society that women come under pressure to take money on the side, they don’t tell the family. Is someone putting pressure on you?’”
Yes, I am one of the fortunate ones.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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