Stranger than fiction

It's three days since Clare tested covid positive. She now has a nasty sore throat, and was up much earlier than me and made her own breakfast. I still don't have any symptoms. Annoyingly my left ear is so full of wax that I can hardly hear and the pressure increase on the ear drum affects my head. Days of lubricating with olive oil before anything can be done to clear the blockage.

Before cooking a lentil with mushroom dish for lunch I completed Thursday's Morning Prayer video and uploaded it to YouTube. A beautiful big bunch of Mothering Sunday flowers for Clare from the children  arrived at the door while I was working. Yesterday after church Sheila came by with a presentation gift box of fruit from the Parish to its mothers. Such a nice thought, and just at the right time, saving me a trip to the supermarket on Sunday, as we were about to run out of fruit.

I did our weekly grocery shopping this afternoon, then went for a walk down to the river. Our neighbour Miriam is looking after a friend's golden retriever for a few weeks and was also on her way to Blackweir. The dog enjoys fetching a ball thrown into the river, and as the water level is low at the moment it's quite safe to do this. 

We stood and chatted on the river bank for a while, and then I walked up the path along the river bank for the first time this year. During the really wet winter weather it was treacherously muddy to walk on most of the time. A lot of work has been done cutting back bramble bushes and taking away fallen trees and branches, as well as completing the construction of the riding school paddock's boundary fence. The path is now one and a half to two metres wide on average, twice what it used to be, but it'll still get very slippery when it rains.

As usual, being a Monday, I watched the newest NCIS season 18 episode, and watched the news before turning in. There are still talks about talks going on between Russia and Ukraine, but building sufficient trust for the process to bear fruit is not going to be easy. Breaking news was about negotiations in Belarus in which sanctioned billionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club was taking part being targeted by a mild poison attack, causing alarming irritation not injury, but interpreted as a threat. There are some secret players in the power game wanting to sabotage any dialogue. But who? Is this true, and not a smokescreen invented to conceal what is really happening? At the moment, real life events are as full of bizarre and terrible surprises as any melodramatic spy novel. And thousands are still suffering and dying.