When the highlight of your day is a blackcurrant-flavoured (with real fruit!) throat sweet followed quite rapidly by another you know you're in trouble. It's just the sort of day for getting warmly wrapped up and fiddling in the garden, sun strong and warm, wind nippy but bearable. Instead I'm locked indoors trying but mostly failing to amuse myself. A friend warned me against watching daytime TV as a distraction - "It's all incontinence pads and Stena stairlifts" - but I'm never tempted, although yesterday I did watch a recording of Mrs Miniver for the umpteenth time to help while away a few hours, and sniffled quite contentedly into an already very damp hanky. All those American accents doing a Dick van Dyke: "Awroight Mairy Popp'ins?". Truly terrible, but even British Greer Garson sounded transatlantic. And there's always a cute but shrill very un-English child like Shirley Temple overacting horrible: "Oh Mormmmy, do I gotta?".
Earlier I realised that I'd read all my Christmas books and couldn't find anything appealing enough on my shelves. So I took advice and ordered a load of treats off Amazon. The bill came to just under £50 for six secondhand editions, and there ensued the usual conversation with my built-in persecutor. "That's a bit extravagant isn't it?". "So what, why else do I have money except to spend it sometimes, ideally on myself?". "Wouldn't just one or two have sufficed?". "I've wanted all those books for ages - some people would have bought them new". "If you can live with yourself ...". "Oh, just f... off why don't you!". It's all quite amiable but weirdly predictable, provoked by an illogical sense of guilt. It never stops me anyway.
I've been watching a large wood pigeon sitting on a thinnish branch on the ash tree opposite. The wind is blowing quite strongly now, and the branch is swaying madly, but the pigeon is just going with it, balancing and rebalancing, it's body perfectly toned and muscled from a lifetime of bird pilates. I wish I had a sound core like that. I might try joining it up the tree when I'm better, and let the wind force those unwilling pelvic floor exercises out of me. Cheaper than going to a class.
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