Today reminded me of a post I wrote last year entitled “ Are we nearly there yet? “.; it turns out I wrote it nearly exactly a year ago. How did that year, and the last 1.5 years, go by so slowly and quickly all at the same time? When I wrote my post a year ago I wasn’t sure where ‘there’ might be, and I’m still not sure. I heard a radio commentator today say, ‘When we are back to nearly normal tourism it would be best if our MIQ facilities were not in a major city’. I wondered how anyone can equate ‘MIQ’ and our 2019 ‘normal’. The whole COVID experience, and day by day lockdown experience, sometimes feels like a perverse game of SNAKES and LADDERS – you never know when your trajectory will change between up and down.

I felt vaguely frustrated today, by nothing in particular. I reminded myself that I am lucky to live where I do; most people are not nearly so privileged and can’t look at 360 degrees of mountains from their house. That didn’t work. It’s a boring old adage that you want what you haven’t got, not what you have got. SNAKE

I recorded my song writing homework song. We had to write a song with only two chords in it. It turns out to be quite hard to write an interesting song with only two chords. Bruce Springsteen’s ‘ Born in the USA ‘ is an iconic example which I liked better before I realised that it just goes back and forth rather unexcitingly between two chords. I was quite pleased with my homework song until I listened to myself singing. One’s voice when recorded never sounds the same as hearing it inside your head. On this occasion, my voice definitely sounded worse outside than inside. SNAKE I posted the song on our class homework website anyhow because I couldn’t be bothered recording it again.

I chopped some grass sods out for Chris to lay by the pond. This is a significant scale job where we are removing the grass from between about 100 silver tussocks I planted in autumn and relaying it where the grass got damaged in the rock placement around the pond last summer. It is very hard to grow grass from seed here as we go rapidly from soil that is too cold for seed to germinate, to soil that is too dry for seed to germinate. It will feel more rewarding when it is done. In the meantime it feels like quite hard work. NEUTRAL

We went for a bike ride under the grey sky and low cloud. We passed some telly offies who told us we should get bells on our bikes, even though we had called out loudly from some distance before we reached them (they also said we should use our voices and I missed the opportunity to suggest they should use their ears). SNAKE All the other people we passed were a whole lot friendlier and even the telly offies said ‘Hello’ when we passed them on our return (I wonder if they didn’t recognise us). So that was a LADDER until Chris ran into me when we were close to home and I got all annoyed that he wasn’t paying attention when I was trying to signal in multiple ways that I needed to stop (he was looking at his chain rather than the person in front of him). SNAKE

When we got home we both realised we were hungry; will I ever learn that cycling over lunch time really isn’t a good idea? After some last night’s dinner leftovers I felt a whole lot better. LADDER I labelled some raspberry jam made earlier in lockdown from frozen berries that we picked last summer. The berries both reminded me that we are not so far away from the next growing season and it is always nice to have spare jam to give to people. LADDER When I checked my email, my songwriting tutor really liked the way my song is developing (the point of the classes, obviously, is not to vet one’s voice but one’s lyrics and melody). LADDER

And then I found the first daffodils have come out along our driveway. Our rabbit population is currently under control so our bulbs are starting to do their spring thing. How can the first golden daffodils not leave one feeling better LADDER – I will leave the last words for William Wordsworth :

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”