Life in this Plague Year is definitely miserable. I see fear and misery all around me when I go into Farnham to shop. My fellow shoppers in Waitrose, once mostly happy and cheerful are now shadows. People to avoid. Reminders of what the world has been reduced to.
What do you do when you disagree with something but are forced to comply? When do I get to breathe properly? Will things ever return to some sort of post-plague normal?
My walk into town felt pretty normal.
I stopped and chatted with Matt/Mike (I can’t remember his name but think it started with ‘M’) about Poppy’s sleeping habits. Shortly afterwards, I stopped and chatted with Gundog Guy who was complaining about the heat particularly given his home office is a box room on the third floor of his house.
Surprisingly, I also had a lovely chat with the woman in Boots who gave me Mirinda’s hayfever medication. But Waitrose was awful and people on the street dodged out of everyone else’s way like so many frightened insects.
It was a relief to get home. Though any happiness was short lived when I received an email from Tony informing us that Brian had died this week. Brian was a reader who was always good value. I thoroughly enjoyed when he read for me. He had been quite unwell for a while and had stopped reading last year. I’ll miss him.
Most of my day was spent doing the inevitable after-holiday laundry. I also made my non-vegetarian version of aubergine parmigiana for dinner.
After dinner and after our usual TV viewing, I realised that the snooker semi-final was on. Mirinda went to bed and I put BBC 4 on.
I only managed to see the last 15 minutes of the O’Sullivan v Selby final frame. Listening to the commentators, I really wish I’d seen the whole thing. Though, like the cricket, an empty Crucible with recorded applause was a bit odd.
At one stage Mark Selby was 16-14 up and about to win through to the final but then Ronnie did one of his magical moments and turned it all around. Levelling the frames at 16-16, and eventually taking the final frame, Ronnie, bumped elbows with the referee then Mark and strode off to be interviewed.
In true Ronnie style, all he could talk about was his (lack of) cue action. It was very funny. Mark, on the other hand, was bitter. He complained that Ronnie had been disrespectful to him and the game by his devil-may-care play at the table. My opinion based on the final 15 minutes was that it was a thrilling end to what sounded like an amazing day of snooker.
Tomorrow Ronnie plays a young guy called Kyren Wilson who I’ve never heard of. Hopefully I’ll get to see some more of Ronnie’s ‘terrible’ cue action.
