Precious restored

First thing this morning, I went up the back of the garden to make sure there’d been no squirrel murder. I wanted to make sure that Fang had survived the night in whatever nest she’d managed to find in the conifer.

While it’s impossible to determine if she survived she at least didn’t leave a corpse in the garden. I checked very carefully.

The only wildlife adventure today involved a wood pigeon which went inside the extension, left an awful lot of feathers and then managed to find the way out again. While the evidence was clear and wholesale, neither of us noticed the invasion.

In fact, there were so many feathers scattered in front of the big glass doors I’m surprised I didn’t spot a bald pigeon on the terrace later.

That was in the afternoon. Back to the morning…having ascertained that Fang’s bloodied corpse wasn’t littering the grass, I headed into town for the shopping.

There’s a chap who controls the queue outside Waitrose. He’s very personable and chats to whoever is at the head of it. Me being me, I tend to have a long chat with him.

Last Wednesday he looked surprised to see me and said he thought I was coming on Thursday. I explained that I was now coming every second week day meaning Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He nodded with understanding. Or so I thought.

This morning I joined the short queue, waiting for the people in front of us to finish fondling the fennel and he looked at me quizzically.

“I thought you were coming Thursday,” He said.

I started to explain but then stopped and told him he asked me the same thing last Wednesday. He smiled and nodded and told me I could enter the shop.

Now I’m wondering if there’s another old and infirm bearded white male with a wicker basket on wheels somewhere in Farnham who shops on Thursdays. And tomorrow the Queue Monitor will tell him he thought he was coming in on Friday.

Having shopped in a not very busy Waitrose, I headed down to Boots to collect Mirinda’s hay fever prescription. This was something I was dreading but, as it turned out, everything went swimmingly.

I was greeted at the doors by a young man who asked if I was after the pharmacy. I said yes and he opened the door for me. I walked into an almost empty chemist. One sales person was standing at a check out behind a perspex screen looking a bit sad. I gave her a cheery wave and good morning. She smiled weakly back.

On the floor, leading up to the pharmacy counter there was dots and dashes. The dots were marked for standing on and the dashes were two metres long (they had it printed on them) indicating the social distancing preferred gap.

There was no-one waiting at the counter. This, in itself, is a first for me.

Behind the counter stood Hannah (her name was on the receipt) wearing a face guard. She looked like an inadequately equipped welder. Her smile was a delight. Again, this is a bit of a first for me. The pharmacy staff in Boots, through no real fault of their own, tend to be a bit miserable.

I handed the glowing Hannah the prescription, she checked her stock and told me it would be a couple of minutes. I thanked her and sat down. And, true to her word, about three minutes later, I’d paid, thanked her and was on my way out of the shop.

I’ve written many times about how much I dislike shopping in Boots (almost as much as WH Smith) but this visit was excellent. If shopping in Boots was like this in Normal Times then life would be so much better.

And that goes for WH Smith as well.

Leaving Boots, I had to buy Mirinda an A3 sketch pad so Smith’s it was. Not for sketching, I hasten to add. It’s for her to stick her guitar music in. Most of her loose sheets are in A4 so the pad had to be bigger.

My trip into, around and out of Smith’s was smooth and perfect. Of course it helped that there was only two other customers and two members of staff there at the time. Still, it was all very pleasant.

As far as shopping is concerned, I think I’m going to miss this Lockdown.

The rest of the day was spent with laundry and cleaning the extension. The extension was especially important because Mirinda was hoping I’d find her ring somewhere. because of this, the cleaning job took on the appearance of a forensic fingertip search like you see on the police procedurals. Without the luminol though.

And among my findings there was a whole pocketful of change in Emma’s recliner. This could only have fallen from Bob’s trousers when he was over before Christmas. I say that because Emma doesn’t tend to carry small change and, apart from Bob, she’s the only one who sits there.

I also found a sizeable black spider living behind the lounge. She was a tad annoyed at my destruction of her home but, like all good councils, I relocated her. I let her loose in a shrub with some spectacular views and a much nicer living space than a leather lounge.

Of course, she might not have seen it that way.

Having completed the minute clean-up and search, sadly I found no ring. I told Mirinda the sad news. She was quite philosophical about it saying that at least we now had a very tidy extension.

Then, at the end of the day, having had her fill of meetings (she’d been very busy) she went for a wander round the garden. By the big compost bin she suddenly remembered that she’d picked up some weeds on the day she lost her ring.

Weeds don’t go into the compost bin. Rather we have a collapsible, ringed bin for the nasty buggers which Gardener Dave eventually takes away for us. She decided to upend it and, with a sudden flash of gold and a glint of opal, there it was.

Her joy knew no bounds. Gollum-like she raced inside, her hand held high, proclaiming how she’d found it. I can’t remember the last time I saw her looking so overjoyed. She threw her arms around my neck in relief and explained how she’d located it.

And so, after the disaster of losing it came the joy of discovery. It was all very good. It was especially good because I didn’t really want to buy a metal detector.