Gosh, this is boring isn't it? I mean, today was OK. We jumped in a car for the first time in months, and nipped up to Forty Hall for a bit of not-Hackney. Anything-but-Hackney was going to be a welcome change, to be honest, but the grounds of Forty Hall (the Hall itself is locked down, of course), though technically in London, felt almost like the countryside, and there was plenty of mud to squelch through. Ruddy ducks.
But Forty Hall aside, here we are, rattling around Hackney, occasionally the northern fringes of Tower Hamlets, and on some days -- the rainiest ones -- just the house itself. There is light at the end of the tunnel but it feels like a very long tunnel and despite the massive strokes of good fortune we have as a family, including 2 well-paid jobs you can do from home, and 2 children in a very good, supportive school throughout most of lockdown, it's still very boring. I mean, so boring I can't even be bothered to use synonyms for "boring". It's not even as exciting as dull, is it? Just boring.
Not unreasonably my parents, who are also bored, want to talk more than usual. Which is fine but I've got absolutely nothing to say. Or at least nothing of interest. Work is frantically busy, partly as a result of taking on a huge new area of responsibility with very little counterbalancing loss of responsibility elsewhere, partly because the gain in hours from no commuting doesn't offset the loss of hours of videoconferencing. Anything you could discuss in 5 minutes now takes 30. I have no idea what the psychology of that is, but there you go.
So yeah, I'm very busy at work, and if you want I could give you chapter and verse on the difficulties of re-procuring a particularly large Government contract I'm wrestling with that but it's so boring it makes my own ears bleed so I'm not sure I want to inflict it on vulnerable elderly-types. And yes, the children are fine in school but they never tell me anything about what they are up to, other than it's "fine", so no conversational meat there. Very thin gruel.
There's a new update of Ubuntu -- Focal Fosca -- available. No, that's not very interesting either.
It's not pubs I miss the most. It's trains and buses and B&Bs and Youth Hostels. We haven't even taken the boys to a Youth Hostel yet, but the fact that we could makes it all less boring. Now we can't. Forget Yorkshire, Suffolk might as well be the Andaman Islands. Poor old Kate can't even go for a swim in the reservoir. For the first time in over a decade we didn't go cottaging in the Autumn and we aren't going anywhere this spring, either, obviously. Cooped.
Right. I have a plan. I'm going to stop complaining and instead work out which of the trousers in this house fits which of the boys, and which fit no one. Basically boy B isn't fat, but he's got huge hips and a Fred Trueman style big arse (and Fred was many things, but unfit was not one of them). This means the the traditional snake-hipped kids trousers, even ones two years 'too big' for him, don't fit all all. You can get over-sized ones, but those are vast around the waist and look ridiculous. I fear the poor chap is just going to have to grow up wearing athleisure (shudder) until he can actually select trousers in specified waist-sizes. Then again, the speed at which he's growing suggests that he'll be able to wear men's trousers in 3 years, so he'll probably survive.#
Trouser trying time.
