DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 14

It’s Sunda’y and a lazy start with coffee in bed. However the debris from last nights meal need to be cleared away and washed up. It was a lovely meal, made lovely by the fact that my youngest daughter was with us and two old friends joined us. It will be the last time we entertain for a long time as I fall into the high risk group and I feel that I am not being given much choice as to whether I isolate or not. Family and friends are already angry with me for my attitude and my behaviour. I know it is out of care and love but I find this situation difficult. I sense anxiety everywhere that I experience as being disproportionate and vaguely paranoid. Not a popular view but that is how it is. Normally I would hug my daughters and my friends but this weekend and last night we all remained “untouched”. It is an uneasy state to be in and I am envious of those who are able to be in their clans and go on hugging and being tactile. It just increases my sense of leper status. Something to be preserved; but placed in a colony. Like the lepers I am not the infectious one, I just have to carry the projections of everyone else’s anxieties about loss, death and fear of annihilation. I am not saying there is not a risk, but statistically there are other things that are more likely to kill me, crossing the road for example.

So today is Mother’s Day and my daughters give presents and flowers to their mother over a late breakfast while I arrange for some frog spawn to be brought round by my partner’s brother. By the time breakfast is done and we are all preparing for the day my partners brother appears with one of his daughters and a bucket of frog spawn. There is a socially distanced conversation on the door step and then a waved farewell. My youngest daughter leaves to drive home taking my stock of beer and lager with her as I will not be drinking it, any beer left will be used to cook with. We wave her good bye without the usual hugs, it’s a crap way to say farewell.

I retreat to the garden briefly to put the frog spawn in the pond. It will be interesting to see if it survives the transfer and we get any tadpoles. My partner goes off to take food her to her mother, my eldest daughter busies herself with preparation for work and I prepare to start reshaping the garden so that we can locate the raised vegetable beds and start growing some of our food. The garden is a challenge at the moment but I scrapped the old mini green house as it fell to bits when I moved it, cleared the patio ready for its raised vegetable trug, and cleared all the old pots and seed trays into a fresh space ready to be used. The garden swing seat has been uncovered so that I can collapse onto to it when I need a rest. I am appalled by my lack of fitness, I must get into an exercise routine and quickly.

My partner returns and we walk to the village shop to get a paper and some orange juice, where we witness a sturdy shop assistant deny a woman two loafs and only letting her take one. Hurrah for sense and the moral fibre of co-op staff. We walk the long way round the village to get some exercise and come across someone standing chatting in the street carrying a large pack of toilet rolls. It was very tempting to mug her but it seemed a little over the top especially as she had a child with her. So home to agree tonights meal, of course we have looked at the sell by dates on everything we have and order them in the fridge, so tonight will be mince as it is the shortest use by date; yesterday. As for tonight , who knows.