This week seems very long and it is only Wednesday – at least, I think it’s Wednesday because it’s bin day. It’s definitely bin day – I heard one of the collections earlier. A highlight of course.
My excitement at featuring on a BBC podcast was short-lived. Superseded briefly by achieving more than 3000 views of a comment I made on Twitter, even a smattering of ‘Likes’. There is clearly a knack to doing these things: a formula to follow. But it is all also somehow meaningless. I suspect that any serious Twitter fame would come with an enormous downside to match.
This won’t stop me from setting myself targets related to this Blog, or to Twitter and podcasts, but this is largely to ensure I do something – anything at all – to fill my days with writing of some sort or another whilst I can’t get out to explore a bit more. I am completely tired of trudging the streets, although it helps when I have a delivery to make because that gives a purpose, and walking in the Park at the moment is a very muddy affair.
This year it will be the sixtieth birthdays of many of my friends. I still have a large group of friends from my university days and it is wonderful that we have remained in touch over the forty plus years since we first met. We have an age range of about four years, and a few have already clocked up the big six-oh, but 2021 is the biggest group. I suddenly remembered one such birthday at the end of last week (a non-Facebooker, so had to rely on my memory – well done me, good at trivia), and pinged off an appropriately abusive text. As a result, we arranged a phone catch up today and it was great to catch up on a year of each other’s very different lives. It has made me think that I really should arrange similar one-to-one chats with others. We’re not really into Zoom as a group (we thought about it and decided we have to do enough of those for our day jobs – haha most of them still working) and it’s easier to speak with just one person at a time.
Interesting that I’ve heard in the media recently that this is a trend – to go back to the old-fashioned telephone call. I’m just SO on-message these days.
(Or boring? Never!)
We also jumped on the latest Netflix film release The Dig last night, which seems to be what everyone else is doing, but it seemed relevant here because Mr J grew up near Sutton Hoo and was particularly keen to test Mr Fiennes’ Suffolk accent (he passed with flying colours and some of the turns of phrase elicited actual chuckles of approval). Apparently there had been a flurry of activity on Mr J’s old Suffolk friends’ WA chat group about the location shots for the film and where each group member had done what in their teens. As someone who hails from the west of England myself, I was slightly horrified at some of the tales from these East Anglian savages, but hey – it was another example of friendship and bonding in these troubled times I suppose.
So, I have now proved that despite the slowness of the days, there are some interesting ways to pass the time.
Now it’s back to trying to decide what to do with the rest of yet another rainy day. I have a supermarket trip next. The excitement is immense.