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16 April 2020 (Thursday) - Late Shift


I slept like a log, finally being woken (rather earlier than I would have liked) by "er indoors TM"’s alarm. I got up and had some Tesco muesli for brekkie. It’s a lot more like sawdust than the Sainsbury version of the stuff, and interestingly the packaging says it has no added salt. You have to ask why anyone would add salt to a breakfast cereal.

I sparked up my lap-top and told the world about my tenth (and final) album choice. “Time” by the Electric Light Orchestra. It’s that rather rare thing - a concept album. ELO’s second one. It tells the tale of a chap from the year 1981 who is launched over a hundred years into the future.
Whilst I was at it I had a look on-line to see what I’d missed overnight. I hadn’t missed much really.

As I do when on a late shift I took the dogs out. We didn’t have time to play in the river yesterday evening, so I thought we might do that this morning. So as we walked I picked up stones and sticks. Treacle and Pogo saw this and got very over-excited; jumping up trying to get the sticks. Pogo managed to yank one stick from my hand. As he pulled the stick so it cut me; there wasn’t *that* much blood really,
We played in the river for a bit. As we walked on we then met a “rather delightful lady” with two massive uncontrolled dogs. We were about to go into the Chinese garden when this woman shouted “my dogs will have your dogs – I’m just saying”. Now there’s no denying that with my hand still dripping blood I wasn’t in the best frame of mind. I waved a foot in the air and replied “my boots will break your dogs’ ribs – I’m just saying”. She clearly wasn’t expecting that, announced “oh, it’s like that is it?”, put her dogs onto leads and dragged them away.
As we headed past the play-park we met OrangeHead. I told her of what had just happened. She said she’d had similar incidents recently. She said something I’ve been saying recently; this lock-down has brought out all the dogs who never normally get walked from one week to the next.
Mind you I would rather have had my morning that OrangeHead’s. She said she’d just walked past a family sitting on a park bench. They had bicycles laying on the ground five yards away and her dog had just peed in Grandma’s cycling helmet. She chuckled as she told me, and I laughed too. I suspect that this is really funny for pretty much everyone except Grandma.

Once home I harvested a bumper crop of dog turds from the garden, then fed the pond fish. The pond is *really* clear at the moment; you can see right down to the bottom (over five feet deep) at the moment. Fudge stopped round the pond trying to get the fish food before the fish did. As he does.
Bearing in mind I’d used the last of the milk on my muesli I popped up the road to the shop to get more. The nice lady on the till was wearing her rubber gloves. With Herculean effort I restrained myself from asking if she realised the things had (at least) three large holes in them.

Usually I would go off on a little geo-adventure before the late shift, but what with the country in lock-down that wasn’t an option. I spent a rather dull hour writing up CPD, then set off to work.

The roads were quiet as I drove off to work. Not as quiet as they have been, but quiet enough that I was only stopping for traffic lights where usually I am stopping and starting all the way to work.
I got to work; where in the past I would have to hunt for a car parking space, today I had a choice of where I might like to park.

I showed my pass to be allowed into work. Perhaps I'm over-sensitive; I do realise the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic running riot through wards of critically ill patients, but I can't help but feel that there is something fundamentally wrong about having security guards controlling the entrance to a hospital.
I did my bit, and during a lull in proceedings I tried to log in to this evening's Zoom virtual geo-meet using my phone. It didn't really work as well as a lap-top, and after a couple of half-hearted attempts I gave up. Some things just don’t work on the phone…

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