Rod and line

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The diary of an accidental landlady views are completely my own and in no way reflect any standpoint of the business.

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Oh where for art thou summer?

Where is the sun? That is my first question.  I’m looking out at a grey sky, highlighting the forthcoming grey day, with slight irritation.  The fact that I’m going to be buried in the kitchen all day anyway seems of little consequence. I find a bit of sunlight in the morning really makes the day start in the right way, and as this one so far has involved traffic jams, early morning phone calls and barking dogs, it’s not shaping up to be the best day ever – by any margin. 

So what have I been doing? Well not writing this blog, that’s one thing.  I’ve been paying much attention to my garden, beans, tomato’s sunflowers, flowers in general – until the attack of the killer slugs, which I can no longer treat with bright blue, very bad for the environment, slug pellets. So the attack it seems is to continue, despite the wool, and the beer traps. The lack of sun though is taking its toll on growing speeds, a late frost caught all of the first Dahlia plants, so the replacements are on catch up, and the beans since being planted out are looking a bit weedy… Not so green fingered this year me thinks…

Apart from the garden and the kitchen which is my second home at the moment, not much has changed.  Mr Jones has a new BBQ, which he has used once, a new coffee machine, which he has also used once, and a fish finder that he can’t work at all.  He’s seemingly unimpressed with the developments of technology and procrastination should have been his given second name, because an innovation to him is about as helpful as a full stop, judging by the amount of time he takes to actually benefit from someone else’s ingenuity.  Take the mobile phone for example.  It only took him the best part of twenty years to be able to call someone on one, and now I expect we will wait another twenty years for him to actually answer his phone when it rings…

Talking about the kitchen, Ollie and I have been very busy this week, not only cooking, but creating a few new things, duck liver pate, caramelised red onion marmalade, some stables like gumbo, chilli and crab cakes, but we also managed a chocolate and banana cake and a flapjack rhubarb crumble. So if you haven’t been in all week – you have missed out! And if you are reading this now, on Friday the 13th – then the pate will be out in the grumpy corner at 5pm. 

Right I must go, I’ve got about an hour before kitchen duty and I need to talk lovingly to my beans before that… 

Accidental LandladyEveryday

Any Port in a Storm

Before you say anything, yes it was me on Spotlight, and no they didn’t get my best side.  Hardly surprising as I had been out weathering the storm with two very disgruntled dogs. I couldn’t quite fathom if they were disgruntled because I had taken them out, in quite frankly horrid weather, or if it was a result of it being far too late in the day.  Willow is a morning dog, she likes 7am, by four in the afternoon she wants to be in her armchair snoozing away, not out in the rain.  In fact, she’s not unlike someone else I know who likes to be in the armchair at a similar time in the afternoon…  Anyway I digress.  So I drop the dogs home, and walk to the pub.  I had spent five minutes comfortably assuring myself there was no way I could do any pilates or exercise without a shower, and there was no point changing in the cold, and consequently, my rather disheveled appearance and I found ourselves walking right into the waiting grasp of a lady with a mobile phone. Not that unusual, but this one was conducting interviews for Spotlight.  People from the media always turn up when you decide not to add an extra bit of mascara, so there I was accompanied by an over large woolly hat, a pair of not particularly attractive wellington boots and an old coat.  I did recoil, but was rather manhandled and coerced by Mr Jones, who pushed me firmly in front of the awaiting mobile, and perhaps, considering the camera angle, holding a candelabra was not a wise move.  I knew I had dropped myself in it when the lady with the mobile said, that is perfect, and fixed me with one of those looks that said, well now I can go and have a beer on a Friday night.  

About forty minutes later, a pint of Guinness nicely snuggled into my palm, the phone went.  Not the normal phone, the fancy electric thing with the answer phone that cuts off after a few rings, because that phone requires power, and we had no electric.  The phone that was shrilly cutting through the dimly lit Friday night banter was the bright red baker-light imitation.  It looks a bit like one of those red phones on the nuclear submarines in the old war movies.  Thankfully it wasn’t Boris on the other end, looking for some of our brave local Marines to send to Ukraine, it was Spotlight, could I take them some more film please.  Well, if I was going to be on telly, I might as well make sure that people knew it was the Rod and Line in Tideford. So with what little battery I had left I shot a bit of film and then proceeded to walk half a mile up the road to find enough signal to send a Wassap.  The whole process took about an hour, because of course, then I had to walk back again, in the dark. At some point later that night, after the Spotlight broadcast, and a few more pints of well deserved Guinness, I had after-all worked up a thirst, the electric spluttered back into life, and despite a few false starts it remained.  Light, power, till, phone, card machine all reinstated, and off I went for a shower and some hot tea.   

The whole thing is slightly more amusing in the sunlit afternoon of the following Tuesday, there are people asking for my autograph although I think they might be pulling my leg.  Its a bittersweet scenario and I still can’t quite be entirely happy about the situation as we really did loose a lot of trade, equally I don’t expect people to climb up to great heights in gale force winds, so I can understand the issues.  But it was that day, that half term day when people travel and it was the last day of term for teachers and anyone school related so it would have been busy, and everyone knows that the industry needs busy, but it can’t be helped.  We could have been better prepared.  Thats what I would have said if I had seen the interview on Spotlight, your fault for not being ahead of the game… 

As for Mr Jones, well you can guess how he took the inconvenience.  He was the first and probably only person to point out to anyone, and everyone who would listen, that the world relies far too much on “eBay and the electric telly”.  In other words, the internet and any technological device that connects to it.   

In fact, having a power-cut in Cornwall he reasoned, was the same as having two spoonfuls of snow, it brought the county to its knees.  He sat on the Clock table looking quite pleased with his discovery, but was less pleased when he discovered I had no mobile signal, so he couldn’t ring anyone who wasn’t present and complain to them about it.  

Don’t worry he made up for that on Saturday…

As I sit here with a cup of tea, with the buzz of some awful daytime TV programme overhead, I know that he is sort of right.  Which is always annoying, so please don’t tell him that. Fridays are my day to do the house work, finish of those last bits of paper work, tidy up for the weekend so I can start Monday feeling far better about a Monday than I ought too.  Effectively I lost a day. No house work, half the wages completed, no shower because I had planned to do the wages first, no coffee, which at 9:27am in the morning is quite frankly a travesty, and no phone signal, and now I’m playing catchup.  We also had no till, no card machine, because who these days has cash? No gas because it uses an electric interlocker, no oil boiler because it has an electronic interface, even the biomass boiler needs electric.  Having no power is not much help to running a business in 2022. Neither is is any help at all for those who need to rely on technology to survive, vulnerable people who were without heating, or lifelines.  But lost revenue aside, there is a little bit of me that loved the drama of it, it is the same feeling that sits in the air when it snows, these natural occurrences always force our gregarious race to come together, often in my experience at central points like the pub, because there is a warm fire, candle light, beer and camaraderie.  It reminds me how important proper old fashioned boozers are to their local communities and why we should support them.  We couldn’t take cards, but we could take IOU’s and they have all be paid back.  So next time, if we find ourselves without power, I will attempt be a little more prepared, so that we can carry on in a bit more of an organised fashion.  Not because I want to ensure I make the most financial gain out of a bad situation, but because I want to make sure we can still support those people around us, The Rod is not just any port in a storm, it’s the only port in Tideford, and it should at least still have its lights on. 

Accidental LandladyEveryday

The Space-Time contingency – aka the 5’o’clock club

There is always a point where something gives way to something else. When the pendulum swings accurately for the last time and the equilibrium shifts, as if it was merely a sole breath of air on an otherwise still summer day. When that happens, things cannot behave as they did before. Over the last few strange years, time itself has changed, and perhaps it is a mistake to think that things will retain their elasticity within a continuum that has been interrupted.  I feel like the world is being composed in an unfamiliar key, and we are all subject to cords and melodies that do not strike as we should hope.  If I was a Dr Who fan, I might add that Russel T Davis would have us alongside a Doctor with a Tardis, who stands at a door and wonders at a postmodernist parallel universe, complete with its unknown and unfounded possibility.  While we aren’t living a second life in a utopia, we may well have stood on a threshold, watching normality end in one place and come alive with a different face in another.  

Perhaps then, its not surprising, that I find myself looking inwards, as if introversion will bring external creativity. Note to self – it won’t. Not only do I have writers block, I can’t remember where my writers initiative was taking me. So, I do what any half decent artist does, and I look back to find a time which will always now seem golden and unreachable, and I ask myself what was so different about it.  Just to stem any doubt, as for me, the covid years have been bittersweet, I hark back to the time before. The time when the pendulum was still plodding along vicariously, the time when I was a young teenager. Where the best part of the week was a pint or two of bitter, a pickled egg and several games of pool in welly boots.  Always followed by the morning, when your room smelt like a smoking whore’s boudoir.  I remember on those mornings sidestepping the pile of clothes on the floor and swiftly making my way to the kitchen for milky tea and saffron buns. Before being thrust into the fresh, clear calm of the first light, where the morning air smelt of life, and I would scrape the heal of my boots all the way across the concrete, down to the yard, to feed a lamb or sell someone a sack of spuds.  There is an element of a rose tinted glass, but still, I wonder now what became of those simple aspirations and that stubborn, bright teenager. 

I can wind the timeline closer still, as the clock slows and drags, in recounting the years of a less encumbered twenty something, where I once worked alongside a chap called Alf.  I won’t tell you his last name, he was sort of famous, but he sticks in my memory, and not because he was Glaswegian, but because he was a boy sized man, who somehow retained the persona of a charming lion.  Those were the days when riotousness outplayed sensibility. When common sense was, well, common sensical.  Alf would say regularly, “it takes 21 days to form a habit”. I would smile at him and humour his sentiment, but today it doesn’t take a lot of thought to realise that we have had a lot of 21 days, thanks in no small way to covid.  Whether you want to call it 19, 20, 21 or just ongoing, its been dogmatic, this virus, and so I presuppose – no I don’t – I know, that consequently there has been a lot of new habit forming.  A lot of supermarket drinking, TV binging, home schooling, lie ins, makeshift offices in the dinning room, virgin dog owners, staycations, mad house moves… and the world of the pub, the proper old fashioned boozer – that’s changed too.  Good old Alf, he knew quite a bit about things after all…

Today, as I am constantly reminded, in my 40th year, I stand at the bar alone, a new veteran of the old pub days.  The days when a pub was a pub and a community was a community. I don’t think, looking back on it, there was a lot of difference. People always need something to congregate around, be it religion, a club, a pint, or an innate sense of bonding over place. Things, some inanimate, draw people together, or at least they used too.  There seems to be a fermata, followed by a coda to the score, where I stand here at the bar turning my glass in my hand, staring at a warming pint, contemplating an existence that I’ve outlived.  But it brings a resolve that I can do something else. I don’t need to sip warm beer while waiting for the world to find a defibrillator, and for you to remember who you are, because this is my time continuum too, and I want to service the motion and restart the pendulum.  The game may have changed, but the rules are still comfortingly accurate. 

There is a 5’o’clock club in all of us, all you need to do is remember that…

Accidental LandladyUncategorized

Give me victuals.

The year 2022 is not a year for dry January. Nor for general purgatory of any kind.  As I now practice bar tending on a Sunday, it seems right that Friday nights have become the new Sunday afternoons.  I have vauge, but fond memories, of long lazy afternoons, starting with shared boards of cheese and pickled onions, accompanied by some amazing unknown musician, performing unplugged, sweating by the fire.  That was what Sundays were made for.  That was before covid, when you could all eat cheese from the same breadboard…  

Now, my favourite few hours are on a Friday night, early doors, because everyone has waited all week, just incase covid had struck, and then by 4pm, lateral flows are clear, and they pile in, sitting within heckling distance of the bar, nursing bowls of hot spuds.  I turn up late after finishing chores, and instantly am heckled, then squashed in alongside dogs and loveable locals alike, gleaning snatches of banter across the table, picking up on conversations and putting them down when the level of balderdash becomes too far fetched… If you could bottle it, it would be the Channel of the perfume world, and well, its comforting.  Especially when some of them make positive noises about actually reading this blog, which has needled me into sitting down and writing. 

This year, so far as its eight days have taken me, has not been a productive year for writing.  Nothing seems inspiring, and this endless grey and warm, or grey and wet, or grey and cold, which constitutes our Cornish winter, just seems relentless.  Consequently, this won’t be one of those blogs, the ones where I can talk about some hilarious activity Mr Jones has managed to get himself embroiled with, because even if we dismiss the weather, and his normal grumpy efforts to be cheery, we are still, after all this time, stuck in an endless, bottomless pit, of boring bollox, which seems to prohibit the word fun and promote thought before action, a situation otherwise known as C-O-V-I-D 19.  Except that now, it’s Covid22, and it has another variant no-one can pronounce, and we like many other pubs are holding on by our fingertips.  It’s a consolatory thought to realise that within this quagmire of a new year, dear old Boris, is as consistent as the virus.  You can’t have a party, but I will if thats quite alright, oh and don’t go to the pub, but yes still go to the pub, and when your out and about give people a wide birth, at least a meter, but, all go now, together at the same time and stand in a close line for your booster. While I’m at it I’ll have another look at masks, now yes, don’t wear a mask,  but then wait, do wear a mask… I don’t need to continue, but he will always remain in my memory as man of contradictions, who has seemingly been taking lessons from Vicky Pollard… 

The other thing about writing is that it needs to be a joy and not a chore. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I was hoping that the next time I wrote, I could think fondly of covid as one of those things that happened.  A thing that changed the world for a year or so, albeit in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime.  Yet here we are, a new year – and its STILL here – dominating everything.  (Including my use of shouty capitals).  So, I can’t not write about it, and as I sit and turn the events over, I find with hindsight, that it slowly dawns on me just how much the virus has changed our lives.  I don’t think I am the only one to who things that everything feels fragile, like we are sitting on the lip of a precipice, seesawing precariously between moving forward and dropping down to a depth from which normality is unrecoverable.  Which is why I find it almost traumatic, when I look back to the lockdowns, the closures, the empty pub, the endless blue sky’s and unseasonal summer sunshine, that my memory tells me, I enjoyed it.  All of it.  The green hair dye and the very bad DIY hair cuts.  The odd socks song and the zoom meetings.  The hundreds of hours spent leisurely cooking and eating, all our copious efforts to drink the cellar dry and all the ensuing hangovers.  The empty beaches and contented dogs, the lack of petrol station visits, the takeaway and our lovely customers – what a wonderful time it really was!  

Of course it wasn’t.  There were days when things felt endless, and I know it would be guileless to think everything that romanticised.  Even the rosey tinted notion that I can never spend too much time with Mr Jones, is not exactly accurate.  Once you put the silver lining aside, and come down to the brass tacks of it, 2021 was a diabolically disappointing, dire, dirge, of a year.  I am glad it is over.   

One of the other reasons for radio silence and the crowning of the diabolical year of 2021, was in part due to the great, general public.  Who would have fathomed before this pandemic, that wallless time does unbelievable damage to us human beings.  We are generally a gregarious and sociable race, but the pandemic shortened tempers and over engineered expectations.  Holiday in the UK Boris said, and so Cornwall was full to the brim of people wanting to get away, most of them from each other. I really did have a conversation with a customer who was not happy with her room, because its geographical location was ‘to far away’ from St Ives.  I had another with a lady who wanted me to provide a porch so that she didn’t have to share her room with her dog.  If I had a pound for the bucket of requests I had for chicken nuggets, I could have retired by mid august, and don’t even get me started on lobster. I am not complaining about trade, or the ability to be able to trade because it was brilliant. May was one long day that lasted until October, when Boris said something else without thinking and everyone started to stay in again. If I could define this one, incredibly long day, it would be as a melting pot of emotion, where one group of despondent, exasperated humans, met another group of thwarted go getters, who had been, and still were, going nowhere.  This combined with a lack of young people or indeed any people that wanted to work, made for an interesting few months. If I’m blunt, hospitality is a young persons game, and young people were busy.  They were understandably and desperately trying to recoup time and celebrate lost landmarks.  They hadn’t been able to start living, so why did they need to start working?  There had been no one night stands, no nightclubs, no backpacking around Australia, no proper pubs, no messy music festivals, no cinema.  No one could get staff and if you could, you couldn’t get enough.  In the words of one customer, “they are just overdone” – and we all were.    

One day, Some budding anthropologist will write a paper on the effects of covid on the human condition, but they won’t capture that feeling of raw exasperation because you had to experience it and it’s juxtaposition.  You were either one of those who just had to get up in the morning and work, because someone had to carry on, or for whatever reason, you were someone who couldn’t wait to take out their post lockdown trauma on the first people they encountered.  We might all be complaining we have no staff now, but wait until normality beckons. They will all be running as fast as they can towards the sun and it won’t just be a problem for the hospitality sector.  Even Boris in whatever Boris world he inhabits, understands that. 

As I’ve ruminated on this entry, I’ve been sat watching the endless rain, and it dawns on me that there is another thing about covid that I had underestimated.  While we aren’t locked up Covid has forced us to remain local.  We stay at home more, and do not under any circumstances tramp about the world indulging in innate nomadic tendencies.  Which is of course is not a remotely profound point, but what is, is that this localness, once a badge of honour, a rooting to an environment that shapes who we are as individuals and provides us an identity, has suddenly become the very thing we are all trying to run away from.  We have been displaced by staying still.  I want to go and ‘be local’ somewhere else.  I feel like going to Scarborough or Yorkshire and taste their prawns and drink their beer.  I want to be a Hairy Biker or take Mr Fog and travel the UK in 80 days.  I want to say “not as good as Lushingtons”,  or “not as pretty as the Tamar”, and not much is, if you catch the river in those rare moments when it runs like a pool in the first light of a golden sunrise.  I can’t remember the last time I saw the water like that, and I feel like I need to remind myself that Cornwall is as beautiful and brilliant as I remember it being.  I’m not talking about a holiday, I’m talking about an excursion into the wilds of Great Britain, an emersion in our diverse culture, which may just be enough to remind me who I am and where I come from. 

And on that note, it’s time for a pint…      

Accidental LandladyEveryday

All the joys of spring

Day 75 LD3

It is another beautiful lockdown morning.  The sun is flashing across the wind beaten tree tops, and spring is somewhere out there happening, or at least flattening daffodils, while I sit here with a coffee, feeling frankly, a bit yuck.  The dogs have taken one sniff at the air from the doorway, just as the sky turned from a beautiful dawn coloured blue to a dark snow laden grey. Unsurprisingly, they promptly returned to their allotted beds, and instead of doing something productive, like attending to the mound of dishes I can see on the side, which I am sure are waving gleefully in my direction, I’m writing this. Let’s face it, mainly so I can wallow in my yuckness, while consuming large amounts of coffee, but also because it is about time I wrote something. Anything to pull me out of a descending cognitive darkness, which is rendering work on the book virtually impossible.

Downstairs, (its before 8am) two strapping young lads are skimming the ceiling they put up earlier this week, and I can not believe how refreshed I felt momentarily, to talk to another human being that was not the husband.  Not only that, but these two particular human beings were full of the joys of said spring, which I cannot yet manage to capture. Now please do not panic about the ceiling.  It is essential maintenance, unless any of you fancy a bit of plaster with your pint or crab sandwich, in which case you may not agree.  However, you may or may not be pleased to know, this is the entire extent of husbands planned changes to the Rod’s precious interior…

On the subject of interiors, those dishes are not going to miraculously wash themselves. As much as I pray for a fairy godmother, I feel that I will ultimately, be disappointed.

Accidental LandladyThe Covid Diaries

Little Celebrations

Day 64 LD3

I haven’t had a gin and tonic since the day before the last day we came out of the first lockdown in 2020.  It’s a summer drink, one to sit on the roof with, and contemplate existence while watching the sun go down.  The sort of thing that serves as an aperitif before you open a rather nice sauvignon blanc, deigned to complement whatever is on the bbq, and to submerge the rest of the evening in loveliness before you retire for a pleasant cup of camomile tea. Tonight, despite the weather, I am indulging in a G’n’T, pink, with ice, lime and a fantastic fever tree tonic, I can recommend the Mediterranean.  I had forgotten until I went to look, but along with our staff and customers, we drank almost the entire bar dry the night before new years eve, so I had to go searching for this little bottle of Tarquins in the cellar.  On my return, I can hear the news blaring from the lounge, despite the hearing aids.  It’s the same news that I heard blaring out at lunchtime, meaning that no one else is sharing in my excitement, or my celebration.  At times like these a little celebration goes a long way, but judging from what I can hear, Mr Jones is instead drowning in the most ridiculous load nonsense the media is capable of producing.  But that’s his lookout.  I leave him be and settle down to write. 

You may well ask why I am drinking Tarquins on a school night, well it’s a tiny, one person, personal celebration, to celebrate a lot of big things.  Firstly, the book is progressing, 60,000 words, and counting, I think its really getting there which is exciting, I can feel those daydreams of Hollywood coming just a little closer, day by day.  There is still a way to go, and I’m not counting my chickens, but everyone has to dream.  Secondly, I picked up a bit of freelance design work today, which is always a joy and an absolute bonus considering that we are still where we are – closed – and just a little sad about the world. Then, finally, there is this.  Which you must have found if you are reading this – the new website.  The bane of my life for some considerable time, it has been picked up and put down on more occasions than I care to remember, but finally it is finished! I think it looks good, and just to add a bit more pomposity and self praise to this small attainment, which really requires far less than its getting, the cream on top of the sugared bun moment occurred because Mr Jones is happy.  

I’m saying that last part, about Mr Jones being happy in a whisper, because the G’n’T rather distracted from last nights task of finishing this blog, and yesterdays magic finger press that would have moved the site from draft to live, so in any moment, Mr Jones may decide to put a disheveled head around the door, to ask what I am doing in the office at 6:30am in the morning if I have actually finished the website.  Websites, in my experience, are things that always seem to need constant tinkering with.  As it really is the launch today, and not yesterday as planned, I want to make double sure that its as good as it can be, before someone emails and tells me I’ve made a mistake somewhere. Normally, its my mum and normally it’s with a spelling, which isn’t quite as serious as a calendar over site, which could leave to double bookings.  Never a good thing in my experience.  

Anyway I am rambling on somewhat, not overly helpful for the first blog entry people will come across at lunch time but there we are.  I must get on and make sure the autocorrect hasn’t made some terrible error of judgement as is its wont, and corrected dimples to nipples or something equally as terrible… 

Accidental LandladyThe Covid Diaries

Lockdown life continues…

Day – I’ve lost count (about 62 days)

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon and from downstairs there is the sound of something being attacked. Something loud, and the resulting sounds of plaster falling worry me and the dog, who is fretfully running from one door way to another looking for the burglar, while the large dog pays no attention whatsoever and continues to snore, even though the floor is vibrating. It’s not a burglar, it is the lesser spotted Mr Jones, attempting to take down a ceiling. I’m a bit worried about going down to have a look, but I am sure he knows what he is doing, I just hope he is more careful than I was the last time I attempted to make a hole in something.

Today is a beautiful day. Cold, yes, but the sun is shinning for the third day in a row and I feel like we haven’t see it in such a long, long time it makes all the difference. On Sunday there were more people on the beach in shorts than there were in coats and hats, I think someone should have pointed out that it was February and bikinis were a little extreme, but I guess anything goes at the moment. I’d like to be outside myself, but I’m finishing a website project, this website project to be exact. This website, this particular one, where you find this particular blog has been about a year in the making.  Mainly because it’s been done in between everything else, lockdowns, gardening, writing a book, maintenance, beer testing and drinking, dog walking, cooking, cleaning, in fact any activity I could employ to put it off!  It’s all the systems and processes that worry me. Will they sync correctly? Will I get over bookings, can I actually manage to manage it?  I know I can, but it seems easier some how to think I won’t. There is also the bit about finally publishing some of these lockdown diary entires.  I’ve been plugging away at it on and off for almost a year, and while it isn’t complete, there are lots of bits to add which aren’t finished, I think it gives a flavour of what lockdown has been like for me and for husband come to that.  That’s not to say its any worse than anyone else’s probably very similar in some respects, but there’s still that thing about allowing people to read it which blurs the boundaries between business and pleasure to the point that they become like a potato membrane.  So we will see what happens tomorrow, in the meantime I’d better go and have a look at this ceiling…

Accidental LandladyThe Covid Diaries

Cooking Kama

LD3 – Day 10

There is something about shutting yourself in the kitchen and playing with your Thermomix that for some reason generates such aesthetic pleasure and sensory enjoyment that it makes everything else seem rather insignificant.  I’m particularly fond of making bread, mainly because all I have to do is find somewhere warm to let it rise and then stick it in the oven.  Although I must admit finding somewhere warm is actually quite a feat at the moment!  The bathroom thermometer this morning read 2.2 degrees, and it is not a lot warmer anywhere else unless you actually sit on one of the oil filled radiators I have plugged in, but even those aren’t quite man enough for these sub Siberian temperatures.  Yes I probably do protest too much but I don’t like being cold and neither does my bread dough! 

Other than the cold its lock down business as normal.  The book is progressing at the fast pace of a snail travelling to Australia, and I think we have taken out shares in the programme ‘A house in the Sun’, or at least we should do because it gets more air time on the TV than anything else.  Other than that it is what it is, a waiting game, a rush for the phone every time the BBC post a news update, because the app makes its own distinct sound, and several hours of rewatching things like Vera.  There is something about murder which makes one feel slightly better off, although it has made me think perhaps I should change genres and start to write a crime novel.  The happiest people in the house at the moment are the ones who have four legs, because they have constant company, their own radiator and a long daily walk.  If there is such a thing as reincarnation I hope that I get sent back as a spoilt pooch.  Anyway I must go, because I need to feed the chickens…  

Accidental LandladyThe Covid Diaries

A happy new lockdown.

Day 2 – LD3

What a way to start the new year! In bed by 10am, I cannot remember when that last happened.  This strange phenomenon was caused first by the fact that we were shut, and secondly by the fact that I seem to have accidentally and prematurely, celebrated the coming of this new year a day early.  We really do have to stop having these lockdowns because my head the morning after the last night of freedom, is akin that of a banging walking bass drum, accompanied by a crashing cymbal and a tuba.  This time it was that bad, I had to get in the sea and have a swim.  I can only describe it as cold, but then it was snowing…

This lock down is not like the last, probably because it feels like an annual blue January, which of course it is. But this, coupled with a prolonged sense of isolation, is made all the worse when you add a little sprinkling of cold weather, and before you know it, you find yourself berating your behaviour, because you can’t actually get up much enthusiasm to do any of those jobs which seemed so easy in the first lockdown. There is of course the cash flow issue, as I’ve attempted to explain to people before, and this mixed in with everything else, well its not a recipe that I would rely on when inviting those you wish to influence for dinner. Trading for us like everyone in the sector was patchy in 2020, we were closed for 142 days in total, trading at half mast for at least another 100 and now it’s that dreaded tax return time, the vat bill is due and for some unknown reason, it appears to be the time of year that everything else needs renewing.  Whatever anyone says all these things add up not just for us but for everyone who has to pay money to someone when they don’t have any coming in.  I feel like Boris hasn’t got it right, after all the early promise of his swift actions, he seems to be waiting until we have already met the final hour before he makes any decisions, and look where that’s got us.  I’m not going to mention the vaccine either, the jury I feel is still out on that one.

So what to do in this new year? Well there’s the normal lets drink less, at least that’s going quite well so far, due to the fact I think I still have a semblance of a hangover.  Then there is the usual ‘let’s work out a plan of attack for 2021?’. Well that’s on the back burner, because who knows when we will be able to open again, and let’s face it, if the sector survives this pandemic then that is an achievement enough.  So instead we sit here in limbo, and in the case of Mr Jones, in front of endless hours of ‘A Home in the Sun’.  At least we can still dream right? 

Accidental LandladyThe Covid Diaries

Not looking a lot like Christmas

Open T2 – Day 21

I never write a lot about my family, I don’ think this is the place for them, we all have enough to contend with without the need to read my dirty laundry. But it is Christmas, and it is a Christmas like no other, well other than the one I spent in Andorra, but best not to talk about that. I’m not particularly fond of Christmas, I don’t remember ever being completely attached to it, and yet this year I find myself tearful because I can’t spend an afternoon with my parents on their big green sofa, drinking warm french larger and arguing over whatever it is we find cause to argue about. I say argue, I mean debate. The day is fairly standard, Mr Jones goes shooting, which if you ask me is an excuse for a load of old boys to drink homemade gin and roll around in the mud. I retrieve him, normally he is late, and off we both go to my parents for the afternoon and evening. It isn’t anything particularly spectacular, but it is Christmas, the only bit of it I get off and I look forward to it, so against my better nature, I find myself cursing the stupid virus more than is perhaps necessary. I know what I am really cursing is the hospitality industry, and the people who won’t wear a mask becuase it is against their human rights. The people who travel and carry the virus with them, the people who don’t care about others, or Christmas or probably anything else. Suddenly I find myself missing everything; carols, mulled wine, even mistletoe, which really brings me up sharpe and I know that what I am feeling is more akin some nostalgic fantansy which belongs in a bad Christmas film and not to any reality I’ve ever known.

The virus has even managed to take away the fun of shopping. Walking around Truro on your own is not a bundle of laughs. Normally Mr Jones and I go together and make an event of it. We stay at a hotel, have dinner and enjoy a little bit of pre christmas time together, but that hasn’t happend either this year. He didn’t want to come and I don’t blame him. The constant on off of your face mask, the washing of hands, the general avoidance of others on the pavement – none of that is enjoyable. Far better, he said No to mention safer, I pointed out, …to stay in the Rod and keep a watchful eye on the procedings, he concluded. I think thats code for stay home and drink beer with my friends.

Not a massive surprise then when today Matt Hancock anounced we are moving to tier 2. We had anticipated it and not much will change for us, most people were coming in and eating, our wet trade is suffering but we are open which is more than some pubs can say and we should be thankful for that. What was a surprise, was to see all the people on the platforms hightailing it out of the citites before the new lockdown hit them. They, unlike me, and probably hundreds of others who are abiding by the rules, will see their families this Christmas, lets just hope its worth it.

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries