Rod and line

Drink. Dance. Laugh. Love. Stay. Eat

Category: Everyday

everyday happenings at the rod and line

Category: Everyday

everyday happenings at the rod and line

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

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

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

Reopening – take two

Open T2 – Day 1

Today is a Wednesday, it is the 2nd of December 2020, and here we are open once again. We are operating in Tier One. Quite frankly that is where I expected us to be, so we don’t need to even start getting into ‘substantial meal’ arguments. We are masked up, ready to go and hoping to get through until Christmas, that at the moment I think would be a real result, and that’s what we are aiming for.

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries

The highwayman and the River Styx

79 Days Open – 20th September 2020

What with all the excitement of opening and everything else I have neglected the world at large. I’ve been out in the garden for the last few days, which if I may say so, is looking like something from the cheap seats at the Chelsea flower show, it really is rather marvellous. A little haphazard and it wouldn’t win any prizes but it is marvellous. The tomato’s are still producing fruit at the rate of knots, although I was right its been a bad year for the courgettes and squashes. I think we had a late frost in the middle of all that wonderful early sunshine, either that or they just didn’t fancy it this year. The runner beans are still in a close run second place with the tomatoes and not a bit of string in sight so far, although they aren’t far off their last, and I’ve even managed a few peaceful moments on the roof, albeit with a cold draft cider in between shifts.

Some of the wonderful staff we had to see us through the summer have drifted off to do other things. The COVID threat is still niggling away at most people, and it doesn’t land unnoticed on the young either. They have dreams and plans just like anyone else, and they don’t get this time back. Not that any of us do, it just seems a little different for the people at either end of the age scale. I guess when you think about it, we are all either running to catch up or running away from it. Tori, is pondering her return to New Zealand, and it seems that Waitrose and Next of all places are safe havens for future employment, but that’s how it goes, the good ones never stay. I remember being one of them myself once, so I don’t hold a grudge I just hate watching them go.

Mr Jones and I have been out on the boat a bit more recently, the swimming has been fine, apart from the jelly fish, of whom I have a particular dislike, not quite to the extent of spiders, but on a fairly similar scale and we have succeeded in catching our body weight in mackerel on occasions, well mine, not his, otherwise we would have been bailing ourselves out before we managed to get back up the Tamar! The mackrell aren’t the only fish to be found in the Tamar. The last few weeks have brought shoal after shoal of sardines, right up the tiny tidal pockets all along the estuary in their droves, the water has been alive with the things, and it’s good to be reminded that we are yet still alive and things are beautiful. That sounds morbid, but its true, things are still not right. We have seen friends, been invited to dinner, and tried to carry on and do normal things, but everything seems so far less than normal. I’m reminded of that line from Marvell, about time and chariots. COVID is like that, its at our backs and we are constantly listening out for it. It hovers over even the most beautiful of moments like a boatman charged on the edge of the River Styx. Next week we will all start wearing face masks, perhaps that’s all the disguise we need to pass by unnoticed.

Anyway morbidity will not be tolerated once I descend those wooden stairs, where once again I will smile and wave at our lovely customers. In fact tonight, I’m going to do a lot of smiling and waving, as I’m having a beer with a pal and it may well get messy, although I must admit that this is when a 10pm closing time comes in very handy. I fold up the invoices and close down the computer, I think it might be wise to shower before going down, no one actually really likes to sit with a muddy gardener no matter how much they may protest otherwise. I sigh and holdfast for just a little longer, methodically working through the worry so I can put it away, after all, there is no need to cry over milk that has not yet been spilt…

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries

And that as they say, is that.

60 days open – 1st September 2020

Wow. I need to start this blog by saying that I have some of the best staff in the entire universe. I don’t know how it happened, but from up the road to around the world literarily, (even from New Zealand), they have arrived and worked like a flotilla of Belisha beacons, always alight, always working and forever making everything float along in a safe and magical way.

If I started to describe to you the carnage that followed the eat out scheme around, I would start by likening it to a millstone around a poor mans neck. It’s a bad description, because it doesn’t really do it justice, but even thinking about it makes me come out in a sweat. It finished yesterday, that was the last day.

On reflection, I feel I need to clarify what I mean about millstone. The scheme was either pure genius or some semblance of complete madness, but that aside, what it should have, and in my humble opinion has done for our industry, is brilliant. I have to say in all honesty, from a business point of view, as a way of getting cash in the bank, it was brilliant for us too. I mean, who in their right mind, does not want half priced food and soft drinks? Especially if you can get them from some of your favourite places, I wouldn’t say no to half a lobster on Boris, or I wouldn’t have done if I had chance to get out and eat some. The game changer, the bit you can’t account for, are people.

People are so wonderfully varied and exciting. We are a gregarious race, we enjoy the kingship and brilliance of everyone, but we are tribal too, we find our own kind, eventually, and we stick with them. The Rod has its own kind of people, just like every other business does, whoever says that everyone is their customer might not be telling an untruth, but within that ‘everyone’, there will be a group of people who spend the most money, and who return time after time, with other people like them because they really get you, your product and your ethos. They become your tribe, your followers and you learn how to excite and reward them. The eat out scheme changed all that. I have been told on numerous occasions that I have the patience of not just one saint, but a whole congregation of the communio sanctorum, I am after all married to Mr Jones. However, I can honestly say that the carrying on of some – not all – but some of the eat out customers, was among some of the worst carrying on I can ever remember seeing in my fellow human beings, and I must admit to ‘loosing my shit’ as my staff would say, on more than one occasion in the last month, not with one person in particular and not so anyone could see, but in genuine frustration with some parts of human race I was encountering. We have a saying here when things get a little hot under the collar, it goes something like ‘just smile and wave’, and believe me we did.

That said, I am not going to sit here and write, let alone subject you to, a tirade of anguished remonstrations about these particular incidents, there are other people who do that well enough for the entire sector. I am glad that we have managed to take advantage of what the government laid out on a plate, thank you everyone who came and spent your money here – there have to be some upsides to this pandemic and this is one of them. However, while I’m still reeling from the chaos, I’m conscious that winter is coming. The evenings are drawing in and I know that the sun lost its Indian summer strength somewhere in the middle of all the eating out hoo ha. It makes me nervous, people will go home, holidays will be put away, and the virus may well decide that it wants to come back with a bang, and I wonder if anyone is ready to face that all over again, because I don’t think Boris will give us free food the second time around.

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries

Eat out to help out

41 Days Open – 13th august 2020

Oh my days. I’ve stolen that saying from our bar man Dan. It’s the best way to describe the indescribable. I actually wonder if Boris and his sidekicks have any idea what they have done – I am guessing probably not. I don’t know who’s idea this was, its bloody brilliant and absolutely absurdly ridiculous at the same time. It’s so absurdly ridiculous, it eclipses any other rational thought my brain has the energy left to think. I cannot even find enough words to finish this blog!…

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries

Covid-19 can do one

19 days open – July 22nd 2020

This year has brought so many new challenges I am unsure which sticks out as the worst of them. The last few weeks have been difficult. Trying to change ingrained habits that have been in formation for a lifetime, longer even than I, or most of the staff have been born, is almost impossible. What it requires is a massive degree of patience, a great big dollop of common sense, two kilos of perfect manners and a constant winning smile. I feel like a school teacher with the class that no one wants to teach. It’s been a very long month. So long in the end I didn’t even have chance to write, I hate to say I haven’t even picked up the scraps that had started to become a work of literary brilliance.

Everything started quite slowly, people drifted back over a couple of weeks as social media helped us promote our new Covid safe environment, some people loved it, some hated it, but that was always going to be the nature of the beast. Some of our locals just haven’t come back, they are shielding, or someone they know is venerable, or perhaps their habits have just changed. Whatever the case they are remembered by their absence, and hopefully when all this is over they will come back. Some, have died. We remember them too… Things are different though, the people haven’t really changed, human nature is what it is, especially after a few drinks, but the job has changed massively. It’s not that lovely laid back welcome to the Rod any more, its a constant, sorry you cant do that, or sit there, or stand there, or smoke there… and no your definitely can’t dance. We changed the menu a bit too, cut it back due to the fact we can get less people indoors, which hasn’t worked in its entirety as people always want their favourite things, some of which we now don’t have, and disappointment in the middle of all this is the last thing we want.

I guess we are all a bit jumpy too. The unknown, it plays on that little bit of your subconscious. You might not know it, but slowly it worms its way into everything you do. The constant hand sanitising, fastidious table wiping, excess cleaning and clothes washing, trying in the midst of everything to explain to said husband that wearing the same shirt for two days running is not acceptable. Not that it ever was, but at least this time I have a valid excuse to back up my argument. After all the cleaning and the washing, and the hawkeye rule enforcing, then there’s the money to worry about. Businesses don’t run on fresh air, I’m sure that even that Sunak chap realises that. Actually, that’s probably slightly unfair, I guess they have done their best so far to try and help, even if they have been relatively unscathed themselves. The only way I can describe it, is one massive juggling act, that takes the joy out of getting up in the morning, but I am sure it will pass, just as soon as this COVID thing goes away.

Soneone asked me a few days ago ‘are you doing the government scheme?’ I must admit to being so busy that I hadn’t even googled it. I stopped listening to the radio at the beginning of all this and I haven’t been able to listen to anything other than Classic Fm since, mainly because all they talk about is classical music and I don’t have to stomach any COVID-19 rubbish, or sarcastic wit to wash it down with. We get free meals they added. That did make my ears prick up, nothing is free. So I googled it. ‘In for a penny’, I said to Mr Jones, as I signed up. He nodded, but I’m not sure he knew what he was nodding at. So now we wait and see what happens on the 3rd of August.

Accidental LandladyEveryday, The Covid Diaries

People are funny old animals

So firstly a chicken update.  Normal service seems to have resumed, we have three eggs a day, and one, rather grumpy cockerel.  The other two weren’t eaten or set loose at Trago, in the end they found a home with Henry.  That sorted I have the garden back, and my first early’s are up – well the green bits are so they must be growing away nicely.  There is at least 25 bags of dung, kindly delivered by the young farmers in the polly tunnel, which is half turned.  Although work has been slightly obstructed by the bath that’s currently settling in at the far end (don’t ask), and the lettuce, tomatoes, courgette and dill are all coming along nicely around it. If I’m not careful it will be mistaken for a modern art installation, so I’m hoping it won’t get to settled. The cherry tree is in blossom, the apple trees are racing to catch up and everything seems to be alright, at least in the garden.

 Everything else however, seems to be rather dire – to the point that people are actually steeling our toilet rolls!!  That aside, Mr Jones and I should at this moment be in Rome, having a lovely little coffee in some Italian square washed down by a sweet pastry.  Instead we are in Tideford in the rain, (yes its still raining), not in lockdown but just slightly quieter than we would perhaps be if people weren’t otherwise consumed with stock piling toilet roll and hand sanitiser.  According to Google the last terrible pandemic in the UK was in 1918 when a quarter of the British population were wiped out.  That was Spanish Flu, which is far easier to pronounce than Covid-19 which sounds like a spaceship.  I’m not sure what is going to happen but it they tell the over 70’s to stay at home that will include half of Mr Jones’s drinking buddies so lets hope it doesn’t go that far.  Either that or they will all have to be quarantined in the pub and that could get messy.  Either way its not a great tonic for marital bliss!  

Anyway other than a national pandemic, and the relentless rain its business as normal. Ollie, is still riding a high from winning the pasty competition, after stealing a free range egg wash made by Mr Jones himself, to glaze his pasty.  Apparently Mr Jones made it in his (Ollie’s) bowl, or that was his excuse anyway.  We raised about £700 for the Air Ambulance, Ollie’s pasty going for £150, so I figure he has the right to feel a bit proud.  We had a great night last night for Shayna’s 18th Birthday, fantastic music from Dan’s sister we have Calvin playing this afternoon, and so the world seems to go on.  If you’re popping in look out for Eva, she’s our new and rather lovely bar maid.  See you at the bar. 

Accidental LandladyEveryday