Here I still am, I’m afraid.

 

I was overtaken by something that felt like panic, and didn’t want to leave the familiar and the cats. I’ll be fine tomorrow by myself. I think Helen and David are coming to walk around the garden with me. They’ll ring the doorbell and stand well back. They’re also well-tested and clear. This damn disease is clearly getting out of hand. Rachel has got it, -- at any rate, has tested positive. She was planning to come up after Christmas with some family, to stay a couple of days at Loch Fyne and then come here overnight. But that’s off. She says her son Joe is much better. That’s something.

 

Loch Fyne: I signed up for Kate Davies’ new club yesterday. It’s called “The Secret Shore of Argyll” or something very like that. I was surprised to see that signing-up had started early in December. How had I missed it? The answer is, I hadn’t missed it. Yesterday’s membership was my second. I heard from Melanie this morning. I apologised, and have already got the refund. This is a worrying memory lapse. There were several reasons that that should have been memorable, including the fact that Loch Fyne is in Argyll, not far from the coast. (It is a sea loch.)

 

I’m having a wonderful time with my salad-maker. Here is a picture of it. 

The lights go off for eight hours out of the 24. It is watered by means of wicks drawing from a reservoir at the bottom. The lights will flash gently when I need to refill it, every fortnight or so. The photographs and instructional drawings show the lights at different heights. I am told that that will happen automatically. My first contribution (other than watering) will be to harvest/subdue the plants when they threaten to get too big.

That's not a real radiator (which would be ill-advised). It's an oil-filled plug-in thing, enormously heavy, which we inherited with the house. We managed to get rid of one or two. We have even, occasionally, in hard winters, plugged it in.

 

So now all I can do is to wait for Heaven’s contribution – the appearance of the little green plants.