No walk today. It was colder, although still open and dry – but I didn’t feel well. I’m coming around now.

 

Three more days until the solstice.

 

However, the main excitement of the day is not any of that, but the arrival of Helen’s youngest son Fergus from Bristol University yesterday evening. She stopped off here with some eggs for me, on the way to the station to meet him. He tested positive for Covid last night – presumably at her instigation – and again this morning, so they are all self-isolating. Her husband David is going to come back from Thessaloniki anyway, as planned, and isolate with them. I think he’s due on Thursday. I don’t know what their middle son Mungo is going to do – he was due home from London one day soon. Meanwhile Fergus feels fine. We think he had Covid last year, when he first went to university.

 

But all this means that I’ll be on my own again, like last year, on Christmas Day. Dear friends from Birmingham had planned to come – they stay with me while visiting their son who lives nearby in a small house. But they have just begged off, too – not a surprise.

 

I do hope I live long enough to look back on all this.

 

No knitting. I spent the potentially active part of the day feeling ill.

 

Language

 

I am increasingly irritated these days by the phrase “mitigate against”, meaning “mitigate”. It is presumably derived by false analogy from “militate against”. I heard it first (on television) from Arlene Foster, then the Northern Ireland supremo, and put it down to ignorance. But it is getting more and more common, and I have heard it recently from a BBC announcer.