Annus mirabilis 2021

Here comes another one.  Wonder if we’ll survive it.  The infection rate hereabouts is over the national average, but the lowest in the county, so we’re just redoubling our precautions and waiting patiently for our jabs.  I’m cutting down on shopping trips: wine delivered today, meat tomorrow and a Sainsbury’s delivery on Sunday.  And we’re getting more resourceful at feeding ourselves from the freezer.

Last August I accepted an estimate to re-upholster my favourite armchair, hoping that it would come in as a slightly late 70th birthday present to myself.  As the months passed, I began to hope for it as a Christmas present.  No such luck, but Colin is coming to collect it tomorrow afternoon, so perhaps it’ll be ready by my 71st.  I was reflecting earlier on its origins and history.  I acquired it from Uncle Charles in 1980, when he was clearing his house in Wanstead.  It was pretty tired by then, having been on station for years at the dining room French windows, where Doris used to sit reading her poxy Daily Express.  

By then it had acquired a loose cover, which remained for a year or two in my ownership, stationed at a dining room window again, only by then in my little house in Tonbridge.  At the suggestion of another uncle, I signed up for an upholstery class, and beavered away at it through the winter of 1983/84, under the instruction of one Allan Upsher.  I have replaced the cushion and springs meanwhile, but otherwise it has given me decades of good service, and is now stationed at yet another dining room window here at Forges-l’Evêque.  Doris will be turning in her urn at the thought of my sitting here reading the Grauniad on the iPad.

When I was working on the chair, I had to schlepp it weekly from the house to the car, and then up two flights of stairs to the adult education upholstery classroom.  I am no longer in my thirties, so will need Martyn’s help to haul it out to the garage for Colin to collect tomorrow.  Colin, by the way, is Allan’s son, and the work will probably be done by Allan’s grandson.  And being done by professionals this time, it should last, as I think I said a while back, till I’m 110.

I spent a bit of New Year’s Day (which I saw in through closed eyelids) hauling out the frosted cosmos.  They flowered very well in November (some of them, anyway) but are very tender and were hammered by the frost.  I regard it as a matter of principle that the paid-for garden waste bin must have something in it for every £2 fortnightly collection, so it’s pretty full of dead cosmos now.  I may gather up some willow leaves before next Monday, or Tuesday, or whenever the hell they get round to collecting.  But since we aren’t generating a lot of waste, maybe I’ll save them for the next one!