Not even funny

This morning I succeeded in kicking everyone else out of the house by 10:00 which is not bad for a Sunday and prepared myself for a day on MY OWN, without distractions, interruptions or other petty annoyances.

I went upstairs to gather together the last load and ... well I only intended to lie down for a couple of minutes but before I knew where I was the offspring was bounding upstairs to tell me all about the horrendous journey they'd found lying before them.

Fuck.

He picked up my work schedule for the next three weeks from the office yesterday and brought it home. Today was basically my last day to get ANYTHING extracurricular done between now and the middle of next month and it just vanished, like that!

And, this is my fourth day off the piss (I think; these days of sobriety are all blurring into one long mangled stretch of sobriety.) I was in a foul mood, stomped about doing a dozen things at once and making everybody else miserable so we could all be miserable together. Family togetherness of a sort.

I got a little ironing done before it became apparent that the offspring was going to hang on my shoulder in danger of receiving a serious burn until I stopped doing that and did something else to make everyone very upset. I went into the back garden and took some of my mood out on the forsythia which is now so hacked back, on one side at least, that it is almost under control. I got together some plastic buckets and started collecting the fallen, rotting fruit from the big fruit tree in the back garden which he insists is a green gage but which produces fruit that look very like the Victoria plums sold in the local supermarket.

What to know something really funny? I'm listening to Stand By Your Man right now. Bizarre.

I filled three buckets from underneath the tree and among the strawberry plants that are now throwing out yet more runners. Anyone who wants some, free to anyone who can collect, drop me a line.

The plums or whatever are very nice but the tree is about sixty feet tall and prolific and we get bored with them after a few weeks. The rest just rot. In lovely hot summers they provide foot for various bugs and butterflies and so forth - we had a couple of red admirals and a peacock this afternoon - which was bright and sunny, swooping about, driven crazy by the sickly sweet aroma of the rotting fruit. One of the red admirals settled on a clutch of over ripe fruit still hanging from one of the lower branches and drank ... and drank ... and drank. I could have reached out and touched it but I preferred just to watch and marvel at a work of perfection.

It cheered me up, we had Chinese for supper ... soy sauce, chillies, ginger and garlic with water chestnuts, bamboo slivers, spring onion and peppers. It all went so it can't have been too awful.

Now he's finally buggered off and I'm cramming this in ... it might be The Last Post (for three weeks, and I can forget a password in that time, believe me).