To prevent the onset of cabin fever I have enbarked upon a strict regime of occupational therapy. Gradually these have evolved from the pointless, but intellectually stimulating, towards the uninspired. but useful. Immediately after arriving back in early June I found myself assiduously ploughing through the backlog London Review of Books that had built-up over the past six months; I wrote an essay on recent epic poetry in America for a New Jersey based literary magazine and read a couple of classics of English psycho-geographical fiction. Meanwhile, practical tasks such as de-cluttering the garage and tending to our somewhat forsaken garden were consigned to the back-burner - we had months at home before our next long trip - why rush about? In a sense, this was true, time has hung heavily over the past few weeks, but of course, it also has slipped by inexorably.
However, once we could to say 'when we set-off for Greece next month' priorities changed, and suddenly we embarked on a de-cluttering fiesta. We have frequented the local Household Recycling Centre so often that we're best buddies with friendly guys who work there. Now they greet us like regulars down the local pub as we arrive with the next consignment of garage junk bulging out of our estate car.
A couple of weeks ago during a brief lull in the rain, we demolished our large, but seriously rotting garden shed; it has served us well for the last quarter century. We replaced it with a much smaller one on the basis that clutter increases exponentially in relation to available storage space. We imagined it was going to be a straightforward job, actually it took the pair of us four days of hard labour resulting in aches and pains that 25 years ago probably would have vanished in a couple of hours, but now persisted for days. Our sixty-plus bods are showing signs of wear and tear. Vintage may be cool in terms of music, clothes and bric-a-brac, but it's never going to trend corporeally! So far as bods go, there is no shabby-chic, just shabby...
So, in two minutes forty seconds, a synopsis of four days hard labour:
Here's the odd thing. The more active we are the more brain dead I become. The inside of my head is like cottonwool. When I try to read a book it's as if my eyes bounce along from word to word without my mind making any sense of it, I keep forgetting the simplest facts, names and phrases - what is going on? Since the onset of the rainy weather I have taken to absorbing myself in useful, but utterly mundane tasks. Now the map book of Italy is annotated in detail with every ACSI campsite and sosta; I have cross referenced the UK Road Atlas with 'Pub-stops' and cheap campsites; increasingly I have ended up in fatuous exchanges on Facebook, and even managed to embroil myself in a ridiculous spat on-line about the merits, or otherwise of some stupid hobbyist drone called 'Lily' that can follow its owner and take video of them from on high like a floating selfie stick. Astonishingly I really did find people who considered this a 'cool idea'. God help us. However, in amongst the slow motion trainwreck of my mental faculties I did annotate a Google Mymap with my research into secure storage for motorhomes in southern Europe. At least this aspect of my unexpected enthusiasm for routine clerical tasks might serve some purpose over and above passing a few pointless hours watching rain come down while counting the days to escape by tunnel from from Cameron's Dismal-land.
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