Goodbye to the Beaches

Here, to try and cheer everyone up is another shot of the orchid tree.

Interesting how people are starting to send each other funnies. I had one from friends in Britain, which I've been wary of sharing with American friends as it's a bit politically incorrect but here's the start:

 "The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent virus threat and have therefore raised their threat level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, level may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”

The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out.

The virus has been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada....

And so on and so forth...

Anyway the biggest sadness here has been closing all the churches. You can't even go inside. And hot on the heels of that, closing the beaches. They were encouraging people to go to the beach and get some fresh air. Then that changed to groups of less than ten and keeping one beach towel's length apart from the next group. Now they are closing completely. The reason for this, I suspect, is to encourage short term holidaymakers, of which there's always a big influx in March, to go home, especially the students on spring break from college, who are not the most conscientious about social distancing. The county north of us closed the beaches first so our county had to follow suit. Otherwise I suppose everyone would have crowded down here.

Still there's always gardening. I went off and bought eight sacks of mulch which should keep me busy, as well as more Mexican petunias, which do well here, as long as the rabbits don't eat them, which is a bit of a forlorn hope. Things have been complicated by an inconsiderate mourning dove building a nest in the tree at the side of the house and exploding in a furious flurry every time someone comes near. So now I have to drag everything round to the back the long way.

But I always tell myself, things could be worse. The supermarket is all out of liquid soap but I've just listened to an interview I did in 1988 with the Russian dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya. She spent four years in a Soviet labour camp, sometimes in solitary, sometimes squashed in a cell with ten others. She wrote her poems on slivers of soap with a matchstick and whispered them down the pipes to her fellow inmates. Yes things could definitely be worse.

Au revoir...