Yesterday I had a lovely wander around Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane, only just resisting fish and chips from Poppies. The market was in full swing and it was great to see how many stallholders were selling things they'd actually made themselves: clothes from recycled fabrics (there were some great giant anoraks made from garish floral duvet covers, for instance), and a woman with a stall selling bags made from Ghanaian fabric (including a bag made with fabric with bags printed on it, which she said was her most popular one). The most expensive stall had very stylish bags made from recycled roofing fabric from Jaguar cars. Anyway, it was fun; the crowds were nice rather than oppressive, and bumbled around as though they had just woken up from the awful Covid years.
It's looming over us again, and I'm wearing a mask on public transport and in most shops. I never stopped, despite people staring at me, and I haven't been ill with anything for ages. I feel like I should be touching wood here! I just don't want to catch it. Although it's supposed not to be so debilitating in its current form, nobody knows what repeated infections might do to you.
I still don't know if the illness that I had back in February 2020 was Covid or not. It was that vicious virus that, pre-testing, could have been anything but was much worse than normal 'flu. I haven't had it again and I definitely don't want it again. Three people I knew died of Covid at that time (they were all under the age of 55), and numerous people that I knew of died of it. I know a LOT of people with Long Covid. There seems to be some sort of awful shaming about this, as though by having Long Covid they are reminding people who've recovered that there was actually a global pandemic a very short time ago.
No thanks! You can stare at me as much as you like, but I'll keep the mask on, and keep washing my hands when I get back to my house.
Ramble ramble, mumble mumble. I suppose these are pre-Christmas misery musings. The local shops are sold out of Lindt Chocolate Santas, there are no Pannetones either, and the blackberries that I got out of the freezer to make a cake with have started fermenting so the sparrows in the back yard are going to have a boozy Christmas Eve feast tomorrow. However, I have sourced (modern terminology!) a supply of lychees, so that's very good news. Eyeballs all round!
Best of all, Offsprog One turned up this evening with a tub of Cheese Footballs that sits proudly on the side in the kitchen waiting for Christmas Day. I'll be driving to Camberwell to pick up Offsprog Two first thing on Christmas morning, sporting my Lidl Christmas Jumper from two years ago (I bought it on eBay) and listening to BBC6 on the car radio, perhaps with a cheese football or two for company.
Yum yum!
I found a stash of sticky old unused Christmas crackers on top of the kitchen cupboards, and have piled cheap ugly clementines from the shop over the road on to a huge vintage plate from the charity shop that I bought immediately after vowing never to buy anything from a charity shop again. The cheap ugly clementines are all different shades of orange and all different sizes, but unlike the supermarket ones they taste absolutely beautiful, and there is also something aesthetically pleasing about the fact that a lot of them still have stalks and leaves, so I know they definitely grew on a tree and weren't simply created by Artificial Intelligence, like most things these days seem to be.
Ramble ramble, mumble mumble. All I'd logged on for was to upload my seasonal greeting 'card' and I've ended up droning on for so long that I'm even boring myself. If there had been some chocolate Santas in the shop, I would have just eaten one of them and then sat here feeling guilty for the rest of the evening instead of writing a blog posting. Here is the 'card' anyway: Merry Christmas to my readers, whoever and wherever you are! Some days sixty people read this blog, yet yesterday more than a thousand did. I rather like the randomness of that and not having any advertising on it, too.
Let's hope for peace in 2024; wouldn't it be incredible if humans learned how to live like that?
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