I think its week 6, but these musings have been written over the course of the past few weeks.
This was written during week 2.
I knew this was going to be a breeze, I self confine most weekends. So it's just like a very long weekend. I'm eating mini Twix for breakfast, and adding it to the shopping list as if its an essential item. I'm eating one on the hour every hour.
Week 3 I think.
The Twix eating had to stop. I gained 2 kilos in a week. So the house is now sugar-free and I'm aware of how I've been lying to myself about my sugar consumption for decades. I rarely buy sweet things at the supermarket, and am not a chocolate fiend.....but the odd dessert that I made for a dinner party gets 'finished off', and when I'm out and about, there is a little snack here or there, or a spoon of someone else's dessert, a malteser from the constantly filled chocolate box on my mums coffee table, and of course wine..... a loyal sugar fix. I haven't cut out the wine, but the cooking chocolate is starting to look enticing again.
My initial super-efficiency has evaporated. I can stay in bed for 2 hours listening to the morning news (Thank you Riviera radio) even though it is the same thing repeated. The dogs now get out of bed and stare hard at me until I am guilted into taking them out.
I have lost the desire to cook and stare at the fridge contents despairingly 4 times a day hoping to conjure up my inner 'ready, steady, cook'.
My house is not spotless and there is no reason for it not to be.
The French have a 1km radius around your home in which you can exercise. This was my excuse for not jogging far, but now some smart arse brought out a map showing your 1km radius. I can easily jog 4km on a pleasant woodland trail all whilst remaining in the 1 km radius. My failure to do this is just me being bone idle. My morning jog has evolved backwards into a morning stroll. I feed carrots to some donkeys in the forest. The donkeys and the dogs are the only 'people' I speak to on most days.
Even Alexa is bored, I burped the other day and she said 'sorry I didn't quite understand that'.
I start a diet every morning. I fail every morning too.
For the first 3 weeks, I was jealous of bored people Netflixing, I was pleased that I had been busy with work and catching up on chores. I was looking forward to the Netflix days to come. Yesterday I descaled the kettle so I guess that puts me officially on the bored people list.
My to-do list is so long that I have an app for it as it was wasting forests of notepads. There are still 48 things on my to-do list. I am trying to get through one or two a day. Generally one. Sometimes none. Some days I don't even get past the 'take your vitamins in the morning' point on the to-do list.
Week 5, however, I deleted one of those items. I am exceedingly proud of myself. My villa is old and needed a lot more renovation than I had bargained for. This is entirely my own fault for my genetics making me go 'oooh I like the space, I'll buy it' and not checking the damp, leaks, crumbling kitchen, damaged roof, cracked terrace... The first summer, I noticed was a sprinkler system in the garden (joy), only it didn't work (sadness). My not very qualified but cheap gardener, managed to get it working manually. So to water the garden, I exit the property, open a dodgy door in the wall, avoid rats who like to live in there and twist various cobweb ensconced levers to launch the different sprinklers. Then I have to remember to switch them all off again which doesn't always happen resulting in a waterlogged garden and a large water bill.
It took me a year to realise that the sprinkler system had the capacity to be automated (like all my posh neighbours' sprinkler systems). There was a box on the wall of the laundry room with various switches and I had zero clue as to its function. One day, I pointed it out to an electrician and said - you can remove that thing, no idea what it is but it doesn't work. He looked at me in that special way that tradesmen reserve for blondes and said 'it's your sprinkler system' as he flicked a switch and lights flashed. So on that day I added 'work out how to use the auto-watering system' to the to-do list.
Four years later, all alone, with nothing but some COVID-19 time on my hands and a nerdy enough brain, I FIXED IT. It took three days of flicking various switches and levers both in and outside of the house, until finally, I heard the splutter of sprinklers. I am still unsure as to quite how it works, or how I will control it, it has a bit of a mind of its own and it was definitely installed pre Millenium so no YouTube tutorial seems to help. But water is shooting out relatively regularly and maybe this summer my lawn (greenish weeds) will be a bit more centre court on day 1 rather than finals day. A functioning sprinkler system must surely boost the house value by 50K.
That was quite a boring story, but if you've lived life as a single woman for more than a few years, you will appreciate the delirious joy of making something work that has defied two gardeners and countless workmen and was specifically designed to defy female logic and to appeal to none of our senses.
So now we're at week 6. It's getting less fun.
'In these difficult/troubled/trying/challenging/tough/strange times....' is the new passive-aggressive excuse. You know when you read that, that it will be closely followed with some back-handed insult or an alibi as to why someone has been behaving like an arsehole these past weeks. They can no longer say they're rushed off their feet or pretend that their kids/husband/job/mother-in-law is wearing them out. No, they have to find some other pretext, so these unprecedented times gets the blame.
I am no longer breezing through confinement like a very long weekend. Yesterday I cried all day long, interspersed with a few Netflix intervals and an early afternoon return to bed. There was a catalyst to this mini-depressive episode, but one that didn't deserve the ferocity of the sobs that it caused.
I can't stop thinking about things that I don't want to think about. Despite listening to audible books or podcasts, my mind keeps drifting to stupid squabbles or irrelevant conversations and working them over and over. I dream strange unpleasant dreams.
I caved and died my hair with L'oreal Preference. I don't bother to dry or style it and as a consequence, I wake up looking like Donald Trump. This is causing me great anguish.
Talking of which, it's almost midday - time for a shower.
Oh, and Marcos wrote a song, and I wrote the lyrics. It's cute.
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