No flipping way, I thought initially, if I’m ordering in, I want it to arrive hot and ready to eat. I don’t want to have to light my oven and read instructions and potentially wreck the expensive dinner before it’s even hit my plate. No, I thought: until it is deemed safe enough to venture out again, I will stay put, and enjoy a meal without the risk of butchering it.

For me, eating out is about the escapism. It is leaving behind the carnage of my house and obviating the need to clear the table of accumulated ephemera. It is the wine list and the joy of choosing a wine to suit each course, if one is making a night of it. It is sitting in the window of General Merchants and Shed and seeing friends walk by who may even pop in and say hello, or the munching of chicken wings on a cheeky mid-week outing to the Northern Lights.

It is not a van drawing up outside your house and handing you two brown paper bags at three in the afternoon. Except, last Friday it was, because this is lockdown and needs must and the thought of eating my own fecking food for another consecutive night had me sourer than a Free Presbyterian stumbling in on an episode of Normal People, and on a Sunday too.

Someone on social media drew my attention to Taste & Tour and happy days, they were delivering, and wasn’t it Indian themed, and I am partial to an Indian. But I am also (and here’s a surprise,) a very FUSSY connoisseur of Indian cuisine because when I lived on Reunion Island we had Indian landlords, who would occasionally drop us in fresh samosas and the odd goat curry. I have since found it hard to countenance the dishes to which one is often subjected here, with all the gloopy sauce and mounds of green pepper. Why do takeaways INSIST on shovelling green pepper into everything? Nigella Lawson says they are an abomination and I’m inclined to agree. Bitter and tasteless but much cheaper than their red counterparts, hence their popularity, I suppose.

Feck me but don’t I digress?

Back to Taste & Tour: flipping gorgeous it was. My fears were unfounded: there’s actually fuck all to do. It arrives, like any normal takeaway, but requires heating. So on went the oven and in went the starter and main. LSB did this, while I ran up the stairs and fired on nice top and skirt and some lipstick. ‘Aww would you look at you!’ said he when I reappeared, delighted to see me out of my rotten old active wear.

Up at the breakfast bar I perched and he opened the pouch of East India Gimlet and shook it over ice. Yes, these guys provide a cocktail in a pouch. To be fair, when I saw the menu I was like, chickpea starter, hmm, lamb biriyani ok so, but then my eyes lit upon the word COCKTAIL and I was all, Feck! Yes! Get it ordered! It was aromatic and zesty and given my swift descent into gentle inebriation, fairly lethal too. Down the hatch it went, sharpish.

‘Ding’ went the timer and the first course was ready. I’ll be honest. A few potatoes and some chickpeas done with tomato and spices. I was not initially enamoured. But, when decanted upon the plate with the yogurt dip, mint & coriander chutney and pomegranate seeds, it was sensational. And this is when it suddenly became a restaurant sort of experience because I became all poncy going ‘Do you SEE how the freshness mint brings out of the spiciness of the chilli? And the yogurt and the chickpeas? Have you EVER encountered such a perfect pulse?

‘I could eat ten of those’ declared Himself as he put down his fork. ‘Me too,’ I said, and then we discussed how, if we had meals like this more often we could go vegetarian. But DING went the timer again and out wafted the smell of slow cooked lamb which put paid to that notion for now. We heated the dahl in a pot for five minutes and the main was ready go.

Another revelation: never before have I heard my husband comment positively about a lentil. ‘My God,’ he said, with feeling. ‘I wouldn’t even KNOW that was a lentil.’ He’s been a long time agin lentils, has Himself, after a bad experience with a Dansak we once shared in the Bengal Brasserie, the consequences of which I shan’t labour here. This dahl, on the other hand, was rich and indulgent. And the lamb. I am still thinking about the lamb. Delicately spiced, velvety and succulent, it was a dream, and even more so when topped with raita and red onion.

I like cooking, but I’m too busy to be flavouring a raita with cumin and coriander, or footering about making a tamarind chutney. I’m not about to start cooking a dahl for five hours, or making a curry with a base of 25 ingredients. Nor am I a precision cook who ensures that that’s an interesting mix of tastes and textures on the plate. In short, I’m a mum who’s wearing about 4 different hats at the moment. So to have this beauty dropped on my doorstep was a Friday Delight indeed. We were too full to have dessert so waited until  on Saturday before sampling the chocolate brownies from Little Pink Kitchen. I never would have thought of adding cardamom to a brownie but it certainly lent it a Bombay twist, and along with a scoop of Al Gelato (which we’d ordered separately,) it was an unctuous, stunning combination.

All in all, it came to over fifty quid, at £23 a head plus extra because Himself had ordered 6 bottles of beer. This meant we had free delivery and for restaurant quality food I think it was worth it. Given the money we have saved by not going out and how we have all but eliminated food waste- I think this is an indulgence well worth forking out for.

(Taste & Tour are no longer offering this particular Friday night service, but keep an eye on their website for other exciting developments.) Meanwhile, keep supporting restaurant when you can, so they are still up and running when we are.

Readers, I tried. I really tried. I was going to be all shiny and positive this week because lovely neighbours have deposited books and buns and plants on my doorstep (sadly no dog’s pyjamas have arrived as yet) and I was trying to channel all my feel-good vibes and be thankful and full of gratitude. But after half an hour of home-schooling yesterday, this noble pursuit was dropped quicker than Prof Neil Ferguson’s trousers, so hey ho, you’re stuck with another rant. Bear with me.

Life under lockdown can be summarised as a series of interruptions, can’t it? Everything takes about three times as long, with treble the amount of aggravation. About a month ago, when I was still trying to be healthy and doing  ‘Yoga with Adrienne’, up popped one of the Master Class adverts featuring Joyce Carol Oates, who offered this nugget of wisdom: ‘You cannot write if you are constantly interrupted.’ Really Joyce? Fecking really? Is that true? Because I’ve become the next f**king Anne Tyler since my kids have been at home 24/7 and my husband’s backside is cemented to his swizzle chair at the computer upstairs.

I never get two minutes peace. The second I think I’m making some headway with a task, in wanders a child needing a drink or a snack or their ball retrieved from the top of the shed.

Of course, the real battle is with myself, trying not to look at the WhatApp on my phone which is going a dinger, and thinking that really the loo could do with a good scrub while I’m supposed to be writing or marking or helping a child do Tally Charts. ‘I HATE TALLY CHARTS,’ wailed the wee one on Wednesday. ‘You hate everything, unless it involves taking out paints and giving me work,’ I snapped, ‘so you may just get on with your sums.’

I really am not my best self at the moment.

Even my Mac conspires against me, as I can almost see my battery plummet by the second, while the poor fan chunters away like mad, seeing as it’s being used as the portal for my work, the home-schooling system and the eleventy billion other things I look up on a day to day basis. A quick look at my browser history shows that yesterday I googled ‘How to Draw a Baby Seal’ on You Tube, ‘How to Start Your own Wormery’ and in the middle of this I decided to order some dessert from Al Gelato (I told you I was easily distracted).  All this I did while waiting for the child to come back downstairs where she’d gone to get a red felt tip and got distracted.

(In fairness, the seal we drew together as the day’s ‘fun creative activity’ wasn’t half bad.)

I am, of course, not the only poor devil losing this battle while they try to work. A teacher colleague of mine was busy last week contending with spreadsheets and data while her sons pestered her with questions as diverse as ‘Does this picture look more like pâte or ham to you?’ for his French homework, and another wanted her to simplify quadratic equations with him.

I think my temper has been so frayed because I feel so guilty all the time; I can never concentrate at the task at hand because I feel I should be crossing something else off my ‘to do list.’ And meanwhile, the dishes! How they mount! And of course, we went and got the dog who likes to be made a fuss of so I can’t walk past her without giving her a hug, so she’s another great interruption, but a lovely one, it must be said.

But if you’re in the same boat as me here’s a tip; (and I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself, what? A tip from you, you crazed mad woman?) but on Tuesday I took my friend Gayle’s advice and I set an alarm and forced myself to get up at 6-45. I shook off the sleep and opened the laptop and did three finicky wee jobs that I couldn’t get near the day before. Boom, boom, boom, I had them all done in no time with no one asking any questions except for LSB who did enquire as to the state of my health, so uncharacteristic was this behaviour. I’ve never been a morning person but I can see now how people get up at 5-30am run round looking all smug and pleased with themselves. It’s a joy, really, to start the day with a win rather than a sense of dread, if like me, you usually feel defeated by 9-15.

Anyway, it’s Friday evening now and I took the day off home-schooling and my work and we walked the dog together and ordered in a feast from ‘Taste and Tour’ and I’m feeling very much better. I’m telling you, it’s cheaper than therapy, this writing lark. Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

(Only got to posting this on Saturday, due to constant interruptions).

It’s bad to whinge, isn’t it? I mean am I a bad person? We are living up here on the hill, we can walk our dog in the meadow and we have the shops beside us where all the staff are lovely and kind and most people, (apart from one prick my husband encountered on Friday,) adhere to the social distancing rules and don’t ram their trollies up your arse while you’re checking the dates on your M&S rotisserie style chicken.

But it’s me, and I am prone to a good old moan so off I’ll go, and don’t go judging me. I’m just f**ked off at this stage. Earlier I reached over LSB for my coffee and he said ‘Ouch! You just after knee-ing me there!’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ ‘Or DID you? said the Older Child, her eyebrow raised knowingly. ‘I think perhaps you did.’

Perceptive wee article she is too because it wasn’t long after he’d cleaned the living room and said, ‘Now I don’t want to blow my own trumpet (well you may as well as I won’t be blowing it for you) but haven’t I done a great job in there? You may want to take a look.’

What is it with men? Every flipping day I do the dishes and the laundry and hang it out and take it in and cook the dinners and I don’t go around saying: ‘Oh, wasn’t that a great load of whites I just flung on there at 30 degrees?’ or ‘Check out these pots? Aren’t they positively gleaming after that good scrub with my responsibly sourced bamboo scrubber?’

I’ve started now, so I might as well tell you what else is annoying me.

I’m pissed off with people making sourdough and posting it on social media because its’s just rude when they can’t have me round and pour me a glass of Valpolicella Ripasso and serve it up to me with a hunk of manchego and homemade chilli jam. (Yes Louise, I’m talking about you, so I am.)

I’m fed up with the Zoom and Whatsapp calls that falter when the connection’s bad and you spend half your time saying ‘Oh No! You first! No, you go on sure! You first! Didn’t quite catch that!’ Then you get chatting about something interesting and in wanders the dog. ‘Oh and here’s the dog! Isn’t she lovely!’ ‘Oooh yes!’ ‘And here’s my child! And there’s your child!’ ‘Hello, Hello!’ Cue inane waving, when frankly, lovely as your children and your friend’s children may be, you want to have a proper, no holds-barred chat that is MOST definitely not for the tender age of the under eights.

I’m also fed up meeting people in the street or over the wall and saying a million time to the kids ‘2 metres! 2 metres! Keep well back there!’ which makes any class of normal conversation impossible.

I’m narked, that instead of sitting across from my mates, all tarted up and having a grand catch up over coconut margaritas in La Taqueria, that we are waving at each other across the street, wearing jogging bottoms and clutching small plastic bags of recently excreted shit, still warm from dog’s large intestines.

I’m agitated because I naively thought, that through all of this that I might get my house in order and do a spot of decluttering, but no, sure there’s no charity shops or recycling centres open so we’re still wading through mounds of shite and sure, by way of getting a dog we just brought at whole lot more truck in.

There’s no end to dog paraphernalia, I’m finding. Rugs and coats and leads and toys and food and treats. If you land yourself with a greyhound, you should know that they are prone to a chill, so we had to get a wee coat for Tilly. We ordered her pyjamas too, much to the Small Child’s delight, but they haven’t arrived yet, much to everyone’s disappointment.

And I’m really quite distraught, that Normal People is over on BBC 3. It was so heartrendingly, beautifully shot and so true- there’s a scene with Connell in episode 10 and if he doesn’t get Oscar nominated it’ll be a crime against acting. I enjoyed the book but I didn’t LOVE it- I got frustrated with the characters, I kept thinking, just fecking GET TOGETHER and be done with it. But in the series the fragility of the pair of them was so much more apparent and convincing to me. One could see how easy it was to be misunderstood, vulnerable and insecure as a young adult, perhaps with a distorted perception of self.  I worry that with all the media hype surrounding the sex scenes (and perhaps I’m underestimating teenagers here) that the point may be a bit lost on them- but to me it summed up so much of what it is to be young and confused; feeling lost and listless at university, especially as an arts student. Navigating new friendships and articulating what it was you wanted when you didn’t know yourself: that was hard, wasn’t it? (I feel, for the benefit of The Mothership here that I have to add that there was never anything in the way of bondage in my student romances, least she splutters out her tea and scalds herself.)

LSB said he was bereft when it was over, (‘Normal People’ that is, not his time at Queen’s after which ended he felt nowt but relief) and I feel the same- I haven’t seen anything that has affected me quite so much in a while. There was just such incredible tenderness in it, and at the moment, when everything is so emotionally charged-it had me in bits.

So there you are- just something else to be raging about. And it’s Sunday night, so another week of home-schooling and cramming in your own work and housework and feeling rubbish at every last bit of it. At least the dog is happy, even without her wee pyjamas, so that’s something.

During my teaching career, kids have flicked M&Ms at my head.  A peeved teen once got up from her chair and launched it, with some gusto,  in my direction. I wore a pair of ill-fitting trousers and students shouted ‘camel-toe’ at me up and down the corridor. Never though, have I been so relieved to see Friday arrive.  Several times this week, I have had to take myself out into the garden and utter obscenities, to quell the urge to eject a Small Child through a window. ‘I see your Tourette’s is back,’ muttered LSB darkly, hearing me drop the c-bomb while hanging out the towels.

It can be trying enough, the whole ‘home-schooling’ lark. More trying still, when you have all the technical know-how of a seventeenth-century peasant with eye-trouble. Things didn’t work this week. When they did work, I managed to delete the bastard things before I sent them. Everything that COULD run out of charge, ran out of charge. ‘I WOULD do the work Mummy, but my tablet’s at 7%.’ I heard that a lot. The Small Child’s newest infuriating habit is running off when I’m trying to explain things to her. She’s a stealthy wee article, and I was halfway through explaining plurals ending in ‘x’ and ‘ey’ before I realised she’d taken herself off.

The main lesson my progeny will have to take from this, is not to repeat the foul language to which they’ve been subjected. ‘Where’s she fucked off to now?’ I spluttered in disbelief, coming downstairs from the printer with a sheet for The Small One to do. ‘Outside,’  said the Older one, not even looking perturbed by and getting on with her adding-up. The Small Child waved with glee from the top of the slide. I sighed.

They have expressed great reluctance to complete the work sent by their lovely and diligent teachers. I’ve had to prise the Nintendo Switch from the Older Child’s hands and at one point I put it in the bin, only for it to be fished out later by her sobbing sister. ‘But Daddy plays it too,’ she wailed.’ ‘Daddy can just eff off,’ I fumed, since it was Daddy who brought the blasted thing into the house at Christmas.

‘The thing is,’ opined the Small Child, ‘that Miss X is very clear when she explains things and you’re not clear. AT ALL.’

‘No, she’s not, is she?’ agreed her sister.

Little s**ts.

To be fair to them, though, it isn’t all their fault. I should be organised. I should source rubbers and pencils and rulers, and have them at our disposal. I ought to acquaint myself with the see-saw exercises, before I have a small, impatient child standing beside me who just wants to play ‘Harry Potter’ with her sister: ‘Here’s comes Hedwig Harry!’ (cue a small stuffed owl flying past my shoulder.) See-saw isn’t the most straightforward of apps to navigate, and is less so when your new dog is pestering you for a piece of scone and you want to get a load of laundry done because the sun has the audacity to still be out after  17 days.

I just have to accept that at 7 and 8 years of age they  need me to sit with them and not be checking my phone or doing dishes while they work. They need me to be present, which is hard, what with my head being more pickled than a jar of kimchi. But to prevent meltdowns and ensure they get actually learn something, I have learnt to sit. We ask Alexa to time 25 minutes and I have a pile of pencils which I can sharpen and papers to sort while I wait for them to finish. I find these repetitive tasks soothing.  Socks have been paired. Elderly felt tips have been consigned to the bin and  I did some colouring in and drew little birds inspired by a marvellous book, ‘Jip and Janneka’.

Sometimes, they take a sheet up to LSB’s study and do a few sums while he works aways beside them. Often the dog wanders in too, and his work colleagues on Zoom have a bit of a chuckle. Maybe I just need to calm the fuck down. One day, I heard Adam Kay in an interview with Claudia Hammond on Radio 4, saying he never gets stressed about work anymore. Since giving up obstetrics and knowing that no one’s going to die on his watch, he’s decided to give less of a shit. I listened, nodding along sagely. ‘How wise,’ I thought, ‘what a sensible philosophy to adopt.’ Did I take it on board? Did I heck. I can’t even get through a morning without wanting to ingest Domestos, (although perhaps that’s a cure according to the news this morning.)

So next week, I’m doing it differently. I’m printing stuff out the night before. I’m making a plan and I’m putting rules in place, such as they must not run away when I’m teaching and be stompy, humpy little shits. They must not use their pogo sticks inside because it makes my head want to explode. They will learn something though, it’s one of the strangest times to be alive, but I’m happy that they’ve adapted to the new normal well ahead of me.

I’m going to go totally off-piste here, but I was thinking yesterday, as we took our mandated hourly walk, of any positives we can take from this experience, and I thought of a few. Yes, I’m as surprised as you are by that turn of events, but there you are. Odd things happen under lockdown.

• You get to be a nosy bastard. There’s nothing I love more than a good peer into people’s houses. I grew up on The Esplanade where it was almost regulation for anyone passing to have a good gawk in, and very few of them were discreet about it either. Sadly for them, my parents weren’t much into doing up houses with my mother caustically remarking: ‘There’s people in Africa without their breakfasts’ when we mooted replacing the 70’s style carpet or faded wallpaper. It was hardly worth the effort of the folk staring in with such intensity. But now, instead of looking away, I feel I can peer into stranger’s livings rooms with impunity, under the guise of admiring the cuddly toys and rainbows adorning the windows. I’ve very envious of some of the interiors I’ve spied, and I’m thinking that our front room is lacking  a flamboyant feature wall. I should probably be able to get someone in to hang the wallpaper in 2022.

• It’s acceptable to be ‘a bit mad’. Very few of us have ever lived through the like of this before, and please God when it ends, history won’t go repeating itself. It thus feels quite acceptable to be having crazy, apocalyptical thoughts, since the world has been firmly tipped on its arse anyway. I’ve always had a fairly tenuous grip of my marbles, and in moments of high anxiety I fear I’ll lose them altogether. It’s comforting to know that I’m not alone, and that other people are rationing how many times they listen to the news of a day, and are going around in a state of agitation.

• You can sit on your arse of an evening and not feel guilty. I am flipping LOVING this. In normal circumstances, I could be out every night of the week. Yoga, running, the gym, a literary event, some other edifying activity. Maybe just the pub. Belfast is a happening sort of a place, and I’m often stressed because I can’t make it to an event or I’m just to tired or too busy at home. There is just so much guilt attached to everything: feeling bad for not going to yoga when I now it will be a brilliant class, but then feeling bad for not spending time with the kids when I do go. At the minute, I feel I have license to sit on my arse. I’m staying at home, like I’ve been told. The children are very happy.

• Deliveries- oh, how I have LOVED the deliveries. And I’m not talking about bland old Amazon: hell no, I’m talking about when David Torrans from No Alibis rocks up with a signed copy (the last signed copy in the shop no less) of a short story by Claire Keegan. Our very own Jan Carson wrote a super blog on short stories and I’ve since ordered a half a dozen of them since my demented brain can’t cope with anything longer. In the very same day, we had a delivery of four fabulous wines from The Vineyard as it’s been perfect weather for sipping a New Zealand sauvignon blanc in the garden, and I always add ice to eke it out so I don’t end up binned by 8 o’clock. We can’t be having that (not in front of the children).

• We’ve been ordering our coffee from Boden Park which makes our breakfast feel a bit more special. We ordered last Monday morning and a couple of hours later Mr McKeating himself landed up with three packets for us. ‘That’s service for you’ I exclaimed, relieving him of his package at the door (all wiped and disinfected he informed me.) ‘I work for a woman sure,’ he said. ‘There’s no rest for me.’

• The final and most excellent delivery arrived on Friday afternoon when Al himself from Al Gelato appeared with 2 tubs of raspberry ripple, honeycomb, Kinder Bueno and my favourite ‘stracciatella’. He even read my wee note which said that I would reuse the wee spoons from the last time and didn’t need any more. We had a chat over the wall and he admired our cat and it was all very heart-warming indeed. It was like bringing all my very favourite bits of Botanic Avenue and the Ormeau to my door. All we need is for Shed to start ferrying up their roasted chicken and dauphinoise potatoes and we’ll be living our best lockdown life.

I think I can some up everything I’ve mentioned as acts of kindness. Whether we’re being kind to ourselves by having fewer expectations and allowing a rest when it’s needed, or the kindness of others as they bring a little joy to us, by making gorgeous window displays or bringing us goods to brighten our day. We are valuing kindness more and putting to at the top of the list, as a necessity and a priority. It’s brought me some comfort over the last few days, so instead of posting a vitriolic rant at the start of the week I thought I’d go for this instead. Don’t worry though- the home-schooling has to start again later so give it 2 hours and I’ll have plenty of ranty blog-fodder for later in the week.

‘So, what’s been annoying me this week?’ I asked LSB as I sat down to write with a large mug of coffee. ‘Write about what’s NOT been annoying you,’ he replied tersely. ‘That would be quicker.’

As usual he was right. I have been going around in a state of agitation, and after some reflection, I’ve pinpointed at the things that have me most on edge.

Firstly, I never feel I’m ‘off-duty’. Now maybe that’s just normal life, and parenting, and I should just accept that, but I never feel I can open a book or write. I feel I ought to be either exercising, entertaining or educating them, the off-spring. I know it’s the Easter Holidays, but home schooling was at fairly sketchy for the week before they began, thus I feel I ought to be doing a bit now, before their development falls off a cliff-edge. I was asking them a few basic maths questions earlier and there weren’t so much gaps in their understanding, as gaping chasms.

Secondly, it’s my new role, which involves never straying more than two feet away from the sink. The housework never stops does it? The tide of dishes is unceasing, especially when we start to bake. I’m not a natural baker (I wonder these days if I’m a natural anything) and I seem unable to do so without using every bowl in the house.  I was reading a rather superb essay by the Irish writer Sam Blake in a great anthology I was recently gifted, and she wrote one of her first books in the car between drop-off and pick up: that way she didn’t go home and get way-laid by the laundry greeting her at the door. Her back was completely fucked by the poor posture of writing in the driver’s seat, but at least she got a novel out of it.

Today, as the sunlight poured into the kitchen, we cleared the table and had a Spanish style lunch, making us think wistfully back to last Easter, when we went to Valencia. No sooner had the wee ones rested their cutlery than they buggered back into the garden, where they were playing ‘Harry Potter’. The Older one is ‘Harry’ and The Small Child is ‘Hermione’, and this game means that I keep tripping over the mop and brush which they leave at their arses all around the house when they aren’t using them as broomsticks. The poor auld cat is ‘Mrs Norris’ and they have a stuffed dog who is ‘Fang’. It would be quite cute and humorous really, if I weren’t in such crochety mood. Anyway, I called out to them that I was Professor McGonigall and that it was a disgrace that they hadn’t performed their ‘tidying-up spell’ and cleared away the lunch items. They came in and helped quite readily, apart from a few grumbles that I’d interrupted quidditch practice.

Oh, delighted with myself was I, with my ingenuity. Of course though, it all went arse over tit when LSB opened the fridge and out tumbled a big glass jar of pickled beetroot and smashed on the tiles. Being children, (or just plain thick) they had shoved it in so it teetered on the edge, just ready to bounce out at an unsuspecting parent.

I was most irked, firstly because I love my beetroot and secondly because the floor was only mopped yesterday.

The third thing which is getting my goat, is the way we keep saying ‘when this is all over’ and planning for the future. Now I’m a natural pessimist, as you may have picked up on, but are we kidding ourselves to imagine normality resuming anytime soon? To misquote Gerry Adams, I keep thinking ‘It won’t have gone away you know.’ I can’t see me trotting down to Shed or La Taqueria on the Ormeau, where you can practically hear the mastication of the folk beside you as they chomp and chew, and eating my meal with any great relish.

I’m worried that folk will forget all about social distancing and be inching closer in the queue and I’ll be telling them to get to fuck.

I’m anxious that we think it’s all back under control and open ourselves up to a new wave of the virus later in the year. I wish the boys in charge had more of a notion of how to get it under control but I remain unconvinced. So this is my whinge this week.

However, as a means of distraction, I can highly recommend tuning into ‘The Nest’ on BBC Iplayer, a thriller that will keep you from scrubbing your surfaces for an hour and provide respite once you’ve got the weans off to bed. I’ve enjoyed it immensely, sitting down with a cup of tea and pieces of Easter egg, and ogling the gorgeous interiors. And Killing Eve has started back with its spectacular costumes, sharp dialogue and imaginative ways to murder people. The only problem I’ve had is trying to resist watching episode after episode as I don’t have to get up for work.

Enjoy folks, and if you have any ideas on helping me be less of a grouchy auld git through the few weeks, then get on the blower.

Er, what’s that you’re up to? asked LSB as he spied me decanting the remnants of my cup of tea into a milk container. ‘The slop-bucket has returned,’ I said, ‘we have to feed the hedge.’

‘Oh God,’ he sighed, with feeling. ‘Not again.’

A few of years ago, during a dry spell, we had a hedge planted at the front. It has not been a roaring success, the new hedge. Its initial purpose was to keep the children hemmed in while I sipped a glass of Sauvignon of a summer’s evening. The garden is on a slope you see, and the kids couldn’t have been trusted not to go a-hurtling into the footpath. However, the gaps between the bushes never knitted together to form a substantial barrier. There remain unsightly large gappy bits and the children are now old enough to stay off the road.  I’ve now got a border to which I have to weed and tend as if I don’t already have enough to do.

A neighbour, who is both kindly and green-fingered, has sought to brighten up our crap looking foliage, by planting a few bluebells and a rather wonderful pom-pom primula. In my usual inept manner I almost let these die  for lack of watering, hence the return of the slop bucket.

It irks me you see, how much water we waste. While waiting for the shower to heat up, for example. Lots of water, straight down the drain. Our kids are forever ordering drinks, then forgetting about them and own cups of tea go undrunk while we race about after them. Then there’s the rinsing. I am a keen rinser of plates before they go into the dishwasher. LSB is not.  He will shove in his porridge bowls with half the oaty goodness still clinging to the sides. I’m forever having to take them out, and very annoying it is too.

So I was at this business, rinsing and swilling and tipping it into the milk when LSB caught me at it. ‘We’re in the middle of a pandemic, in case it had eluded you,’ he said. ‘You can’t go firing that round the garden. It’ll be like the day of the Triffids out there.’ He had a point, what it being spread by droplets and all. ‘Get it down the sink,’ he said, ‘in case it ends up back in the fridge and into my coffee.’

Oh, most authorative he became on the subject.  So down the plughole it went. However, he’s not coming between me and my shower basin.  No sirree. I’m just thinking that we’ve had a dry spell and there’s obviously going to be so much water used with the extra laundry we’re all doing that I must do something to redress the balance.  I was driving home one day and  I heard Feargal Sharkey on Radio 4. He’s become an environmental campaigner, has our Feargal, and he’s demented about how fast the water authorities are draining the nation’s rivers for public consumption. One would think, what with the torrents of rain to which we are oft treated here in Ireland and the UK , that water shortage be an issue, but you’d be wrong. Rivers have dried up all over the place, and you can see him chat about this here. I have been greatly mocked  in my efforts to preserve water, so it was nice to be vindicated, by Feargal Sharkey of all people.

I’m keen to know any other eco-tips you have during this time. Hit me up for ideas, and get that shower basin on the go yourselves.

We’ve decided to shake things up a bit round here. On Saturday LSB suggested a ‘Date Night’ so at half seven I poured myself a glass of fizz and went upstairs to glam up. It wasn’t a moment too soon as I was getting sick looking at myself, trogging about like some Russian babushka in my woolly cardigans and tracksuit bottoms. Added to this, while out in the garden some bastard insects have nibbled my ankles which are now red and splotchy; my IBS is back from nerviness so I’m boasting a bloated look, and my hands are cracked and veiny from the constant washing. I don’t want to emerge from this quarantine with LSB marching down to the solicitor and citing that he wants a divorce because in addition to my habitual crankiness I also look like a sack of shit.

It was nice, listening to Craig Charles on Radio 6 while I dried my hair and applied proper make-up, with a slick of creamy eyeshadow and my Mac lipstick with a fine little brush I’d forgotten I had.  It was nicer still when I went downstairs and the kids said, ‘You look fancy!’ and LSB refilled my glass. The Older One assigned herself the role of ‘Head Waitress’ and served me crisps with a tea-towel over her arm. ‘That’s lovely,’ I said, giving her a kiss and telling them both to clear off to bed. To our amazement off they scampered and didn’t even come back down to annoy. I’m not convinced that LSB didn’t drug them slightly.* We sojourned from the breakfast bar to the table, which earlier we’d cleared of paints and papers and felt tips and other ephemera. We lit a candle and opened a posh bottle of Spanish red. We wondered, if after being in the house for almost 3 weeks if we’d have anything to say to each other. It’s been odd, all of this. During the day, LSB comes down from his study and says things like: ‘What’s the craic?’ and I look up, raise my eyebrows and say ‘What the hell  is likely to have changed in the last hour since I saw you?’

But what we are noting is that it’s the micro-stuff, the minutiae that we’re now reporting, has become imbued with more significance.  It’s actually lovely. Back when I was pregnant and my pelvis was fecked I used to sit at the front window and watch all the people going by with their dogs. I had different names for them all (the dogs, not the people) so a fluffy white Samoyed became ‘cloud dog’ and a grey mongrel who wasn’t a looker, bless her, was ‘hyena dog’. There was, and indeed still is, a guy we call poodle man, who always has his black poodle with him or a coffee, although never both. It was a pleasant diversion, this dog-spotting, from watching the History Channel and endless documentaries about the Holocaust. No wonder I was proper depressed during both maternity leaves.

But this is what we’re back to now, reporting on all the small things. I mention how when I take the kids on our daily walk that we wave in at an elderly man at number 19, or stop and chat if he’s weeding at the front. Yesterday he told me to pick a few of his blue hyacinths and get the girls to draw them. ‘Very tricky to draw, are hyacinths,’ he mused. Every day we spot our friend Paul in his study. He waves his left hand in an animated fashion, while his right grips the phone as he works. We giggle as we know he wears his work shirt and his grey tracksuit bottoms which no one can see over Skype. Often we meet Maggie and her Shitzu, Bubbles. She always extends his lead so the girls can make a fuss of him. The Small Child likes to giggle over the name ‘Shitzu’, for obvious reasons. ‘But Bubbles ISN’T a rude dog at all,’ she opines. We wave in at Emma and her new baby girl and she waves her baby’s hand back at us. At our friend Sam’s house we make rude faces and execute a ‘crazy dance,’ sometimes to the consternation of passing vehicles. Our little pal Sophie likes to come racing out of house and chat down at us from the tree in her garden. Sometimes she climbs quite disconcertingly high.

I have become an irrepressible ‘thumbs-upper’ even though this is a gesture which has, for some reason always irked me. I give the thumbs up as I pass, as it manages to convey so many things: ‘I’m still alive, and obviously, so are you if you can wave out at me.’ It says, ‘This is horrible and frightening but we’re still here.’ It says, ‘I’m trying to home-school my kids, check in with work and stop them gate-crashing their dad’s work calls and putting the hamster on his shoulder, but we’re smiling.’

So these are the stories we tell each other as we sit over our M&S Dine in for two. We talk about the friends who have contacted us from New Zealand, Barcelona and Nova Scotia, and the ones up the road with whom we rarely talk, but who have lifted the phone. Our 91 year-old friend Grace informed me earlier by e-mail that she spotted a woodpecker during a walk in Belvoir Forest. LSB has never seen a woodpecker, other than the reappearing one in episodes of ‘Ben and Holly’. When this is all over he wants to go and have a look. I never had him down as one with bird-watching tendencies, but there we are. It turns out that we actually have quite a lot to cover over our dinner.

*No children were actually drugged on Saturday evening. Honestly. There was, however, extensive bribing with Nintendo Switch and a large bag of Moams.

Since it’s Wednesday, or HUMP DAY, I thought I’d come on and have a good auld bitch, just to reassure you all that while life as we know it is in a desperate state of flux, things here remain the same and I’m still a vinegary old bastard. I’ve been a cranky in the house, especially with the children, who have been very reluctant to do any of the school-work they’ve been assigned and have thus been getting on my nerves something shocking. Poor LSB- he got a chewing earlier too- I could have punched him in the face for crunching a Mini Egg too loudly.

Last week I was all excited about Joe Wick’s exercise plan as I naively thought that starting every morning with a good buck-leap about would be an endorphin-boosting start to the day, but I’ve given up on that. The kids only did the warm-up before sitting down for a spot of colouring in, and left me cavorting about, fantasising about emerging from this enforced hibernation with a six-pack and toned upper arms. I overdid it on Friday and spent the entire weekend in a state of agitation over the terrible tightness across the chest.  I kept asking LSB to take my temperature for fear it was the dreaded virus but since no other symptoms presented themselves, I think it was just the press-ups.

I am also in the vice-like grip of ‘sunshine based anxiety’. Anyone else get this? It’s when you feel compelled to make the most of the great outdoors before the bright spell disappears and it pisses down, putting paid to all the things you planned to do when it was fine. Washing, for example. No sooner have I one load hung out than I have another flung on. I feel guilty about how behind I got with it all while I was at my work, and I am trying to atone for that lack of diligence. There’s not a bed in the house hasn’t been stripped and changed.

This ‘sun-shine neurosis’ also applies to gardening. Our garden is a huge embarrassment to me, because LSB wouldn’t know a weed from a wallflower and I haven’t much more of a notion. However, I do know that the big tendrils of tough grass which are strangulating my escallonia at the front looks most unbecoming, and on our government mandated walks round the block I’m noticing all the mowed lawns and spring flowers and tended hedges. Ours looks neglected and sad in comparison, miserable even, and certainly not sparking any joy. 4-30am it was last night when I jolted awake and said: ‘Stevey we have to fill the brown bins, while we still can!’ At that hour of the night/morning, he failed to see the urgency about bins and garden waste. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep and came down and stood outside to listen to the birds in an effort to calm myself. I’m telling you, there’s folk locked up who are saner.

And then, there’s the Mothership. Fuck me. Never off the blower presently. Here she was last week: ‘Now, I’m just ringing because I’m VERY WORRIED. You know Basil, from your Dad’s History Club? Well HE said that his home-help is now coming with a face-mask on her, (and only a week ago she was saying that the whole thing was a nonsense and was raging that there was no loo roll in Asda). She’s NOW telling him that he isn’t to TOUCH the mail with his bare hands in case the postman is infected, and passing it on, willy-nilly. She says he’s to put a pair gloves on and extract the contents with a pair of tweezers and put the envelope straight into the fire.’

‘I’ll not be going to those lengths,’ I told her, but sure then didn’t I google it and came across a crowd of folk who’d emptied their entire Tesco shop into a bath with disinfectant in it, with a loose cauliflower bobbing about in the middle of it all.

So Himself did a shop on Sunday and to be honest I wanted to go, but he said ‘no’ because if I got the fecking virus he couldn’t listen to me and off he went before I could argue. Then he texted from Forestside saying thank God I hadn’t gone instead because I’d just have said “Fuck this’ and come back minus the shopping and we’d have had no dinner. Meanwhile I was waiting with the Dettol spray at the ready, and when he got in, corralled him directly to the laundry room, told him to strip down to his boxers before bundling all his stuff into the machine and putting it on full whack with the anti-bacterial laundry cleanser. ‘I’m not in Maghaberry you know,’ he said, looking perturbed. Then I set to wiping everything down with my spray. ‘What have you become?’ he asked, his eyes wide with disbelief, as he reached for the red wine bottle. ‘NOT BEFORE YOU’VE HAD A SHOWER!’ I guldered.

I mean, please, tell me, do I have to be at this? It’s not like I’m working in the ICU at the Royal. (And a big million thank you from the bottom of my sour little heart to all of those who are. We owe you. Do you hear that Boris? We fucking OWE them.) I just don’t know what to be doing anymore- what’s best practice for groceries?

My nerves are shattered. I suppose that’s why the hamster wheel in my brain is churning round about washing bed linen and gardening because it’s infinitely preferable than worrying about your whole family coming down with the bloody thing because you were too lazy to take a Dettol wipe to a packet of fusilli. Send me good vibes. Send me advice. Send me anything. Let me know I’m not alone, slowly unravelling here.

‘Errrr what?’ I hear you say, ‘what’s that mad eejit up to now?’ I shall elaborate. A lovely lady called Christine who does my Irish Dancing Class, told me about this initiative where you donate to this charity and they ‘twin your toilet’ with one in Africa where people don’t have a loo on which to pee while they check their phone/read the paper or just hide from their family. They then send you a picture of the loo you have helped to construct with your donation and you can hang it up in your bathroom and look upon it with a glow of satisfaction while emptying your bowels.

I’ve been meaning to get round to twinning my toilet for ages and I guess now I have no excuse not to get on with it, especially since it’s the weekend and all that home-schooling lark can get to fuck. Since there is a lavatorial theme to this post, I have included my latest Tenx9 story which I read last month in The Black Box. It’s all about my trip to Madagascar in the year 2000 when I fell prey to the sort of pestilence one would expect when travelling round the developing world at twenty years of age and paying blatant disregard to the advice to avoid ice-cubes in your glass of coconut rum.

Tenx9 story on the theme of ‘Nature’

They say if you travel round South America you have tales about hair-raising bus journeys, and if you go to South East Asia, you have tales about your bowels. For the record, I’ve been to both and it’s bowels all the way. But I don’t like to limit myself to just the two continents, and my trip to Madagascar off the coast of Mozambique, fairly took its toll on my innards too.

I have my Malgache adventure in January 2000, because at the time I am teaching (well, teaching in the loosest sense of the word) on Réunion, a French island utterly dwarfed by its neighbour, which is a whopping 233 times its size.

Jo, Will, Katie and myself form a gormless foursome of language assistants, off on a 3 week jaunt of the island, since we are off for the southern hemisphere’s equivalent of summer holidays. How ‘magnifique’, we think, being paid to go gallivanting in search of lemurs and tramping through rainforests.

Endless patience and a strong constitution are a must for trips like these, and sadly for me, I have neither. We are following a route outlined in our Lonely Planet guide, but of course we didn’t appreciate the lack of passable roads to facilitate this journey, which deteriorate the further south one travelled. Our entitled, first world backsides are in for a shock indeed.

Our lovely hosts in the capital, Antananarivo organise a car to take us to our first stop, Antsirabe and though it is rickety and fusty, the amenable driver who stops frequently and lets us commandeer his cassette player, replacing the jingly jangly Malgache tunes with the Beatles White Album.

We have considered a vegetarian diet once we left the confines of our host’s home, after their son took us to a market and pointed to a shack where hunks of meat hung from hooks, dripping blood onto the wooden counter. ‘Voila la boucherie,’ he said, while we looked on and tried not to retch. The bored looking vendor wiped at the blood with a grubby cloth and ineffectually batted the flies away with a brush, a display which we felt was only for our benefit.

However, as I have no patience. After one day of eating rice, I am ever so bored and decide to risk a ‘poulet coco’, as according to the Lonely Planet, Antsirabe boasts the island’s best restaurants. Trust me when I say that The Lonely Planet talks shite. My chicken is all bone and no meat, as though it had been thoroughly gnawed prior to serving. Still, hungry after a long drive and I clean my plate before tucking into a ‘banane flambé’, a dessert so liberally doused with rum that I am sure it would kill any bugs left from the main event.

No rum, as it turns out would be strong enough. Walking back to our guest house I feel the onset of cramps, as if rough hands are wringing out my colon as though it were the neck of the chicken which had so briefly featured in my curry. ‘You might as well just stay in there,’ says my room-mate caustically, as I crawl into the bathroom for the 4th time that night.

She and the others seem impervious to whatever pestilence I have fallen prey, and they lack a great deal of sympathy. I had visited the doctor in Réunion before the trip and upon hearing my destination he had raised his eyebrows and I left with a truck load of antibiotics, rehydration salts and Imodium. It cost me a bloody fortune.

But by the next day, two Imodium and three hours of rough roads later, we all feel very grateful to my doctor. We arrive at Ramomafana National Park in time to hire a guide who takes us on a night safari, smearing banana onto trees to attract small mouse lemurs with bulbous black eyes. Others swing through the trees, chattering and singing, a sound which I can’t decide is endearing or eerie.

What is eerie though, is the immediacy with which my Imodium runs out after the four hour period. I try to ignore the rumblings of my guts but seize my moment when our guide goes off after a trail for the cat-like fossa. I dive behind some trees of which, thankfully, there are many. ‘Could you sing or something?’ I ask my companions. ‘Yes, because that’ll encourage the wildlife,’ said Jo, a straight-talking Yorkshire lass. It didn’t help that the guide is skulking about and appear about three seconds after I had pulled up my trousers. I’m sure he felt he’d witnessed nature at its very best.

The next day, despite having only ingested warm coca cola, I have been to the loo 19 times. By the 12^th, it is less of a soup, more of a consommé. By the last few it is water, though I wonder how I have any fluids left to pass. My friends meanwhile go on safari. They see ring-tailed lemurs, brown lemurs, black lemurs, even the rare red-ruffed lemur. The closest I get to wildlife is a bold grey rat which I wake to find nibbling on crackers that supposed to be my dinner.

Once I recover sufficiently to travel, we head to Isalo, another park, this time via ‘taxi-brousse’ which is a dilapidated mini-bus into which a million people are squeezed. The journey will take hours but for £2 each we reckon it’s worth it. That night, however, at our guesthouse, three French chaps strike up a chat and take pity on us when they hear of our mode of transport. They are headed in the same direction and have a four-by-four. Of coursethey will take us, they say, and arrange to meet at 7am the following morning. We drink some rum cocktails before bidding them goodnight, barely able to believe our luck.

At ten to seven we are waiting at reception. We wait, and wait, then take a look for the jeep. It, like them, is long gone. ‘Oh my God, what did you say to them?’ asks Jo. ‘You talked about your bowels, didn’t you?’ she says. ‘They probably thought you’d have the shits all over their hire car.’

‘Gosh,’ I reply.  ‘I don’t think I did, but I did have rather a lot to drink.’ I occurs to me then that when the French men had suggested that we join them for a coffee in their room the night before, and Katie and I had politely declined, that they may have retracted their generous offer.

Still, at least we had clear consciences when we set off to get our taxi-brousse. Three hours we wait under a leaden cloud of smog at the station. Our back packs are bundled on top and secured with ropes and slowly, seat by seat our bus fills up. We have bought four seats but one of these is only half a seat, and guess who ends up getting that.

After two hours of jolting along, I need to pee. We stop alongside some desolate huts where a few women and children sit around a fire.  They point me towards a small dark hut, but they might as well have said ‘follow the flies.’ My North Down bladder refuses to comply and I can’t even go in, although my need is great. I board the bus again which bumps on for 50 or so excruciating miles.

Such is the terrain on one road that it chugs to a halt and my joy is immense.  ‘Let me out!’ I shriek, leaping over a toddler and a basket full of hens.

The shrubbery is sparse, but I find a bush to squat behind and pee. By now I could crush watermelons my thigh muscles are so well developed.

Alas, the relief when I stand is mitigated by the realisation that most of the pee is over my sarong. The bleak scrubland affords little in the way of washing amenities, and my rucksack is firmly lodged on the roof. I stand on the urine drenched sarong hoping to squeeze the worse of it out. As it happens, it dries as we wait outside under a roasting sun for two hours while men poke about under the bonnet.

We reach Isalo and I am rewarded with incredible hiking and spot the rare black and white lemur, like a small pointy panda. At our final beach destination of Ifate, home to the spiny forest of Baobab trees, we see nature at its most peculiar: some trees are shaped like carrots, others have a circumference of ten metres. Here, the worst indignity is at the local disco, where a generator pumps out Cher’s ‘Believe’ on repeat. I feel like I could have lived without the lemurs and come straight here, with its kindly locals and coconut infused rum. I came to Madagascar for the nature, and my trip ended up more about answering its call.