Grey.

Quite grey today but no rain. It was bright and sunny around the middle of the day but then it turned chilly and grey.

Peter had an appointment at the surgery this morning but as his foot was painful, (damage to a ligament when using the exercise bike barefoot which has never happened to me) he wasn't able to do the shopping on the way home. Instead I went out afterwards to do - not exactly panic buying but a large shop with a  bit of a stock up of some essentials. While neither Lidl or Tesco's had bare shelves some things were scarce, toilet paper of course and I will admit to buying some because imagine running out. Also there was no milk powder at all in Tesco's and very little left of the long life milks. Not much left in the way of bags of flour and yes I bought one bag of self-raising. I found dried milk in another shop and to top up two tins of evaporated milk. My other extra items were; dry cat food so now Speedy has enough for a couple of months, prunes and figs, oats, coffee, chocolate for emergencies and a jar of peanut butter. Liquid hand washing soap was also in short supply and though I didn't look I've heard that everywhere is sold out of gel hand sanitiser. I found one bargain in Tesco's, little tubs of dried pineapple with 70% off and when I ran the scanner over them I found out that they were on a 3 for the price of 2 offer which still worked at the reduced price so I bought 6 tubs.

The other night Peter cooked some fish and the smell seemed to be everywhere. We've kept windows open but today I could still detect the smell (I've a very acute sense of smell which is not an advantage). While Peter was out I opened all the windows and lit a joss stick. Having once set fire to the wall of my mother's bathroom with a joss stick I looked around for somewhere safe to put the burning stick. The perfect solution was a pot which had once held an orchid and then exercising in the same room while the joss stick burnt. That seems to have got rid of the fishy smell. But now I have another problem, while waiting in the queue at Lidl's I made the mistake of sniffing at the perfume testers. That wasn't the mistake but deciding two of them were nice enough to spray on my wrists was. The smell in the car was almost overwhelming and no amount of washing at home made a difference. Toothpaste was the final solution reducing the smells to almost gone.