Sunny.

The day began bright but cool. The weather man on the radio is talking about widespread frosts tonight before getting warmer in general. It's been very windy which made it a good washing and ironing day. 

One of the nice things about this place is that I have countryside views when I'm sitting in bed. 

Today I'm a bit worried about Speedy because for the very first time he left some food in his bowl. It might be down to  my changing the brand of his food. I later took off his cone and tried him again with the leftovers. It must have been the taste because he dropped those biscuits from his mouth but when I gave him some fresh ones he crunched them up happily. So not damage to his teeth from his window escapade. I washed out his bowl and he's just eaten his supper without any problem. I'll have to keep an eye on him.

My extra job today was to clean out the cupboard under the bathroom sink. There were a few containers of oddments most of which were binned but mostly it was dust and the odd drip from shampoos etc.

Hazy.

A strangely quiet Easter Sunday, not even our local church bells to celebrate the day. To keep the correct distance it would have to be just one person pulling a rope and a single bell usually  signals a death.

This was the view in the morning and it hasn't changed much through the day. The two pictures of Woolacombe Beach (not mine) show a typical sunny day and then below how it looked today. Even with the haze there would still be surfers, dogs and walkers and general holiday makers. 

It was cooler and very pleasant to work outside so I found myself some gardening work. Mainly clipping off last year's dead growth. I left the trailing geraniums outside during the winter so they haven't done too well. A couple have new leaves at the ends of the trailing stems but the rest are defunct. I'm a believer in not throwing plants out too soon so I'll wait a bit longer. I wasn't going to take them to Wales anyway. I only bought them to brighten up the conservatory in Dingles and looking after them in the winter is too much bother. I finished my gardening by weeding out tiny seedlings from various pots, surely a sign that I was looking for any excuse to stay outside.

We had a lovely long chat with Romas this morning on the phone. He and Laura are both working from home and keeping themselves safe. Apparently there's a lot of people behaving irresponsibly regarding social distancing in their part of the country. That's not good news.

Sunny.

Still bright and sunny though there's a high haze and the breeze is refreshingly cool.

This morning Peter got out our old mower and cut a large section of the communal grass as well as our little lawn. One of the neighbours came out and offered his green bin for the cuttings which was helpful. The oldest of our neighbours came out to trim his hedge and exchanged a few words with Peter. It's good that nobody here has to feel isolated. There's nearly always somebody around if you fancy a chat. Afterwards  I had a quick weed round of the garden and gave the large buddleia a summer pruning. Now that the acer is fully leaved and the buddleia almost there we're sufficiently screened from passers by in the evenings which are light enough to leave the sitting room curtains half drawn..

For the rest of the hot afternoon I sat out in the back garden and sewed a second grey face mask. I still need to add the elastic which will be to fit Peter. Then I'll make myself a second mask which should be sufficient for the moment. While I was out in the garden the female blackbird came along and disappeared into the ivy on the fence. That points towards there being a nest in there. The pair of blue tits also arrived to investigate the acers in pots.

Hot, Hot, Hot.

Sun and heat all day today. Not good for keeping people inside their homes but wonderful if you have a garden to sit out in. I think that yesterday's official temperature was a bit conservative as the house interior thermostat read 22C at 9.00pm. without any heating. 

This afternoon I took a thermometer outside at 4.30 and the numbers speak for themselves. We sat outside for a while but not for too long. Unfortunately it isn't so peaceful outside when the neighbours keep their radio blaring music. At least they like a radio station which plays 70's and 80's music. It's so hot outside that the families with little children aren't out on the front grass yet.

Apart from mending a hole in the toe of one of Peter's house shoes I haven't done much out of my usual routine. Lately I've gone back to playing my guitar something that I'd let slip so it's going to take time for my fingertips to toughen up again. Surprisingly my brain has retained most of the fingering but chords are still a challenge. Today I was inspired enough to try and play from some of my music books (Dylan, Donovan, Leonard Cohen and Simon and Garfunkel). Didn't get very far after seeing so many new chords and ended up just picking out the tunes. I've also been spending longer at the piano. Using the headphones gives everyone else some peace.

I had a lot of trouble uploading today's photos. I tried putting in a new battery and jiggled all the connections to no avail. With all the extra usage of the internet there has been a noticeable slowing down of the service but I'm wondering if  my swapping from my Nikon and Peter's old phone might be confusing my PC. In the end I did a restart and with some patience I got my photos. 

I was idly skimming through the houses for sale in Borth and looking at the interiors when I came across this photo on the details of a house across the road showing Red Roofs against the blue sky and sea. We already know our neighbours in the light blue bungalow also the chap who lives in the house behind the tall hedge and another neighbour whose house is out of sight behind the blue painted garden wall.

Right now I'm listening to the latest news, some police have gone overboard with enforcing social distancing. One police officer has had to apologise to a family for telling them they couldn't be in their front garden. We've also had clarification from the government that once you're in a shop there is no restriction as to what you buy. Some police forces have tried to say that you could only buy 'essential' items and not things like Easters Eggs! Another person doing Tai Chi in a park bandstand was asked to do it elsewhere as it might encourage other people to join in or watch. That's just silly.

A Scorcher.

With an official temperature of 23C/74F it really has been a scorcher of a day.

Having made sure I didn't need to do any food shopping for a week and more I still had to go into town to pay a couple of bills at the bank. Otherwise they would have had to wait until after the Easter weekend and Bank Holiday. One bill was quite large and the other relatively small but the recipient of the smaller payment acknowledged with thanks straight away. It might have just been good manners or relief at cash in the bank. Here I was the only customer in the bank in my robber's outfit. I thought my totally dark 'insect eyes' sunglasses might be overdoing things so as can be seen on this inadvertent selfie I wore lightly silvered ones which I bought to protect my eyes from strong winds. 

Peter asked me to get a white cabbage and some potatoes while I was in town. Instead of going to any of the supermarkets on the High Street I went round to an independent greengrocer. The two sticks in the middle of the photo each had an ice-cream tub attached, one for cash and one with a card reader which I thought was a clever way to maintain social distancing. 

Butchers' Row was completely deserted. A fancy delicatessen was open and in another two workmen were refurbishing the shop but that was it. With the 'Exit' doorway from M&S being by the cattle market car park where the car was I thought I'd mooch through the food hall and maybe get something special for Easter. However when I entered from the High Street entrance I realised I had joined a long queue of people waiting to do their food shopping. With the clothing sections barricaded off from the central walkway my only way out was down the queue, through the food hall and past the tills. This I did quickly trying to keep away from other people but I wonder if any of them thought I was jumping the queue. At least I wasn't breathing any germs over them.   

The weather was so lovely that after cutting out the fabric for a grey mask I took it outside and sewed by hand. It felt very hot and when I came back inside the marble tiles were refreshingly cool against my bare feet. Not so nice was the sting of sunscreen and sweat dripping into my eyes. Another not nice event was the discovery that yet again somebody has stolen my brown recycling bag. I only got it last week and yesterday I made sure to write the house number very clearly on both sides. I don't think it is a case of the bin men putting it back in the wrong recycling box as I checked any boxes that hadn't been collected and my 'missing' bags never reappear. We do have our suspicions as to which household is finding these bags very useful for another purpose. In the meantime I better check that my recycling boxes have dried after being washed and can be put away.

Sewing.

The morning was quite grey and cool but later the sun returned giving us a hot afternoon and evening.

I planned to have today as a mask making day. I decided to bring the iron and ironing board upstairs to work in my sunny study listening to music or the radio on my PC and using the sewing machine on the floor. However, as I finished the first mask my sewing machine began to run away again. The very fault that was supposed to have been fixed by the chap down the road.  It's not so much the cost, though that was quite a lot, but the fact that I'm relying on my machine to alter/make curtains and probably cushion covers for Red Roofs that has me worried. Peter's going to phone the chap tomorrow and we'll see if he's happy to have the sewing machine brought back now or wait until things ease up. My suggestion was if Peter took it to the chap's house the virus would be dead/gone after 72 hours but it would be entirely up to the chap. Above I'm modelling my first mask though the top elastic actually goes up behind the top of my head. It has a pocket along the bridge of the nose into which goes some soft garden wire to mould the mask over my nose. I used an offcut saved from turning a pair of pj bottoms into shorts and sheeting for the liner. The next ones are due to be made from some micro cloths I bought yesterday. I can make two from each colour, I thought manly grey for Peter and cheerful green or pink for me. I feel a bit weird seeing myself in a mask, to me it hints of S&M while to Peter it looks as if I'm about to rob the bank. Not funny when the bank is one place I need to go to.

Below is a photo of yesterday's sunset when the cloud cover lifted enough to letting the golden light through. Sadly I did not get a sight of the pink harvest moon.

C -19 - Our Prime Minister is still in ICU (should have been socially isolating at work) but apparently talking and not on a ventilator. With the Easter holiday approaching combined with the current hot weather there have been constant warnings about not being out unnecessarily. However sometimes the headlines give an inaccurate view. With my love of maths one of my favourite radio programmes is More Or Less which delves into often misleading stats. Take this for interest - the newspapers screamed '3,000 people found sunbathing in London Park'. That sounds serious until you take into account that the park is over 150 acres and the normal numbers would be 10,000 on a similar day. And most of the people were walking about in one's or two's. Quite a different picture.

Bright.

While not that hot it has been a pleasantly sunny day. This morning I spotted a pair of blue tits here for the first time. They were in the front garden acer feeding I presume upon aphids and other small insects. Hoping to encourage them I was going to fill a feeder with fresh peanuts and hang it in the acer. But could I find that half bag of bird peanuts? Not a chance. I searched through all the kitchen cupboards, and there aren't that many of them, several times. Then I searched again this time climbing on a chair to check the plastic storage boxes on top of the cupboards as well as go through the cupboards again. I had to give up in the end. Possibly the peanuts have already been packed for the move. Instead I hung a seed filled feeder in the acer.

Today I went out shopping, first to Lidl's. There the shelves were a little sparse in places but everything was there. I did a generous shop with the hope that I don't need to go out again for 10 days or even 2 weeks when the risk of infection will be greater. After much condemnation of 'panic buying' it turns out that apart from a few selfish people the main reason for the empty shelves we were faced with at the start of the pandemic was simply every shopper adding one extra of the popular items to their shopping. A sensible response to the advice we were getting to prepare to self-isolate for two weeks if we had symptoms that might be corona.

With just a couple of things to get from Tesco's I was looking forward to a gentle browse and check out any plant bargains. When I got there I was greeted by a queue (below) that went from the front entrance, around the side …... 

……. down the side (the photo below continues on from the right hand side of the photo above) and the same again to the far corner of the building. Too long for just a few items. Instead I got back in the car, filled up with petrol and drove over to Asda. No queue at all there though the security guard said sometimes there was a queue and sometimes there wasn't. Inside Asda a number of the more frequented aisles were part of a one-way system marked by arrows on the floor. I got the rest of my shopping and a few bargains. There wasn't a lot of wholemeal bread left but I got one loaf which was all I needed. The bargains were 5 spools of gold curling ribbon at 10p each and 2 nice quality red party tablecloths for 20p each. They would be very handy for wrapping extra large parcels.

Anticipating the opportunity to photograph the pink Harvest moon it is disappointing to see the sky filling with clouds. But for once the evening light is reflecting off the sea in the far distance, a rare occurrence.