Well how times change. I have returned to by bed after breakfast because Claire is using the veranda, which is in effect our daytime living room, as a television studio to join her group for Italian lessons on a internet conference call. The babble of French voices struggling with Italian is all pervasive and here in bed, computer on my knees and the panorama of our springtime garden before me, calm reigns. I must not let this become a habit. Too seductive. Perhaps it will give me a stiff neck that will dissuade me.

Please don’t get bored but instead let me set the scene. I don’t know if I have explained it before and I don’t have the energy to re-read to verify, but we bought this single story house purely for the view from the front, which is uninterrupted over the valley. Almost before the ink was dry on the sale and before we moved house Claire decided that she would be unable to sleep on the ground floor. Being born and having worked all her life in Paris I think she found the idyll of country a touch unsettling when it may be outside the open window at night. Whatever the reason it was decided that an upper floor must be added for a bedroom. This had a complication, the area is a protected zone and we were severely restricted in our options.  None the less our plan, that conformed to the 20meter square limit, was approved and here I am looking to the rear of the house out of what is effectively a large glass sliding wall onto a balcony and there after the trees and garden.

All of this explanation is leading to my reason for writing today. How satisfying to see the new colour of the handrail on the balcony, which had been jarring my senses for some time, imposing a horizontal slash of artificial precision across the bucolic view. From the outside it was fine in white matching the overall design of the wooden balcony in front of the natural timber finish of the house, but from the bed it was a barrier, a border, a blot. So two days ago out came the paint pot and colours which, after a minor misjudgement, resulted in a pleasant rural green that blends well with the foliage.

Why am I writing this? Well to demonstrate how times have changed. Here I am self-satisfied with a job well done. It is however a job that in normal times would have been put off in the order of importance in the time available to THINGS. Until two weeks or so ago I ordered THINGS into a mental rank of importance, given the limited time available to do them. At least I thought the time available was limited.

There are times when you have to take stock and you realise you have been wrong. I was wrong. Together with one third of the worlds population I have been ordered to stay at home and after the initial horrified shock wore off I have discovered that I was wrong. Time is only limited by yourself, there is in fact vast amounts of time in the week, probably more than you know what do with it. (To demonstrate my new found freedom I will leave that sentence badly constructed at it’s the end.) For example at 11:28 in the morning I can sit here in the bed writing to myself without a trace of guilt, knowing that there are hours and hours ahead of me to fill with things I need or want to do. I glance at the screen to verify that it is in fact Tuesday, as if that had some significance, Tuesday the 31st March 2020.

Tomorrow will be April fool’s day 2020.

I will resist the obvious temptation to place great philosophical importance on such a date and to make judgements on the fools who comprise mankind. The world and I do not need to add to the myriads of philosophers who have lain undetected in our midst, who not are now oozing forth to tell us we deserve all that fate is now dishing out.

Tomorrow will be April fool’s day 2020.

I will also resist the temptation to propound my, no doubt profound and world shattering, theory of political tomfoolery. There appears to no lack of opinions on such matters.

Tomorrow will be April fool’s day 2020 and I will use it to do another thing I have not had time to do before in my life. Because I realise I have been the fool to think I didn’t have the time.