We’ve been correcting the door on the larder for the last few days. Excuse the fancy terms; we do tend to take the mickey sometimes. Our house was built many years ago for a family that had achieved moderate success rather than great wealth or just enough to keep out of the workhouse, so it isn’t grand and it isn’t basic. It has a cupboard set into the wall next to the cooker that we use to stack food in, and we can’t help but call it the larder.

The problem with the larder door is – well, it has two problems. First, it’s old. We don’t know how old the house is, but its builders weren’t working to a set of standard plans and the whole place has settled since then. The doorframes have twisted just a little – a lot, in one case. We think the larder door dates back to the 1930’s, and we do know that the owner before us tried to liven the whole house up by having all the doors dipped and stripped of their 1960’s paint, which is the root of the second problem.

We’ve pieced the whole thing together like some comedy village murder mystery over the years. First, he took off the doors and took all the ironwork off them – knobs, hinges, latches and catches. Then he sent them off to be dipped in acid and washed off. When they came back, he realised that he hadn’t noted which hinge set went with each door. There’s shadow marks on one door where a long ornate hinge used to be, different to the short square hinge that’s holding the door to the frame now – the long ornate hinge is on a different door, the one that clearly used to have little hinges like those on a box. Worse, the doors warped and cracked as they dried. Some don’t close all the way up, with the top bent a good four inches out of true, and the cracks are wide enough to see through.

It might sound easy to replace the doors. But. There are standard door sizes these days. Not one of the internal doors in our house is a modern standard size, and not one is the same size as any other door. We thought at first we could get a modern door and cut it to size, except – the widest doors are too wide for this treatment while the tallest are too tall.

We’re refurbishing the larder door. He’s been re-setting the hinges and bending the latch back into shape; I’ve been holding the door up while he notes where to cut a recess for the hinges, and chipping the crusty remains of bright blue paint from the grooves in the door. It’s taken me all day so far and we’re left with a door that looks like a plain and elderly wooden door of a simple design. It suits the kitchen beautifully. Give us another day at this, and the damn thing will also SHUT, for the first time in years.

Photo by Tomasz Pro, Pixabay

When one of our cats dies, I light a tealight and leave it burning in a lantern over the cat’s grave. Tonight there’s a candle burning on each grave in the garden, to acknowledge that every cat out there added his or her own flavour to the house. Looking out of the window I can see them all, and think of them.

Today the official death toll from Covid-19 in the UK passed 100,000, and many of those who died got a funeral to break the heart of every bereaved relative, with very few allowed to attend. A teenage boy died alone, as his family was not allowed to visit him (as for too many people). Patients were ferried miles away to hospitals with a few beds to spare, London borrowed ambulances from surrounding areas (themselves under enormous pressure) and oxygen supplies ran so low that Southend Hospital was reported to be rationing oxygen treatment to desperately ill patients. I’m upset at the loss of a cat, and I apologise to anyone who feels this is out of proportion.

It’s important to say goodbye. Funerals are for the living, an important ritual of letting go and passing memories and comfort among the survivors that is a reassurance that the deceased will not be forgotten. My father’s funeral two years ago was low key but important to all of his family and friends. It hurts that too many people have a family member erased from their life and the funeral is held with the attendance rationed. It damages the lives of those who survive.

I hear tonight that the civilian death toll in World War Two was 70,000 in the UK. I have heard suggestions that we should have a memorial to those who have died, like a war memorial. It’s an idea worth pursuing. It’s the least we can do for those who died in the sole care of strangers.

Wet day today. Started just before noon yesterday, and it’s been raining ever since. The roads out to the nearest town have been flooded, the river has burst its banks in several inconvenient places, potholes appearing in the roads are invisible under huge puddles, an accident a few miles south has delayed journeys home to our village. To add a splash of comedy, a notorious local flood point is due to be worked on this week and next, and was pumped dry of all water just hours before the rain marathon began. And it is still raining.

I’m grateful it isn’t the forecast snow, which would have been worse – though it is forecast to freeze overnight, leaving those travelling to work tomorrow facing freezing fog and icy roads. We are staying indoors till the weather cheers up. We have plenty to do.

I’m still following a challenge set by a friend of mine to write 1,000 words a day, and that initial push to reach an artificial word-count has led me to some good places. A complete short story about a pair of ghosts. A short story about someone taking victims of domestic abuse to a new life. Another go at a project stubbornly resisting arrest but potentially worth the trouble of working out all its plot-holes. Roll on rainy days. I have more than enough to do.

I made a private resolution to post a blog entry every day in January, even if it was only a few lines. You can check back and find out how well I’ve done so far. It won’t take you long.

The best I can make of this is that everyone has been telling others to ‘be kind’ in this last year. I’d turn that around to say; include yourself in that. Don’t beat yourself up about failed resolutions, rejections of stories you thought were brilliant, kids who tell you you’re a rubbish parent. Other people will be quick to tell you where you went wrong. If you’re still here, and if even one person is still talking to you, let’s face it; you did something right.

Happy New Year.

I spent the run-up to Christmas trying to keep up. Our local area went from relatively virus-free to one of the top twenty infection hot-spots in England. I wasn’t keen to go out and mix with other people – most have been polite and willing to keep their distance, but some are oblivious and focussed only on getting what they came into the shop to get, never mind if anyone else is standing at the counter they want.

So when it became clear that I was going to run out of Christmas cards before I ran out of recipients, I made my own. A project I intended to get on with a few years ago and never quite had the courage to finish. This year, needs must. I sent the home-made cards to friends I thought wouldn’t be offended by the primary school designs and the odd blotch, and then I sent the last cards to anyone left on the list, because I really did have no shop-bought cards left.

Now I’m sitting back with time to think, I’d say it was a good thing to do. I put in a hand written note to any friends I hadn’t had much contact with recently, letting them know what’s happened to us this year – quite a lot, despite lockdown, and two pages just about covered it. I’m tempted to make up a few more Christmas cards ready for next year.

Today was a quiet day, recovering from a late night. We emailed our neighbours to check they weren’t trying to sleep through midnight, and no, they weren’t. Last January, they invited us to their Burns Night Supper, and I wanted to invite them to a St Georges Day dinner in exchange (lockdown probably saved them from food poisoning). Instead, we ended up standing on one side of our hedge singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to them in their garden fifty metres away. They were singing back to us, and we yelled Happy New Year to each other over the distance. We came back inside buzzing and happy, feeling that we’d had a new year celebration as good and as safe as any we’ve had in previous years.

Happy New Year!

For the first time, I finished 50,000 for NanoWrimo early – on November 25th. It started as a short story meant to get me in the mood of writing and just kept leading me further into the story.

I finished the main story on the 25th, but I’ve carried on writing – several short stories and a plan for a different major project. I’m up to 58,547 words at the moment, not including this blog, and still going.

There’s been a lot of discussion in one of my writers’ groups recently about how useful and inspiring Nano is these days. For me, it’s been a private commitment to write a substantial project, one that has got me venturing into types of writing that I wouldn’t otherwise have thought I was capable of. It’s been worthwhile. My main writers’ group is now picking up where Nano left off, pushing me to knock the 2020 Nano project into shape and to keep writing new stories.