Report 18: Day 19

Alcohol units: 187

Showers: 9

Cat: 1

Dog: 1

Wife: 1

Kids alive: 4

Potatoes: 0kg

In-laws: 2

Easter Eggs: 0

Dear Diary, I do not know what day it is.

I took a few days off, you may have noticed. To be honest the long weekend wasn’t good for productivity and Tuesday came around a little too fast! Funny though Tuesday felt just like a Monday regardless!

I have given up working out where we are in the lockdown! Too confusing; I will just continue until someone says I can leave.

The Government are pretty keen on keeping the status quo on the Liquor trade; such a shame but soon we shall be the proud producers of “Raymond’s Revenge” so who needs “Tops!” now? The wife is rather enjoying her new role of “distillery consultant” and has been doing quite a bit of research into it all – she is like the modern-day Jack Daniels of Pinelands which like Lynchburg, Tennessee is a dry county... She has made suggestions for an herbal infused recipe for the next batch which I quite like; sounds healthy, like a vodka smoothie or something.

The kids are driving each other (and us) mad; on the one hand I get it, they are all cooped up, but at the same time ordinarily they would be at school – so why argue about the bloody work? Surely doing zoom classes and a couple of sums a day beats the heck out of putting on a uniform and heading to class? You would think they are being asked to invade a small country with toothpicks or something? I haven’t seen this many tears since Westlife broke up…although I did cry harder when they reformed; I wasn’t sure what the world had done to deserve it? The money we have saved on the school tuck-shop though has been enough to buy a small private island…which I cannot buy right now as Amazon seems to deem this as “non-essential”; let me tell you Jeff Bezos, it’s bloody essential!

Raymond has been MIA from our part of the world, no doubt Mrs. B is not letting him out of her sight for quite a while, poor thing! I think the prospect of being in lockdown with Mrs. B would be enough for anybody to end it all; that said though Poppie has been asking a number of questions about our neighbour…seems they used to go to the same church until Mrs. B left under somewhat of a cloud. As far as I understand there were some unanswered questions about her Orange Marmalade in the “homemade” competition at the church fete a couple of years back. Apparently, she left in a huff and went Baptist instead.

Poppie keeps brining her name up at the oddest times in conversation…disturbing to say the least.

Checked with Afrihost on why our bandwidth consumption has been so massive, they sent me a detailed breakdown – I understand that we are using more than normal but something under the “video conference consumption” column feels iffy; I’ll need some more time to investigate.

Managed to find some non-alcoholic beer and gin at Pick ‘n Pay this week as well; it looks and smells like the real thing, but I haven’t started on them yet…it’s a last resort at this stage but comforting to know they are in reserve. It will be a bit like virtual reality drinking I guess – everything feels and looks the same, but you know it’s not real.

Just after writing this I am going to replant the marijuana plants close to the pool filter and see if we get better results; not a sentence I ever thought I would be writing.

Joseph the gardener called today (we are still paying him) wanting to know when he can come back to work. I explained the situation and said if it was up to me, he could start today! Also mentioned that the cops had suggested that we move the “plants” to a sunnier area in the garden so they can grow better…he has suggested a pot just next to the swimming pool which gets good sunlight but not for too long each day.

The irony in the above conversation of course was that while we were taking gardening tips from law enforcement about growing quasi-illegal plants, the most illegal thing we could right now is let Joseph come to work! Strange times indeed!

Short and sweet today diary. More to come tomorrow, right now I have Susan in HR “zooming” for a meeting and some plantations to attend too.

RH