Twelve Days in the Year: 27th July 2024

Some time in the small hours, despite being fast asleep, I realised there was a strange noise somewhere in the house, an unfamiliar hum mixed with white noise. Strange noises are rarely good, so had to get up to investigate it; fairly quickly the culprit was established as A’s laptop, sitting innocently on the desk in the bedroom. No obvious sign of why it was doing this – other than the fact that it was on at all, whereas she generally makes a big thing of shutting it down completely and getting cross when I leave devices to go into sleep mode (which is admittedly a reasonable position when you have cats liable to start walking around on keyboards in the middle of the night). Thankfully the noise stopped shortly after I pulled out the power cord, but it then took a long time to get back to sleep – and when it came, it was a vivid, disturbing dream in which I was in a huge church service with little idea what was going on, being alternately pushed forward and held back and talked at by people whom I couldn’t for the most part understand, without knowing whether this was because they were mumbling or speaking an unknown language. Woke past eight o’clock feeling dreadful.

Because the last couple of weekends have been disrupted and tiring (A away chiahuahua-sitting while I failed to get anything useful done and all my cooking projects failed the week before, down at my parents’ to do helpful tasks the week before that), we’d planned to have a quiet and relaxing two days, including having breakfast at a cafe the other side of Frome – so, a little paradoxically, a nice lie-in was not an option. Quick cup of tea then shower, and then had to get the cats in from their morning excursion. Hector responded readily enough, but no sign of Olga – the signal from her collar (we’ve had too many incidents of cats getting themselves locked in sheds, other people’s houses, the Methodist chapel down the road etc. that we need to be able to track them) showed that she was nearby but not moving, which is usually a sign that she’s lost or dumped the collar tag.

Coming down into the lower part of the garden, I saw a flash of ginger fur in the far corner – Olga is not ginger. Rather big to be a cat, and so it proved as a youngish fox either failed to get over the fence into next door’s garden or decided on a different path, so ran across to the other side of ours and disappeared (shortly after, there was some frenzied barking in the distance). Olga had presumably been spooked by this, as she still didn’t respond; wandering around to triangulate her position with the directional finder showed that she must be lurking at the bottom of one of the gardens adjoining ours, out of reach from either direction – unless she had ditched the tag. We gave her five minutes – A getting cross with me because I was getting cross – and she wandered in of her own accord as if nothing had happened.

So, off to Beckington, just north of Frome, much later than planned, to Café Mes Amis, which does a nice range of light breakfasts and an excellent selection of cakes. It turns out that being late is actually an advantage, as the first thing breakfast crowd is departing and the mid-morning lot are only just starting to arrive, so we get a table straight away, and get our breakfasts (bacon, mushrooms and avocado for A., sourdough toast and a croissant bread and better pudding for me) reasonably promptly, before the service starts to go to pieces under pressure – though in retrospect it would have been better not to order a second coffee…

Lots of interesting people-watching opportunities; it is, as A observes, the most upper middle class café ever, if you discount Ottolenghi in Chelsea – a lot of well-groomed, well-heeled fifty somethings with beards, a lot of ladies who presumably lunch after their black Americanos and tiny tiny pastries while they discuss what each other’s therapists had to say last week – and a deeply annoying woman next to us, whose yappy dog, clearly her baby, is allowed to clamber over everything, within inches of the loaves for sale, while her husband stoically eats half an almond croissant while waiting for their coffees.

We buy a couple of slices of orange and polenta cake for later (which turns out to be too sweet with insufficient polenta, but could be worse) and head for home, via supermarket to buy a few bits and pieces for the barbecue planned for the evening (now with added neighbour, A2, who has been thrown off balance by news from a different neighbour, A3 – WHY THE HELL IS EVERYONE ROUND HERE OF A CERTAIN AGE CALLED SOME VARIANT OF ANNE?!? – whose heart seems to be failing…) At home, I dig salad potatoes and make mayonnaise, which doesn’t curdle but is rather thick as A. (my A) has requested less vinegar; it’s bland, frankly, but better to meet customer expectations… Walked around town putting up posters for the local Big Bat Count I’m organising in a couple of weeks’ time, plus asking shops to display them- which leads to entertaining chats in both the hardware store and the bookshop. I have hopes for a decent take-up this year, certainly if the QR code for booking actually works. On the way back we run into a friend, who updates us on the death of another elderly neighbour, as a result of falling from a ladder and then falling out of bed in hospital; as we’ve said before, we really need to get a few more friends who are not 70+ and therefore might last a bit longer…

Down to the wine shop, as A has promised to introduce the owner to Bulgarian rosé (her favoured drink since our holiday at Easter); owner is impressed, and promises to look for some – which might make life easier, as the wine shop in London where I order it at the moment tends to employ completely useless delivery firms. I feel far too tired to risk drinking in the middle of the afternoon, despite some of their craft beers looking quite tempting, which makes my presence a bit redundant and off-putting, but then we’re introduced to a friend of the enterprise who calls into the shop for a chat and stays for a glass, and that passes the time nicely.

Back home for tea and cake and to let the cats out, then get the barbecue fired up for padron peppers and slices of courgette before the usual assortment of meat; meanwhile, finish off potato salad and make coleslaw (why remain too bland for my taste, but hey ho). A2 arrives punctually, and I manage to get food ready within ten minutes rather than the usual half hour to get the hamburgers cooked. We’re set to eat outside until it starts to drizzle; it then cheers up again, so we have after-dinner drinks on the work-in-progress lower patio (aka the Pigsty) at the very bottom of the garden. Lots of chat about A3, the way her partner is behaving, the idiosyncrasies of cats (we’re still slowly getting Buddy used to the fact that he has to share the house with others; A2 has recently adopted a rescue cat after her elderly ginger boy died).

She doesn’t stay too late – not to be a misery, but this is a relief. We watch an episode of Buffy – it’s annual rewatch time, we don’t have any interest in the Olympics, and we’re too tired for anything more taxing – and then off to bed, hoping to sleep.