Twelve Days in the Year: 27th July 2025

Woke from a deep sleep, albeit with very peculiar dreams involving a complicated journey across a city that I can’t place but seems very familiar. It’s the first really good sleep I’ve had for at least a week; back in my own bed, with my own pillow rather than an uncomfortable combination of a pillow without any substance and a too-hard sofa cushion. A., however, is suffering horribly and audibly, from the infection she picked up last week – which looks more and more like COVID – to which has been added the impact of a long day of travelling yesterday, and an eye infection. I make tea and read the papers while she goes back to sleep. Eventually I get bored and go downstairs for another cup of tea and a bowl of muesli. I start quietly unpacking the suitcases and sorting washing; made slightly trickier by the fact that the dining room table is covered with red onions drying off. For once this is not my doing, and I hope to get some more leeway next time I attempt to take over a large area of the house with stuff that needs to dry off.

A. does not read my blog, but I know that a friend does – hi, Tracy! – and passes things on. So I probably shouldn’t note that she’s being rather silly about her sickness, getting up to make a cup of tea rather simply asking me to get it for her, and insisting on doing the washing. Presumably this is to preserve the mystique that operating the washing machine is a task beyond the capability of any husband… She does submit to me hanging the clothes out on the line, and then goes back to bed again. I go into town to buy fruit and a few other things, then have a light lunch – my sense of time, especially mealtimes, is out of kilter just from being an hour behind after when my body thinks it is after four weeks in Poland and Germany.

The main task for the afternoon, especially since the rain is holding off, is making a start on mowing the lawn – heavily overgrown after a fortnight’s neglect and the combination of heat and rain – as well as inspecting the vegetable beds and greenhouse. Pleased to see that I’ve got at least a couple of winter squash and one pumpkin coming along, and the chillis and aubergines are doing well, but the fennel has run to seed. The grass is so thick that the mower batteries lose their charge at least twice as fast as normal, so I can’t actually finish the whole thing. Cut the edges around some of the raised beds, dig potatoes and cut a head of calabrese for supper. Suddenly it starts to rain, and I have to rush to get the washing inside.

The next hour and a half involves juggling the cooking of supper (a simple meal of meatballs and Swedish-style cream sauce, plus veg), phoning my parents and watching the closing laps of the Tour de France. A. comes down for a small plateful of food and we watch Tagesschau – Trump visit to UK, horrors of Gaza, train crash in Baden-Württemberg – then she goes back to bed as there is absolutely nothing on. I put on a cd and continue to try to make some progress in having a sufficient number of ideas about Thucydides, having unwisely done one of those ‘One like, one Thucydides opinion’ things on social media, and realised belatedly that some of the things I wrote when only twenty or so people had ‘liked’ the comment were much too sweeping and could have furnished three or four individual opinions for the purposes of hitting the target of 150+ that I now face. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Headed up to bed around nine, having completely forgotten that there was a football final on. Read some more Stefan Zweig – his collection of vignettes of key moments in human history, an entertainingly idiosyncratic selection that so far has included the fall of Constantinople, the writing of the Marseillaise and G.F. Handel’s stroke that led to the miracle of him writing The Messiah – and turn the light out when I suddenly realise that it’s half past ten. It’s only tomorrow at half past six that I realise that I’ve forgotten to adjust the alarm clock to UK time.