730 things — Days 99 & 100

 Yesterday was such a full day!

It was Friday, when the Abel & Cole van brings our food shopping — all the organic things it can be hard to source in the regular shops; and the vegetables are mostly without packaging except the main boxes and wool protective packing, so we rather treasure Abel & Cole.

But their delivery time is very early in the morning, so on Fridays I have to set my alarm for 5.00am, and go downstairs to open the front door (I lock the inner one in case I go back to sleep afterwards) and put last week's packaging in the porch for them to collect and re-use. I usually hear their van in the road well before six o'clock.

After that I wrote and recorded the ministry of the word for our last meeting of The Campfire Church on Facebook this Sunday. We began it at the end of March 2020, when the UK went into lockdown. We thought it would be for six weeks or so until everything returned to normal. Here we are, finally, coming up to the summer solstice of 2021, and the churches slowly opening again. The Campfire church has done a good job in that time, but I believe in local expressions of church for the most part; most (not all) people best flourish in a faith family where they can physically sit with one another. 

Then later in the morning I went on the bus into Hastings, to buy some fruit and flowers for my friend — we were actually visiting in her home after all this time of isolation! The first people apart from my immediate family I've seen socially in a year and a half!

In the afternoon, a taxi took us to Fairlight, and it was lovely to see our friends again — and Molly the dog with her loving eyes, and their new cat Sparkle.  

They live in a little country lane, very hard to find if you haven't been there before, so when the taxi came to take us home we waited at the corner so he didn't get lost. It's been very stormy the last few days, so we stood under a tree — though it wasn't raining much.

As soon as we got home, Tony bought a car! He's been experimenting with living without one — there are benefits either way — but has decided after a time of trial (in every respect) that he's a car man to the core — I mean, he watches every episode of Wheeler Dealers, and cars have been a joy for him his whole life. So at six o'clock a man came with a bright blue Citröen that won Tony's heart (and didn't cost too much), so it's outside our house in the road and he has wheels again.

As dusk began to fall, I was so tired. I just sat like a languid heroine from a 19th century novel on my bed, reflecting sadly that I never wrote a blog post, and drifted off to sleep.

So, here I am with two days' worth of items to dispose of from my life.

The first is a collection of veggie bags.

We went overboard with accumulating these when they first appeared — a welcome alternative to disposable plastic packaging. Some we still use, but these were surplus. They went on Freegle.

And then a pair of tights — well used, went in the bin — and a fold-up shopper. 

The bag was a very good one, better really than the one I've kept, but I was fond of my old one (it has little daisies on it) and this that I gave away was one of a pack of three I got for my mother's funeral, so we'd have unobtrusive bags to carry our hand sanitiser and masks and hankies and speaking notes and gloves . . . But I didn't want to keep one single thing to remind me of that day, so I kept my old one and sent this one on its way.