Weather, vaccines... and more jam

There's been a bit of welcome coolness and rain for the past couple of days – standard British summer weather for which the garden is very grateful. Lovely to wake up and hear the rain against the window. It was as hot as the flames of hell all last week, with very little breeze. When a feeble draught occasionally put in an appearance it was as though someone had switched on a huge fan heater! We gratefully decamped to the downstairs bedroom, where it’s a bit cooler, in order to get some sleep.

The weather at least took our minds of the continuing Covid saga. It’s becoming ever more ridiculous; cases are obviously up, they're being found because of more testing, but deaths are down to almost negligible levels. Three deaths reported today. We still have a raft of rules and regulations to abide by, however, not to mention the subject of masks... a very sore point with me, as you may have noticed.

Boris has turned into a tinpot dictator – we could now be fined up to £3,200 for not wearing a bloody mask! They’re going to keep this going as long as poss, purely in order to cover their own sorry arses ineptitude.

Until I can go out without effectively being muzzled, I won’t be entering the portals of a cafe, restaurant, public building, railway station, bank, NT property… or anywhere else.  I step into an M&S Foodhall once a week… and that’s it for me for the foreseeable future. I’m now only buying what I actually need. No discretionary purchases, no wandering into a shop and buying another tee-shirt or a handbag just because I like it, not because I need it; it’s saving me shedloads of money!

Everyone seems to be pinning their hopes on a vaccine, but I think it's unlikely there'll be one available any time soon. Safe vaccines take years to come onstream; if there's one coming out in a matter of months, it won't have had sufficient human trials, they won't know how it might interact with existing medical conditions and they'll clearly have no way of knowing about any long-term effects. No thanks - there's no way I'll be having it. Give mine to someone else.

I sometimes feel like I’m living in the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel; life as we knew it no longer exists.

Thankfully the garden carries on doing what it always does regardless of Covid. We're picking tomatoes faster than we can eat them and Victoria plums are now ripening at quite a rate. Picked a goodly amount of them from the garden and spent a happy hour yesterday morning making six jars of plum jam. Copious quantities of toast and scones will be required!