I was booked in for a haircut this morning. On balance I thought I was probably fit to go, if I washed my hands scrupulously before going out, and avoided breathing on the hairdresser. Fortunately, cutting somebody's hair is an activity you do while standing behind them, and immediately after washing their head, so she was probably at no more risk from me than she would be using public transport, or going to a supermarket, or anywhere else where she would be breathing the same air as a lot of post-viral strangers. If it had been the dentist I might have tried to rearrange, just to be on the safe side. I don't actually know whether I am infectious, or stopped being so days ago and was at my most virulent before I even had any symptoms. None of the friends and relations I've spent time with in the past ten days have reported going down with it, so it can't have been too wildly infectious.
Driving the car felt like a big adventure, and my knees felt faintly wobbly as I tottered down Colchester High Street. I began to wonder if it had been rather ambitious to go out, on the other hand, you start losing muscle mass within forty-eight hours of ceasing to take exercise, so after six days of moving no further than between my bed and the chair in front of the stove, fresh air and exercise was going to be a shock to the system.
I'd seen in the local paper that the former clock museum, Tymperleys, had finally found a tenant and a new purpose. The recent history of Tymperleys has caused rather a rumpus. It is a Tudor house, updated in Georgian times (though not very much) which was left to the borough. The council ran it as a clock museum, then closed it citing funding pressures, causing a local outcry, especially in the light of the amount they have spent on the wretched Firstsite (a banana shaped new gallery with almost no vertical walls, for conceptual art, which opened late, over budget, and has scarcely held any decent exhibitions since it did open. It was without a curator for six months, and certainly hasn't ever tried to add my contact details to any marketing list, despite my being natural fodder for them with my ingrained gallery habit).
Anyway, the council fiddled around looking for alternative uses for Tymperleys, amidst demands it be accessible to the public, and a row about shared access that scuppered one tea room plan. Now it has been let on a 125 year lease to the couple who run Layer Marney Towers, with the intention of fitting it out as a tea room and venue for dinners and receptions. It was open for viewing today and yesterday, the new tenants and council representatives being available to answer questions. I didn't have any questions, though I'd have been interested to know how they resolved the access question, if my head hadn't felt as though it were stuffed with cotton wool, but since I'd been too idle and disorganised to go and see it when it was a clock museum, I thought I'd go and cast my eye over the Tudor beams while I could. They are very nice, and I look forward to visiting again once it's a tea room. There are quite a few clock museum related 1980s excrescences to strip out first. The plan is to follow the London restaurant fashion and have a glass fronted kitchen on full display, so from the garden you will be able to see the staff making tea and cutting up cakes. The new owners were very loud, enthusiastic and hospitable, and offered me coffee and cake, but at the prospect I began to feel bilious again.
While I was in Colchester I managed to track down some Worcester sauce, in Gunton in Crouch Street. The Systems Administrator has been trying to buy it in Tesco or the Co-op for weeks, but there seems to be a north Essex wide shortage of the stuff. They only had it in small bottles, so I bought two (and nothing else). The woman on the checkout did not seem to find this in any way surprising.
When I got home the SA said Good haircut, which is the correct answer. The SA has rallied sufficiently to go out for a short walk this afternoon. I ate my lunch, and contemplated all the things I needed to start doing, like the beekeepers' annual accounts, and circulating the minutes of the last music society meeting, and thinking about how we could make a stand exciting enough to be given a free slot at the local agricultural show, plus which of three up and coming young artists we would like to book for a concert, when the sound quality on my laptop makes them all sound as though they were busking a long way away. And my tax return, and employment situation. After three cups of tea I decided that making it to Colchester and back had been tiring enough for one day, and that I would return to these questions in the morning. My colleague at the music society got it spot on when she said viral things can be very debilitating.
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