The garden did not look at all inviting when I pulled up the bathroom blind this morning, but ever hopeful I put on my gardening clothes. It was a blow as I sat down with my muesli and opened my laptop to see that the forecast was for light rain all day. I protested about this to the Systems Administrator who asked mildly what I had been expecting. Apparently by yesterday the forecast for today was for rain, but I'd failed to notice. Hope springs eternal.
Thinking that if I didn't have the excuse of being out in the garden I could at least catch up on some admin, I settled down to write an account for the music society's website of our education projects in the past year. This was a process of clunking, agonising slowness as I had not personally witnessed any of the projects, and was reliant on trawling through my inbox for whatever emails the chairman had sent about them, with associated links. Eventually I had half a dozen paragraphs giving a factually correct if slightly dull account of our efforts during the year. I pressed the Update Website button and got a page saying the page I was looking for was unavailable. When I navigated my way back to the editing function of the website the only part remaining of my laboriously crafted post was the title. I started again, this time in Word. Memo to self: the music society website does not have Autosave.
The phone rang in the middle of this excruciating exercise, and it was a man with a foreign accent, calling from a noisy room, who after struggling to pronounce my name told me that he was calling because my computer had been infected. I told him that I thought he was a scammer, which was much more polite than what I said to the previous person who rang up to warn me about my computer. Since he'd rung from an actual number instead of a Number Witheld I thought I might as well report it to the Information Comissioner's Office, but it took several minutes to find the right page on their website, and then several minutes more to pick up the thread of where I'd got to.
The phone rang again, and it was not another scammer but the secretary of the history society where I did my woodland charity talk, asking if she could have another copy of the little book about their memorial woods for the centenary of the Great War, because she had given the first one away. It was handy that she rang, and even handier that she wanted another book, as it meant that I had an address so that the charity could write to acknowledge their donation. She wanted my address so that she could write to thank me, and I learned that the person who donated his raffle prize to the charity was the grandson of the property developer who first set out the plotlands in the 1920s. Jaywick may be a byword for deprivation nowadays, but when first created it was an affordable holiday escape for East End families, their own little bit of paradise by the sea.
Her call galvanized me to write a covering letter to the charity so that I could get both donations in the post on my way out this afternoon. Then I remembered that a recent email from the house sitting agency included their invoice, which I needed to pay if I wanted the faithful Mr and Mrs Smith to come and look after the cats and chickens and water the pots while we are away.
The Inland Revenue emailed to remind me that I could now submit my 2017-18 tax return, but I thought that was a step too far, and that I would feel more motivated about it when it was more urgent.
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