the road to recovery is paved with housework

So Jaywick did not flood.  By the time we went to bed last night it looked as though it wasn't going to, after high tide had passed without incident at a string of places further up the coast, apart from a few isolated properties, and when I flicked the radio on this morning and at three minutes past eight the Today programme was already talking about Donald Trump I knew there couldn't be any major English floods to report.

The day was bright and cold, the wind able to cut through several layers of clothing with no trouble at all.  The Systems Administrator went out for half an hour to cut more firewood, while I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that I was staying by the Aga.  Tomorrow is forecast to be milder and damp.  Hurrah.  It could finally get rid of the lumps of frozen snow still littering the garden, and then next week I might get something done.

I announced that tomorrow I was going to clean the house as I finally felt strong enough to face it and the weather forecast for Sunday was horrible while for next week it was quite good, and the SA offered to do the vacuuming.  The house has reached that tipping point of scuzziness, unbelievably dirty even by our standards, while I feel fit enough both to care and to do something about it. When you are at your most ill you don't mind what state the kitchen floor is in.  Then you do notice but can't summon the energy to do anything about it.

When you are both unwell at once you discover how low cleaning comes in the hierarchy of domestic needs.  You have to feed your animals, however little you feel like getting out of bed. You have to open the chicken house in the morning and shut it at night, and by the second or third day somebody has to go into the run to refill their water.  Luckily we had emergency reserves of cat food in the form of a large box of pouches we bought before going back to tinned food for their main meals, otherwise we would have had to buy cat food.  Human beings can exist for days if needs be on baked beans, tinned rice pudding, and whatever cheese is in the fridge, even if meals do end up resembling something out of a bizarre cookery challenge, but you can't expect your cats to live on jam and ryvita.

Apart from the need to buy cat food, it is nice to have milk for tea and so a trip to a supermarket comes fairly high up the list, once one of you feels fit to drive.  And once you start feeling like proper cooked food again then somebody has to cook it.  And then the need to do some laundry kicks in because otherwise you are going to run out of clean socks and knickers.  And unless you have a big and beautiful stack of firewood all ready chopped into logs small enough to fit in the stove somebody has to cut up some of the large lumps of wood that were left outside the workshop, if not drag more out of the actual wood.

So washing the kitchen floor and wiping the kitchen units and the Aga comes a very long way down the list, but tomorrow could be the day.