Helpful Mottos?

 We had a bad Friday. 

Any Friday where you can’t get a bunch of friends together to make music is a bad Friday and we have had far too many of those lately but this was more than that.

The Long Suffering Husband was bored. This isn’t the early retirement he signed up for. Even the golf courses are closed and being a domestic god isn’t quite enough for him. While I rang parents and tried to explain technology I don’t understand myself and talked to children about methods of multiplication that no one talked about when I was at school because you just had to learn your tables (*note* I do think maths teaching is better. I’m not a grumpy old goat who thinks it was better in my day) the LSH busied himself with trying to find every small hole that was causing a draft in our house.

He looked like a neglected puppy dog.

“I’m just bored,” he said.

“It’s the weekend tomorrow,” I said, still in my cheery, everything’s-fine-you-can-do-this-home-educating-your-children-is-a-breeze voice that I had just been using on the telephone.

He pointed out that wasn’t helping. It wasn’t as if we could do anything different then. I thought about it and realised that he was right. We hadn’t even had Bora Bora day, sometime at the beginning of January where social media fills up with pictures of tropical islands for people to tag their mates, looking forward to a summer holiday. The holiday adverts that are on the TV feel like a cruel punishment, as we know that they will have to close the borders for a significant amount of time to come. Even the predicted snow was causing less excitement than it should. What’s the point of snow if there’s no chance of a snow day? Also, predicted snow is always a disappointment here.

We decided to open the last box of Christmas chocolates: a box of fancy truffles. A good solid chocolate hit was required. 

They were the most well wrapped chocolates ever. A triple layer of cardboard and foil and printed on one of the layers of cardboard were the contents and a tear out square containing a motto. I’m certain that it was supposed to be one of those positive thinking things that should help but ...

What?

Nothing?

Oh?

That doesn’t make me relax. In fact.... oh God...... I can’t breathe!

I don’t know if you are an anxious person but the only thing that keeps those of us who have any issues with anxiety sane is the belief that we can at least control the small things. We might not be able to stop an u known virus from killing us but we can have clean hands and a tidy sock drawer. The theory that my socks are always working themselves towards chaos doesn’t help.