EB: Autumn Green, by Ray Cresswell

Two days at the market has left me much in need of rest. I woke up from a nightmare: I'd volunteered to administer a flu vaccine to someone unknown, before realising that I didn't have the first clue how to do this, and 'fessing up to the school nurse, who took me under her wing. I spent a fun-filled shift with her and her team, before realising that I should have been in nursery, and I hadn't told anyone where I was! The team would have been wondering what had happened to me, and Steve wouldn't have known. It took me some time on waking to realise that this was in fact a dream.

Now is that CoVid anxiety or just Anxiety-anxiety? I must admit I'm terrified that all sorts of non medical staff are having to be trained to deliver the new CoVid vaccine, mainly because I think that one day it night have to be my turn one day, and I'd be sure to make a mess of it. Most of you will not remember Professor Von Igelfeld, a character created by Alexander McCall Smith in his novel The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs.. In a case of mistaken identity, the pompous professor was asked to perform an operation on a dachshund. In front of an audience, he performed an amputation of the wrong leg....

Anxiety aside, these books are very funny. The first in the Vonn Igelfeld quartet is Portuguese Irregular Verbs. I shall listen to them all again if I am ever bedridden, or at a loose end.

Mostly I did housework today, or nothing. Made Cantonese style lemon chicken for supper. Watched Small Axe, the fourth film in the made for TV series directed by Steve McQueen. Powerful and engaging, it tells the story of Alex Wheatle, a young black boy born in the 1960s, sent to Shirley Oaks children's home near Croydon, eventually relocated to Brixton, London, where he began to make a name on the music scene, before being imprisoned after the Brixton riots. In prison he had a life-changing encounter, which resulted in his tracing his parents and becoming an acclaimed children's novelist, awarded an MBE in the noughties.

Returning to this jigsaw after a break of a week or so, I am not making a great deal of progress. There is so little daylight these days, and it's so cold!