While you were clearing snow off the windscreen I was looking forward, always forward people, to spring.  With the Equinox upon us, technically it has sprung and let us greet the delivery of the first shoes of the season, ordered during my darkest duvet days (January to March inclusive).

Another timely arrival was the first local election leaflet, this time in the form of a questionnaire.  How do these wretched people get one’s name? (The electoral roll is, on reflection, the prime suspect).  It asked, hardly surprisingly,  a number of totally asinine questions.   What did I think of the council’s policy on plastics?  Answer: a total waste of time, whatever it might be, when the government is trying to build yet another runway at nearby Heathrow which will dump millions more tons of toxic waste into the local air and I suspect a far higher risk of an untimely demise when, inevitably, a ‘plane crashes over our densely populated city than from ingesting an old Perrier bottle.

At least there was one joke amongst the questions.  Did I think there should be a 20mph speed limit throughout the borough?  Show me where the traffic ever gets to that sound barrier breaking velocity and I’ll take a view on it.  Given the average rush hour speed in London is now below 10 mph let’s not fritter away ratepayers money in an attempt to criminalise those who manage to exceed it.  Or was money raising not on your mind, Mr Mayor?

Is this not the very same council who have recently given permission for a school to be built for 400 pupils on the only road access to Richmond Bridge?  That’ll sort out any speeding issues and no mistake.  Add to this happy mix the fact that the school is going to be on top of a new supermarket –  something we are crying out for  in the borough – and local gossips would have you believe that planning permission was granted because of a sizeable contribution towards the cost of building the school.  As if!

The highlight of the week, on paper, was the fire evacuation training session.  (It was A listers only.  Maybe you’ll be invited next time).  However, contrary to expectations there wasn’t a single fireman there so although I can now empty a building  in under three minutes it was ultimately a bit of a disappointment and I think I speak for all the ladies who volunteered to take part.  Fake news.

Which leads me to the Russians.  I hope it has escaped no-one’s notice that their foreign minister made a statement which was a total copy of my blog.  You heard it hear first.  As usual.

I used to read my children a lovely book about a little monster who’s frightened to go to sleep in case there’s a boy under his bed which, by way of a largish, lateral leap, leads us to my thought for today.  The necessity of a collective bogey man in a modern society.  Actually in any society because a good way to keep the masses in order is to keep them in a state of terror.

Even in my brief lifetime (What? Ed.) it has been never ending.  My parents had only just recovered from the very real threats of the Second World War when we were all cowering under the stairs thinking that the Russians were about to drop a nuclear bomb on our heads and thanking God that we’d never taken down the black-out curtains which would surely save us from an atomic fireball.

The Americans were so nervy of the prospect of Communist world domination that they spent years fighting the totally unwinnable Vietnamese war. Obviously they lost in entirely predictable fashion but staggeringly the world did not, as we had been warned,  instantly think Marxist Leninism was the way forward.  That didn’t get a lot of publicity.

There were decades of worrying about the IRA but as soon as they’d signed a peace deal up popped a World Wide Web of loonies – not a million miles from the Taliban, who if memory serves we had been supplying with arms in an attempt to rid Afghanistan of the Russians – and we all obediently began to submit to endless security checks in case they were lurking round the corner, ignoring for the time being that virtually all murders are committed by someone known to the victim.  Like the 2 women a week in Britain who die at the hand of their partners.  Not much publicity for that either.

There has been a brief respite while the lily livered Metropolitans warned that we’d be eating grass after Brexit but now we have returned to our old adversary, the Russians, bringing sudden death to a restaurant near you.

Here, we are led to believe, is a man who has been a double agent, whose wife and son have both met mysterious deaths and yet he lets his daughter travel to Russia and then decides to go out for lunch taking with him a parcel she’s brought back from Moscow.  A man who is an obvious target for both sides but has he changed his name, elected to live in a witness protection programme, moved to a country that he hasn’t betrayed or taken the most fundamental precautions when dozens of other Russians have met the wrong end of an umbrella?  No, reader, he has not.

The ‘passing’ policeman was hardly your average bobby on the beat either. Check him out.  And best of all they were handily close to the Porton Down research facility, the only place in England where you can obtain this obscure substance.  This must  explain why the local hospital happened to have supplies of the antidote which they administered within hours although the poison wasn’t identified for a week.  And I hear that only yesterday, Porton Down had millions of pounds of extra government funding slipped into their coffers.

No wonder Mr Putin is so dismissive. Perhaps it wasn’t him.

Exciting news and especially pertinent to the subject of motherhood.  I am in a child free home! (If by child you mean adult men in their late twenties and early thirties).  The silence is deafening, it is safe for the gin to come in from the cold (shed) and the only things in the fridge are tonics and champagne.

The telephone handsets are sitting smugly in their holders, and my iPhone charger is exactly where I left it.  The milk stays fresh in the fridge, no longer opting to end its life curdling in front of the unwatched television next to a pizza box and an ash tray.

Best of all my wallet is bulging with unspent wealth; unspent on Oyster card top ups and emergency fags.  We are, people, talking sunlit uplands.

Obviously it was only a matter of time before my new found freedom went to my head. ‘What a fine opportunity for a spot of spring cleaning’ I thought, a text book definition of impending breakdown if ever there was one.  Although I had long since abandoned the idea of raising the hygiene level of parts of the house above that to be found in a Nairobi slum, I have invested heavily in the necessary equipment.  A worryingly masculine trait that, being lured by things with a plug on.  Possibly transitional?  These devices have had very little use over recent years and the relevant instructions have long since hurled themselves into the re-cycling bin.  Again, not something that would bother a man for a single second but a grown woman really should have known better.

I started in the bedroomof Useless the Elder and having finally located the carpet I thought it best to have a bit of a go at it with the steam cleaner, just to loosen up the top couple of layers.  I then set to work with the vacuum cleaner until a strange smell filled the room (Or even stranger smell than that which had greeted me).  I turned round to find a huge ball of foam emanating from the Hoover, the result of suction on the wet, soapy carpet, and then it stopped working.  Which was probably a good thing.  (I bought a new, less temperamental one later that day).

On reflection I decided that the simplest way forward was total re-carpeting and instead set about burning the thousands of unopened, tear-stained letters from the bank to the boys, shredding them all not being an option in my anticipated lifespan.  Eagle eyed readers will realise at this point that I had probably over-inhaled the fumes from the carpet chemicals which is why the next thing I did was to melt an extremely large plastic pot doubling as an incinerator but at least it was outside.

And how does this tale of woe end?  Suffice to say it involves a sofa flying over a second floor balcony.  In a good way.  But sadly there are no photos.  I’ll leave the details to your fevered imaginations.

Off to bonnie Scotland for the Calcutta Cup and what larks upon the way!  I collected Junior Nurse from a house in Sheffield which I was slightly surprised to discover is not unlike Tunbridge Wells.  Whatever happened to the dark, satanic mills that my parents warned me covered the countryside north of Regents Park? Is there no relief from the creeping fingers of gentrification?   I was greeted at the door by a woman in hair curlers covered by a headscarf which unfortunately I assumed to be the normal local daily dress but turned out to be a post-Stalinist joke on cultural appropriation.  Fashion and despair.  Again.

We got to Staff Nurse’s lovely home to discover that another guest had arrived before us.  A gentleman of the road, as we used to call travelling folk,  who she had met whilst tenting in the Outer Hebrides.  How many, many times must I repeat the dangers of canvas related shenanigans?  It must be confessed that for all out metropolitan nonchalance we were mildly discombobulated to observe that he was wearing our hostess’s skirt and tights;  his clothes, including a negligee from Anne Summers,  having gone straight into the washing machine.

In the HUGELY unlikely event that I were ever to consider packing for a  cycling trip to the Cairngorms in a very snowy February, hoping to hone my igloo building skills,  this might be one item I could do without, what with weight being an issue but then what do I know of such matters?  Bear Grylls has a lot to answer for.

Having seen him safely on his way we decided to watch the England-Scotland rugby match in Edinburgh.  Arriving in the capital Junior Nurse insisted that she must do a tour of the city in an open topped bus, an obvious, first class choice for a mid winter afternoon in a location north of Moscow.  Being of considerably sounder minds we declined to join her and set her a second challenge: to locate us after her outing, should she survive it.  We then decamped at some speed to the Cafe Royal, which is a bit more like a pub than a tea shop, actually quite a lot more, if accuracy is required.

A first class afternoon ensued, which if truth be told did not actually involve going to the match, (This a plan we had abandoned some time earlier, not having tickets and it being extremely cold) but it was apparently viewable on a television somewhere behind the bar.  Thank God Scotland won which meant that the day ended with high spirits rather than mayhem as we were probably the only English people present and we still had just enough sense not to,start a fight.

Junior Nurse did eventually locate us, using the unexpectedly intelligent reasoning that we would be A. In a pub and B. Very close to where she left us. Respect, Sherlock.

If technology permitted I would have liked to have finished with a photograph of the bloodied axe on the kitchen floor, worryingly a true detail of a very surreal weekend,  but perhaps that’s a story for another day.