Some of you may have seen the leaflet I posted on Facebook.  Where lesser folk are fretting about Real Life and pizza delivery offers,  my neighbours are getting flyers about treatment for ski injuries.  And no, we do not live in the Alps but somewhere where people leave ski racks clamped on their cars until May, just to make a point.

One of this week’s offerings on the local website was a peevish rant about dustmen leaving the lids of wheelie bins open.  (Would that I was making this up).  To the credit of other citizens it did attract a fair degree of derision – perhaps they would prefer to  live in an area where flooding renders such concerns less of an issue?  “I’ve got water in my bin” versus “I’ve got six foot of water in my house”.

I can only imagine that the Oscar winning ‘Parasite’, required viewing in the nearby posh cinema, must have been an uncomfortable couple of hours or would that require a level of self awareness that doesn’t appear to exist?

I went to the ‘Picasso and Paper’ exhibition at the Royal Academy this week and there were actually people wearing soggy face masks.  The urge to tell them to grow up and stop worrying about monsters under their beds was almost overwhelming and I will eventually give in to it.  If you’re that worried stay indoors pet and make space for the rest of us. Thank God they weren’t organising Dunkirk.

Incidentally don’t rush off to  see it.  Yet another poorly curated avalanche of odds and sods and the utter pretentiousness of the signs on the walls reached an all-time high.  I may start a competition to find the worst nonsense spouted about art on a gallery wall.  And who else would rather have quality than quantity?  We skipped the last two rooms entirely.  And the fridge magnets.

I do worry that we have lost the plot and that, increasingly feeble and degenerate, we are about to go the way of Ancient Rome but perhaps it is just the time of year.  We always dread January but the snag is that having survived it we are confronted by even dreamier February and no relief in sight.  Supplies, spiritually speaking, are at an all-year low and now we are confined inside by an endless string of oddly named storms.  These have clearly caused havoc around the country but here the streets were silent and deserted in the face of a fairly restrained bit of rain and several large puddles.

High time, methinks, that I looked out my own stiff upper lip, slapped a smile on my face and Got On With It.  The daffodils are practically in flower and you can’t hear yourself think because of the bird song.  Spring is just around the corner, allegedly, and I would be feeling a lot less sour if we hadn’t missed victory two weeks running at the pub quiz because my, as it turned out correct, answers were ignored.  Perhaps I’ll book some assertiveness training.  Perhaps we all should.

Yes another funeral this week – a bit like 21st birthdays and weddings, you go through a period of your life when you seem to go to little else.  This time it was one of my oldest and dearest friends; 46 years of getting impressively drunk together.

I was introduced to him by his best friend, my late brother-in-law – they were both jazz musicians and I could fill blogs for the next year relating just some of the shenanigans they were involved in.  After the brother-in-laws funeral, a tragic early death involving a rogue lawn-mower, my then husband, not as tired and emotional as we were, uthrew us both out of the car on the way back to London.  We went to the nearest pub and carried on grieving.  A proper send off if I say so myself.

We didn’t meet up that often but if he came to London the day would always involve lunch followed by brandies and cigarettes outside the Bar Italia in Soho, opposite Ronnie Scott’s.  He always smoked the most revolting fags and whenever I was abroad I made a point of seeking out the worst local  gaspers as souvenirs.  I recall that the ones sourced in Russia were particularly impressive in their room clearing properties and a real bargain at about 5 roubles for 200.  Sadly unobtainable over here.

We spoke on the phone frequently and for never less than an hour, ice clinking in our glasses as we discussed our respective gardens, his being as eccentric as he was.  Think Tim Burton crossed with Bunny Guinness on speed.  Not a suitable place for children on several levels and talking of which let me deviate to my own offspring.

They too had spent long afternoons with me in his garden drinking whatever gut-rotting Eastern European vodka we had purchased en route.  I found out that he had died because one of them rang me and bless them, they both came to the funeral even though it meant one of them leaving Bristol at 6 in the morning.  They looked handsome, they were charming to the elderly mourners and they came because they knew it would mean a lot to me.  A moment of maternal pride.  Proper old-fashioned values.  I hope I passed them on.