Trivial troubles mount like bills

Things crumble from the outside in. And it starts with a watch strap. Mine is a simple bracelet that slips over the hand and clings snugly to the wrist. But its inner elastic perished last week and time is now dangling.

In normal times I would deal to such an obvious metaphor. I’d be off to the jeweller’s for a new bracelet to snap time back into place. But the jeweller is moping at home like everyone else, with only a thousand clocks for company, and I must endure a flopping watch.

And rats. For now is the time of the year when the rats come. They’ve cleaned out the walnut tree behind the house, gnawed through the soft new shells and eaten the brain-like flesh. And now the sun is lowering and the land is cooling and with their little pink noses they sniff the coming winter and they seek shelter in my walls and roof.

I know the rats are coming and, as I do every year, I have put out bright green poison to welcome them and they have nibbled and died by the dozen. But I am down to my last two baits and still the rats keep coming like waves on a beach.

In normal times I would fetch more bait from the hardware store, but Mr Mitre and Mr Ten have put up the shutters and withdrawn beneath their own roof. As I type this I can hear the patter of little feet in the walls of my life. There is only plasterboard between me and them. And rats, I believe, have a track-record in pandemics.

This morning the bathroom heater died. I pulled its little cord and nothing. Like any thinking man I pulled the cord again and harder. Nothing still. Perhaps the rats have nibbled through its vitals.

In normal times I would fix the heater with that universal tool, the telephone. But my cheerful German electrician is in quarantine as well, no doubt rewiring his house.

I can do without a warm bathroom, but not without hearing. And my ears have blocked themselves with wax. They’ve been doing this all my life, and I know to soften the wax with hydrogen peroxide, and then to head to the clinic where the nurse brings out her little vacuum cleaner with the anteater nose. But the nurse right now is at home, vacuuming her carpets to keep her hand in, and I must occupy a muffled world.

Like everyone else I’ve been baking bread. My bread is rustic, basic and barely edible. The problem lies in the yeast. Years ago, yeast was known as godisgoode, because a risen loaf was a blessing that god conferred on his favoured bakers. God doesn’t seem to favour me.

But I feel obliged to eat what I bake, and besides, chewing this bread counts as exercise. Yesterday there was a crack like flicked fingers and my mouthful of bread turned crunchy. I was eating my own tooth.

The broken tooth is tolerable so long as I leave it alone. But whenever my attention is diverted, my tongue snakes off to explore the ruins and the jolt is like a cattle prod.

In normal times of course I would take the ruins to the dentist but he is at home baking bread.

Watch, rats, heater, ears, teeth. Each is trivial, but together they accrue like unpaid bills. And I am reminded of New Year’s Eve 1982, when I fetched up in a grim little town called Twin Falls, Idaho, and there was a T-shirt in the window of a general store. ‘‘Twin Falls, Idaho isn’t the end of the world,’’ it said. ‘‘But you can see it from here.’’