S LL P S

The doorbell went for the fifth time one morning last week and I’d just had enough. Thundering down the stairs in my work clothes – PJ bottoms and yesterday’s T-shirt – it was one of those days when I hadn’t even managed to commute to my home office.

Flinging open the door with a “WHAAAT THE…”, I stopped myself swearing just in time as the world’s biggest bunch of flowers greeted me on the doorstep. Obviously I thought my luck was in, but then I remembered that I hadn’t had a real-life date since December 2019.

I just about found a vase big enough to decant the magnificent bouquet and opened the card. “From Vicky at Interflora – check your email inbox for exciting news”.

So I checked my emails, and sure enough there was a press release. It read: “Interflora has designed the first ever bouquet of the year – each flower representing the emotional rollercoaster of 2020. “Pink is the predominant colour representing the overriding emotion of the year, love. While other flowers such as blue clematis hint at sadness, and stocks show excitement.”

“Not sure where they’ve been these last nine months,” I thought to myself, “but for excitement, they really need to add a couple of bog rolls and sourdough flour.”

Thing is, I don’t want to count my chickens, but I did recently stalk someone that I’d quite like to meet in real life (which is why I’m hiding this revelation down here in case he reads it). But he’s not local so we can’t even meet for a walk in the cold, drizzly January rain and mumble at each other from behind soggy masks.

I would do Zoom meet-ups, but I haven’t found a way to hide all my chins, so we just have old-skool Friday night phone calls that go on for hours.

I realise that my love life is not high on the list of priorities when there’s a mutant virus strain trying to wipe out the whole of humanity, but Sage could at least bear it in mind. Otherwise by the time us singletons can resume normal dating service, I’ll be forced to lie about my age. Again.

Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co. uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.

“This is Shadow, my son’s half-chihuahua/half-Japanese chin dog,” says Chris from the Isle of Dogs (the real one in East London). “He’s a lovely little boy, but doesn’t know his mutt from his mutton. This is him on a trip to the Lake District getting to know what he thought were the local pooches.”