Wake me up when this weird dream is over

It’s tricky, what with being in lockdown due to a pandemic, to think about anything other than being in lockdown due to a pandemic. Of late, days have begun to merge into one. At the start of this crazy situation I got very angry one Friday night because I couldn’t go and drink beer in Brussels or Budapest and because idiots kept buying all the bog roll. But that was an isolated episode and, despite my better half’s protestation that

I am ‘too negative’ perhaps due to my incessant work-place swearing, I think things have got better since. Nevertheless, even the new positive me finds it difficult to maintain that attitude when the world is in the grips of an invisible killer and 99% of the news is about just that. That’s probably why my dreams have becoming increasingly crazy. The other night I found myself screaming at my mum and sister to do something about their new pet snow leopard which had escaped and ripped apart a bird – mum pinned it down while my sister applied a muzzle. The news over the weekend that 10 armed cops and a chopper had descended on sleepy Ightham after a walker mistook a gran’s chicken wire tiger sculpture for a real life big cat somehow wasn’t a dream and actually happened. Then on Monday the owner of a genderchanging foul-mouthed parrot called Charlie put out a plea for help finding her. Charlie was a boy until she one day laid eggs and now she’s flying around Bexley squawking “**** off you mug” and “do one, you **** ”.

A bus driver is only “90% sure” he spotted her flying over Manor Road.

“It was definitely a parrot”, he added. It appears the beauty of local news is getting me through this strange time.

‘At the start of this crazy situation I got very angry one Friday night because I couldn’t go and drink beer in Brussels or Budapest and because idiots kept buying all the bog roll’