No offence, Phase One.. I’ve bin to better parties

before. Best to bring your own burgers. In fact, thanks to you, Phase One, the drive-thrus will be open as of Tuesday so just bring your own McDonald’s.

Please excuse the 374 black bin bags piled up in our garden. They’re full of the junk we cleared out during those enthusiastic early weeks in the Big Momma House when we believed the quarantine would be short-lived and embraced the chance to do all the jobs we’d been putting off for donkeys’ years.

There are also bags of weeds and hedge clippings accumulated when gardening still seemed like a rare and soothing diversion instead of a groundhog-day chore, and before we realised we had no means of getting rid of anything we pulled up or cut off.

Why on earth did the local authority dumps have to close in the first place?

Phase One, we are beyond excited at the prospect of waste recycling centres reopening and will be carting our 374 refuse bags there in shuttle runs once the queues are shorter than those at the garden centres, which you’re also making available. Wait a minute… cafes at garden centres won’t be opening? But they’re the best bit – everyone knows that.

So you can go to Dobbies for plants but not sit down and relax with one of their gigantic scones or mountainous meringues? You can’t get tucked into a full cooked breakfast while the other half ponders the relative merits of bark mulch or chuckies as weed suppressant?

No offence, Phase One, but you’re not exactly bringing free-wheeling liberty, are you? We much prefer the sound of your successor, Phase Two, so let’s hope he/she comes quicker than the estimated three weeks, because that takes us to mid June and half the year will be gone. In the meantime, how about a day trip to Barnard Castle? We know you’re only supposed to travel five miles but it’s an angling emergency.

We’ve heard the riverside there is worth a stop and fishing is officially allowed…