Lucky I’m in isolation as I’ve an urge to upend my friend’s fiddly jigsaw puzzle

THE Husband’s done his back in. No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. Currently he’s shuffling around the house like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I asked how he’d done it because it certainly wasn’t with all the household chores he’s supposed to be doing. He says it’s because he picked our dog Murphy up, who’d done one of his dashes for freedom out the front door the other day and he’d had to give chase.

I say, because of Murphy’s tummy troubles he barely weighs more than a bag of groceries so how did he hurt his back lifting him? He says he must have picked him up at a bad angle.The upshot is that the list of jobs I drew up for him is now a no-no.

Why is it every time I pick up a paper or a magazine, I read about people using this isolation time usefully, clearing out cupboards, building sheds, decorating bedrooms, giving the garden an overhaul? Chez Malone absolutely nothing in the way of domestic chores is occurring.

Yes, we did do a big clean of the house on Saturday which has made me 100 per cent appreciate the lady who (usually) comes in for a few hours a week. But there’s been nothing since.

Every day since isolation began I’ve been asking him to clean out the gutters that I can see from our landing window and which have got clogged up with gunk. I even found a contraption in the garage that I’d bought last year (in TX Maxx obviously) to help scoop it all out.Well, the kybosh has been put on that as well thanks to the Back Injury. So if you read about an ageing female journo falling out of a window covered in black gunk and cursing the name, “Nino”, you’ll know it’s me.

But what’s wrong with the two of us that when we have some time to do all the stuff that we normally don’t get done, we’re achieving the sum total of nothing?

To be fair, both of us are working every day. I’m doing a lot of writing from home and TV stuff on Skype. And Nino, who usually travels a lot, spends half his day on conference calls with colleagues. But what are we doing with the rest of it?

I know I’ve started to have a little sleep every afternoon (not so little: an hour and a half hour yesterday).And I’ve started watching a couple of series on Netflix that I really need to have a fix of every day. But Nino and I have never been people for hobbies. I actually hate the word. It reminds me of funny people who study trains and collect stamps. But I’ve always wondered why nothing interests me enough that I want to spend lots of time on it. Nino’s the same. Does that make us stupid? Do we have infertile minds? My friend Peter always has a superdifficult jigsaw on the go which he has set up on a table in the living room. He has to send away specially for the ones with thousands of tiny pieces, the putting together of which would fry the average person’s brain.And while I’m in awe of the patience it takes to do these things, I cannot understand the point of spending endless days putting it all together only to have to immediately dismantle it and put it back in the box, never to be seen again. I’d rather be watching Coronation Street. And does it make me a bad person that when we’re staying over at his place I do sometimes mess with the pieces when no one’s looking? Childish, I know.

But it’s better than what I really want to do which is tip the whole thing over. It’s an urge that gets harder to control which is why it’s a good thing we’re in isolation because just now – with my mind craving mischief – I just might not be able to resist.