The bug is back with a vengeance.

I mention this, not because I am looking for any sympathy [I fucking hate sympathy] but because it is pertinent to the events of this morning.

I haven’t slept properly for two nights now, what with the sweats, the shivers the cough and the runny nose.  I am seriously sleep deprived.  Add to that the aches and the constant pounding headache [which is all over, and not just in the head] and you begin to realise that I am not quite my chirpy cheery self?

I had managed to grab about an hour’s fitful sleep this morning when the doorbell rang.

I dragged myself, snuffling and coughing to the door and opened it.

“Good morning Sir,” says a big burly bloke in a DayGlo jacket, much too cheerfully in my opinion.  “Do you want to go out?”

I told him he wasn’t my type.

That confused him and he started again.  Did I want to take the car out in the next couple of hours as they are about to rip up the lane outside my gate.  Now, according to their flyer, they were supposed to do this yesterday, but I let that pass.  I told him that I had no intention of going out.  I didn’t bother telling him that I had every intention of curling up in a corner and dying.

About an hour later there was another ring on the doorbell.

I dragged myself to the front door and there was another DayGlo there.  This time it was a wee scut of a lad.  He went through the whole palaver about how he was from the council and how they were putting in a watermain and how I was to get a stop-cock and where would I like him to fit it?

I told him anatomically precisely where he could fit it.

That didn’t go down too well, but I really wasn’t in the mood for little cunts in DayGlos.

He told me he reckoned that the north side of the gate would be best as that was nearest to where my garden tap is.

“How do you know where my garden tap is?” I asked him as calmly as I could muster.

“I took a look around the back of the house” says he cheerfully.

Now I know the law.  People are allowed to walk from my gate to my front door, but outside that, anything else is trespass.  I also know that under a new law I am entitled to defend my property against trespass up to and including lethal force, particularly if I perceive a threat.  And a DayGlo jacket is indeed a threat to my eyes when I have a full blown headache.

He is still examining my water situation..

from the bottom of my lake.

It’s funny but I feel a whole lot better now.