Nowadays, it’s when it’s a busy time and I’d like to keep a record of things, I have least time to blog. I’ll try to keep up a bit better and I will have some spare time during the day next week.

A friend is staying at present, as her husband has Covid and, as she’s a nurse in the community and visits a lot of people, she can’t be with him and still go to work. Luckily, she’d been away from home before he tested positive and he isn’t very ill, just a bad cold, so it’s okay. But convivial evenings over a bottle of wine leave no time for evening blogging.

A friend, who has commented here in the past and also came to a blog party a few years ago, suggested herbal Nytol to help me sleep, saying that it helped her get back to sleep when she woke in the night. This is what I need, I can usually fall asleep quickly because I am so tired. I don’t like taking medication of that sort, but this is basically valerian and there’s nothing in it I would object to. I am perfectly sure it’s not actually making a difference, but I have convinced myself that it does, so it works. I wake up in the night, think “it’s all right, the nytol will send me right back to sleep” and off to sleep I go. Amazing. I slept until 5am yesterday and 7 o’clock this morning.

I read about a study on placebos, a year or two back, which said that sometimes, even when patients were told they were being given a placebo, they still worked. It was about the power of the brain to control symptoms, such as pain. I tried valerian tisanes a couple of years ago, didn’t much like the taste and didn’t really think they’d help. Now, however, good sleep is my priority. I’d never found it easy to drop off, but then slept soundly until I started to worry about my mother’s health and also found her a great strain to live with. That was when I started waking and worrying in the middle of the night and I’ve never got over it, well over 20 years on. I don’t worry any more, if I do I read or play mindless games, such as cards on the phone, to distract myself (the adverse effect of using the phone in the night is less than worrying is) but I have that first, deep sleep and then am wide awake for hours. I am absolutely determined to break that habit. But at any rate, two fabulous nights’ sleep is a bonus.

I went to the hygienist on Friday. All went well to start with, then she became a bit puzzled because the more she checked, the worse things seemed to be and it wasn’t adding up. Had I been under stress recently? Well, yes, I told her about Tim and she was sympathetic – well, of course she was. Stress causes inflammation and it even affects your gums, so even if there’s not much tartar etc, the effect is gingivitis. So that’s another reason for being well rested and taking care of myself.

On my way home, I remembered I needed chicken feed, so I called in at the pet shop in the village and bought three 20 kilo bags. I loaded them into the wheelbarrow, but because there were showers of sleet, snow and everything else that shouldn’t happen in April after a week of lovely weather, I had to take them into the chickens’ greenhouse straight away. And that will be tomorrow’s blog post.