My toilet ultimatum to the builder boyfriend

The rain showers had a strange and wondrous effect. All the cyclists, joggers and dog walkers that were coming from miles away to take their essential exercise in the countryside magically disappeared.

No one we didn’t recognise took any essential exercise in the downpours, but then resumed it when the weather changed.

I find this odd because the explanation of the day-trippers for putting their bikes and their backpacks and their hiking equipment and their picnic baskets into the backs of their cars had been that they really, really needed to do that — come hell, high water or Covid.

The locked-down inhabitants of towns and cities needed to pedal around the countryside hour after hour, day in day out, so badly that we lot who live here ought to get out of their way.

When we were coming out of our houses to get food or see to livestock, or when we were attempting to walk our dogs or ride our horses down the lanes and bridleways by our own farms and fields, they intimated that we should throw ourselves into hedges as they came past to assure them of their two-metre distance.

So I was delighted that the cycling, jogging and essential picnicking masses underwent a Damascene conversion on the matter of taking these unprecedentedly conscientious bouts of daily exercise and reverted to slobbery, which meant the rest of us who exercise 365 days a year in all weathers could walk our dogs and get our horses out of their paddocks as usual.