I hate being ill.

It’s boring and pointless. I’ve been stuck at home for five days now feeling horrible, heady and exhausted. At least if I was coughing my lungs up or coating tissues in greenies, I’d have something to show for being infected, but there’s nothing.

Everything’s on the back burner.

My ongoing quest to procure the perfect body through a brutal (and often humiliating) regime of weight training and yoga is now on pause. Tennis remains a dim and distant memory as my ankles continue their tortuous return to normality. All I can do is put the electric blanket on full and wait for it to be over while I binge watch ‘Nobody Wants This’ (Netflix; second series, actually very annoying now) and ‘Film Club’ (iPlayer; quirky, touching brilliance).

Claw clipping

In other news, one thing I am able to do without expending precious, and lacking, energy, is trim the dog’s claws.  They’ve been clickety-clacking on the floors for ages and driving me mad. Success in this endeavour requires catching Dolly at the perfect time, preferably when she’s tired and trying to have a nap with her feet stretched out and as far away from her face as possible.

I’ve tried to attempt the clipping of claws when she’s sitting up, but it always ends with her hopping about from foot to foot trying to avoid the clippers. Note to self, do not do this on a moving dog, I did once catch the quick of her nail by accident which resulted in a nasty mess across the kitchen as an arc of blood shot out of the hole I’d made. Quite a lot of clearing up that one.

In fairness to Dolly, I taught her a long time ago when she was only a puppy, that for every claw I clipped, we’d count and she’d get a piece of cheese. One. Clip. Cheese. Two. Clip. Cheese. You get the picture. It’s stood me in good stead, because now I don’t have to count or provide cheese. And with the help of torch (our house is old and the lighting rubbish), glasses (I’m old and can’t see properly) and a sleepy dog, all went swimmingly. Best of all, no more clickety-clacks following me round the house driving me mad.