As my cycling pal, Tim, said ‘You’ve not posted a blog in a while?” “Well Tim, there’s not been a lot to blog about at the moment has there?”

In fact as my first wife commented in all sincerity this morning as she scuttled down the landing – “You’ve got a busy day ahead, there’s a light bulb that needs changing.”

Unavoidably we all have to agree that in the UK it is a dreary time being locked down in this wet and very cold weather (if it rains much more I’m going to start gathering animals in pairs.) Even if you do venture out for a walk then all the walkers and dogs have turned paths, over fields, into something resembling the Somme. Cycling is still very important to me but the weather has been treacherous let alone unpleasant. It’s either snow and ice or flooding. In fact it got so difficult to find a way across the various overflowing rivers in North Yorkshire that Anna was called to pick me up during one spin from Pocklington. However by this stage I’d cycled 60 miles and climbed 900m, bear in mind Snowdon is 1,085m high.

In fact, things have got that bad that I was even prepared to answer a long and pointless questionnaire from a Geordie on a dodgy phone line about the exciting (not) Pension Protection Fund. I nearly envied people who worked for a living but thankfully that quickly passed when I realised that now entailed going into your spare bedroom at 8.30am and firing up a computer and only emerging a limited number of times during the day to resolve the need of bodily functions.

Talking of Stupid O’Clock then the cricket is back on as England tour the sub continent. The Sky coverage remains immaculate but the BBC’s Test Match Special on the radio has degenerated into something as trivial as bored housewives chatting on WhatsApp with an occasional mention of what’s happening in the middle. Banal chat includes UK weather (southerners were very excited about snow), various breakfast treats to sustain them through the early hours, had they walked the dog yet? And encouraging the public to Tweet in stupid questions for the scorer eg. when was there last an international century partnership with batsman with the least number of characters in their surnames? ‘Click’’… off.

Mrs Ives has various lockdown activities, one of which has necessitated me fitting a lock to the knife drawer: I’m worrying about Anna developing ideas. She’s binging on Scandi Noir from morning to night. Who knew they could make detective series in Iceland or Finland? The regular formula involves a dysfunctional policeman (existing on a secret diet of pharmaceuticals), lots of snow and ice, exclusively operating at night or dusk, clambering over a growing pile of mutilated bodies. All this is understood by subtitles. I breeze in to the lounge thinking it’s the Swedish chefs from The Muppets having a loud argument to find a Volvo driving at high speed toward an empty warehouse, in the dead of night, to rescue a child hostage, a Greta Thunberg lookalike with pigtails, being suspended from a beam just before an elderly lunatic, unsuspected, sub post office mistress intends to lower her into a vat of acid. I turn on my heels.

My search continues around the various TV streaming networks and terrestrial channels for something to watch. Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small is tremendous but was only seven episodes. These were quickly consumed. Call My Agent has had their fourth season uploaded onto Netflix and so not all is lost.

When Anna’s not doing this I am receiving her expert advice. This irritatingly extended to guitar tuning, who knew? To kill some time I dug out an old guitar to reaffirm how hopeless I am at playing it. The first task was to tune it. Despite changing a string I couldn’t tune the bottom E. My electronic tuner just couldn’t hack it and I contemplated buying a new device, to which the ‘font of all knowledge’ casually said ‘there must be an app for doing that’.  Disappointingly she was right. Yet something else I can do with an iPhone.

If you’re house bound then it seems timely to get to those chores you’ve put off forever; I’ve been editing and slimming down my photo library on my PC hard disk. This ran to 23,000 photos and I’m down to just over 19,000 and falling.  The library has documented my cycling trips but the size of the library reflects the benefits of digital photography. That is, you can take a picture of something five times to get the best shot knowing that all you are doing is ‘expending’ megabytes. A more worthy task has been the digging out of an old work laptop and sweeping it of documents and files. I plan to pass it across to a former co-worker who’s a teacher now. He worked in IT and spent some of last year restoring laptops for use schoolwork for children now at home. I know the government’s been chuckling lots of money into resolving this but there are apparently still children without.

Lastly, despite the weather I trust you’ve kept up your vigilance for men in shorts. They still abound in York, although I suspect they’re escaped Geordies breaking lockdown by migrating further south. This unnecessary shank exposure is usually explained by a desire to display a large tattoo they’ve had doodled down their calf and shins. Pray for them.