Cough, Cough, Cough

Everyone in the house is coughing. Peak cough was yesterday. It's not a cheerful sound.

As I seem to be less congested than anyone else this morning I made a proposal that anyone heard hacking should have to stand on one leg, sing a comic song and give everyone else five pounds.

You don't have five pounds, said Ailz.

I'm wading through the final pages of Nicholas Nickleby. Things become much lighter and breezier whenever Squeers appears. How odd that a child-abusing, money-grabbing sociopath should be the most entertaining character in the book. But, then again, we all love Mr Punch. Vis a vis Mrs Nickleby: someone might have pointed out to Dickens that it may not be such a great strategy to give a character who is designed to be annoying quite so much space to annoy us in. A dash of Mrs N is invigorating; pages of her rabbiting on tempt the reader to skip.

I don't usually back the winner in big sporting events; This is because I favour underdogs- and there's usually a good reason why they have that status; but yesterday I was cheering for Swiatek and she not only won but never really looked in danger of losing. People- commentators- have been pronouncing her name as if there is an "N" in the middle. Shwee-an-teck. Can that really be right?

Written On My NEW Computer

The guy who delivered my computer said he couldn't deliver it before 10.00- and he was a little early- so we stood on the drive chatting while the minutes scrolled by. It was a pleasant chat. He said he'd be going home to watch F1, I said I'd be settling down with the tennis. Then, because conversation had lapsed I told him how my son-in-law was doing electrics on an outdoor site in Middlesborough. Well, I found it interesting.

Ailz set the machine up. I could probably have managed myself- because I'm fairly dogged- but it would have taken much longer. Now Ailz is having problems expunging me from her computer and I'm being asked for passwords and having to reset them because I'm told they're incorrect (even though they're not.)

No underdogs in the men's final, so I'll be cheering for Rafa. It's sad that Djokovic is so unlikeable. I was on the phone to my sister when D was playing Tsitsipas. She said Tsitsipas looks like Jesus and I said Novak looks like the guy who nailed him to the cross.