Musings from outside a bolted door...

One issue Scrobs has with 'lockdown', is that meetings with good friends like Elias and Gloriette Sagtrouser have been suspended.

For two months, the normally open doors of 'The Bells' have been firmly shut and bolted, although the lovely people who run the place are doing takeaways of enormous proportions at weekends, and we try and support them on our meagre pensions (?), as much as we can, the various pints of Sheps' 'Spring Ale - 8.7abv' and the large Anno and Fevertrees are just not apparent at the moment!

So there's a sad dearth of seeing the trilby hat, sloping to the rear of the noble head, with a twenty pound note swaying in the breeze from a gnarled mitt, and the tiny feet, tiny hands, and huge - gins of the lovely lady, and things just don't seem right somehow.

Elias has been working hard though, keeping his business going, and I guess Gloriette has been working just as hard, doing the books, taking the orders over the phone etc, because I have been gladdened to notice, only last week, that after several weeks of the muck-away boys trundling past The Turrets with loads of subsoil, the Sagtrouser trucks are arriving with a variety of heavy building materials to a site down the road, where we believe another ornamental fishing lake is being constructed.

Life goes on I suppose, but discussions with hard-working chums still at it in the building industry have indicated that the good builders are getting to grips with the situation, and finding ways to keep working, which is what they always do, rather than be paid by the state to sit around and do very little.

These guys and gals are still the people who are providing the taxes to pay for the lockdown, and all the public services who are on full pay, pensions, soft hours and lots of excuses, especially from the 'management' end, but thankfully, the real money is going to the front line worker bees.