Podcasts at double speed are not listening

It began during the pandemic. My husband was given a dollop of sourdough by a colleague, and it has lived with us ever since. It has a name. It has its own shelf in the fridge. It is fed more often than the cat.

I have nothing against bread. But when a man asks how the dough is “feeling” before he asks how I am, something has gone too far.

Am I alone in living in a three-way relationship, one third of which is yeast?

I sat on the bus for half an hour and counted. Of twenty-two passengers, twenty were looking down at a phone. The twenty-first was asleep. The twenty-second was me.

We used to look out of the window. We saw the seasons, the cows and the neighbour’s new car. Now people know the weather in New York but not that it is raining on them.

I do not wish to be old and grumpy. But I want somebody to see the cows.

Yesterday I had to step into the road three times to get past e-scooters that someone had left in the middle of the way. One was in a bush. One stood in a fountain.

Nobody owns them, nobody puts them away and nobody seems to know where they are going. They are like pigeons, but with batteries.

I propose that the council introduce a pound for stray scooters, just as there was once a pound for loose horses.