I spent yesterday ‘working from home’. I’ve always thought of it scornfully as a 21st Century euphemism for doing very little, and that was how it turned out.

I managed a leisurely breakfast, a trip to the library and a lift to town for Julia, then did about an hour of paperwork. Fortunately, as my paid work is pretty flexible, I will still put in my hours in the rest of the week so no harm done. It is, as generations of teachers have said, my own time that I’m wasting.

At the end of the day I washed up, made a venison casserole, roasted some vegetables and washed up again. That concluded the “work” element of the day, but that would have needed doing anyway.

In the middle of the day I read a portion of Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson as part of my plan to read better books. It’s on my Kindle, so I can’t tell you of my progress in terms of pages, just that it was about 30%. Pages would be meaningless anyway, as I have the type size turned up so I can read without glasses. There aren’t many words to a page at that setting!

Sleep also took part of the day as I drifted off after lunch and woke an hour and a half later to find that, with the heating off, I felt cold and my joints felt stiff. Now I know what rigor mortis is going to feel like.

Finally, whilst watching Pointless, I hit on two pointless answers in the final round. Usually they select film or football as topics and I can’t even come up with the required three answers. This time they chose politics, which is also usually pretty dire for me. However, the subject was 19th Century British Prime Ministers. I went for Lord John Russell and Lord Aberdeen but I hesitated over Lord Derby or Lord Salisbury. I went for Salisbury. Turns out I should have gone for Derby, which would have given me three pointless answers. Viscount Goderich made up the fourth of the pointless answers in case you’re interested – he was in power between Canning and Wellington but I don’t remember him at all. I’m going to have to brush up on my Prime Ministers, though, as Meatloaf says ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.