Wrexham County Borough 13 - Bangor on Dee- The beauty of the red sandstone/Old Bridge House and the lack of a Post office

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Day 300 of lockdown and Covid restrictions . As I take my daily walk around the new village I find my mind is doing nothing more than drifting from subject to subject . 300 days of living under restrictions . Of swimming pools and gyms closing down , opening up and then closing down again . A merry go round I want to get off . My wandering mind wondered how many miles I had now walked . I lost count in the summer when the swimming pool re-opened . I was some way across France . By now surely I would have got closer to the German border or the German part of France . I have equally lost track of and lost faith in our Prime Minister who has quite literally spouted rubbish out of his mouth on a regular basis . World beating testing . Yea - of course it was Boris . First to get the vaccine - well you were on the ball there . Finally we will be over this by Easter . Not a hope. Not a cat in hells chance as they say . At the rate we are vaccinating it is going to be a long long haul out of this misery. It seems the First Minister has a hair brained idea . Keep the vaccine back . Issue so many doses a week . That way the people doing the injections will not use up the supplies in the first weeks and find themselves with nothing to do for the rest of the month whilst they wait for the next lot of doses .Spread it out and spread the misery . The man has lost the plot . He gets paid rather a lot of money to lose the plot and then try to justify it.

My walk takes me further around the conservation area of the village . An area where many of the houses are that lovely soft red sandstone or classic examples of Flemish bond brickwork . The windows must remain the same . None of that PVC stuff here . The chimneys remain at a suitable height and the roof clad in an appropriate slate . There is a certain feel of uniformity here . Nothing sticks out nor clashes . I walk past Post Office Cottage . Post Office has long gone with the move from snail male to e-mail . E-mail both a blessing and a curse , The local shop sells envelopes and stamps now. . Plus almost anything else you could think of. Oh yes and pegs . Those old fashioned wooden ones . Not that plastic rubbish .

Lilac Cottage . I looked for the Lilac tree . Perhaps it is there somewhere but I failed to find it . I hoped it would there for me to see in the Spring . Leek Cottage - Leeks in the garden I wondered ? Deva House - Deva the old roman name for Chester. Fraser Cottage and the Stableyard . A hint of what was here before . The Old Dee Bridge Cottage . A photographers studio and a house used by a counsellor . Perhaps we need counsellors more now with the Covid blues hitting everyone . Even the most up beat - the glass half full amongst us are now fed up. The Laurels . The names just kept on going . It took my mind off Covid for a while . It took my mind off all the work we need to do on the house . It would be easy if people turned up. But they don't. They promise to come or make a phone call and do neither . When they turn up they promise faithfully to send a quote . That never arrives . I wondered who would let us down today . How I wish I were on a Greek beach . Or enjoying an Italian meal somewhere in Italy . Sicily - we really have to get down to Sicily and make it this time . My mind went off the useless workers who were obviously being paid too much to sit at home and drifted .

I started to count steps to break the monotony . Count to a hundred and move my thumb . 200 move my pointing finger , 300 - the middle one and so on through the ring finger and then the pinky until I moved on from the left hand to the right hand . Soon counted 500 steps and then 1000, Soon get to 10K at this rate . My mind wandered even more .

I headed out along the river and completed my walk in Friars Garden ,. A community garden that had been heavily invested in over the years. The neighbourhood had erected notices telling me which flowers I would see on my walk . The birds and wildlife I might encounter. Seats to sit on, a dove cote , a scarecrow competition held in the summer. I looked forward to the summer .Short nights and long days . I climbed the gate out of the garden and headed along the river , It was low today. I spent a useless morning doing useless things . Lin Yutang came up with that thought " If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner you have learned how to live " Sometimes, now and again we need useless time .

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