My friend Monkey is driving down to outermost Wessex today in his Ape van.
Our farmer friends down there are delighted that he’s coming to help with their harvest.
Monkey’s very excited.
He’ll be picking raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants and blackcurrrants, and blueberries.
And after that, there’ll be cherries in their orchard.
Monkey promised to phone when he arrives.
I know the roads aren’t busy at the moment, but I seem to be more worried than usual about things I used not to worry about at all.
We all had a chance to say goodbye to him last night, because we had a Zoom meeting of the Red and Green Teddies.
Now that I have some experience of online meetings, I’m more careful about my background.
People did comment last time, at the Book Club meeting.
I hadn’t realised that everyone would be able to see all my mess.
My cousin Peter looked very smart in the meeting, next to his elegant chest of drawers.
So this time I sat next to my chest of drawers.
It’s not as grand as Peter’s, but it is nice.
It didn’t show up well enough at the meeting last night, so I’ll show you now how good it looked. Better than my heap of clothes last time.
The drawers are all full of rubber bands.
I might empty them out and use them for storing something more useful.
Though then I’d have to find somewhere else for the rubber bands.
Points had a long agenda for the meeting.
We planned to discuss what changes we hope to see after the Coronacrisis is over.
Luckily Points is good at chairing meetings. She’s had a lot of practice.
We notice her prickles rise a little, and we all go quiet.
Of course there were a lot of suggestions.
We want the NHS to be properly funded, with all its workers, and other care workers, paid a decent wage. We want financial help to go only to companies that will change to green practices. We want a proper focus on Black Lives Matter, leading to action, not just words. We want clean safe living spaces, with less pollution and fewer cars. We want the pandemic to be recognised as part of the whole ecological crisis, which needs international cooperation. We want well funded education for all people of all ages.
Most of us also think that there should be a universal basic wage, but Gibbs and some of the others weren’t sure how this would work, so we decided to talk more about that at another meeting.
(That whole list will be in the Minutes, which is just as well because I’ve probably forgotten some of the crucial things we thought of.)
Our influence on all this is quite limited, because we aren’t represented in Parliament.
So as usual, we ended up agreeing to intensify our campaign for
Anyway, Monkey was at the meeting, so we all wished him well, and he was allowed to choose which song we’d sing at the end of the meeting.
Usually we sing something like The Red Flag, or Where Do The Children Play.
I’m very fond of the “You can count on trees” song.
I specially like the line “Let all the little plants and animals have their say, Biodiversity hurray hurray”.
But we all agreed that Monkey should choose, and he chose “We went to the animal fair”.
It’s not specially red or green, but it was good to sing it together.
We changed the ending to make it happier than the original version.
I don’t think Monkey really minds whether it’s sad or happy, he just likes singing “Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey”.
I should say that I’ll miss him.
But everyone seems so far away at the moment, it won’t really make much difference that Monkey’s going to be all the way down in outermost Wessex.
Of course I do see Ruffy when he drops off my shopping. He’s very kind.
We have a bit of a chat, but he has to keep a long way off, and he’s got a mask on, so it’s hard to see what he’s saying.
Otherwise it’s just Zoom, and Skype, and Microsquash Teams, and phone calls.
I might as well be living on the moon.
But it’s no good moping.
Better get dressed and get something done.
It really is time I found out what this key is for.
I thought it might be for the Russian dancer, but she says she already has a key.
It’s a mystery.
RRRRRINGGG! RRRRRINGGG!
There’s the phone. I expect it’ll be one of those recorded people trying to sell me something.
(He sounds pleased. What sort of things come in the post that are very nice, I wonder.)
Well, fancy that.
I suppose I’m a bit old to learn something new like swinging from trees.