- Your only contact with the outside world is: the child's daily reports of bitchy schoolyard Monster High games; your Twitter feed; the mountain of junk mail collecting at your door; and regular emails from Johnnie Boden. You now believe that the NHS is being privatised by a crack team of Abu Qatada and the freaky off-spring of classic ghouls; all armed with doner kebabs and adorned in floral frocks. You'd like to be outraged and pitchfork-y, but this requires too much effort and may result in you having to leave the house.
- The Funsized Fascist - instinctively sensing weakness - subjects you to days and days of craft-based torture. Any attempt to extricate yourself from the situation only leads to menacing threats of the wrong tops on pens, glitter paste in your shoes or a horrifying copydex waterboarding technique (clearly subliminally transmitted to eight year olds by Blue Peter). Your house looks like it's been raped by Mister Maker. You retreat to the broom cupboard.
- You are oddly comforted by the womblike claustrophobia created by the piles of newspapers, Vogues and takeaway menus collecting at your door. You seriously consider making an architectural feature of them and like to think you are Edie Beale reincarnate.
- Your mother starts leaving cake-food parcels on the doorstep, and gradually further and further down the driveway, in an attempt to coax you out of your torpor. It doesn't work. You try to train the cat to fetch her daily offerings. When this fails (the Indoor Cat is even lazier than you) you bribe the child to collect them. But you're out of cash, so the opportunistic eight year old is suddenly rotund from cake and wearing your wedding ring.
- The nearest you get to sunlight is from the patch of the window you sleeve-cleaned to spy on the village people.
- The highlight of your day is your husband's central heating rant. He pretends to kick the radiators in temper, but you know that he's set the house to freezing to persuade you outdoors (which looks strangely warmer, despite the February month). To counteract this, you up your pyjama layers to four and concentrate on knitting your leg hair into an attractive thermal onesie.
- You lie to your friends. You can't meet them because you are 'oh so busy' and 'ever so popular'. In truth the only friends you have at the moment are Jo Stockton, Lorelai Lee, Fanny Logan and a family sized jar of gherkins. (This is not such a bad thing. It could be worse.)
- Your diet, dubious normally, centres on the nuclear holocaust provisions at the back of the pantry (custard powder, soggy boudoir biscuits, tinned fruit of 1970s vintage and unidentified brown sticks that you mistakenly take for orange Matchsticks only to realise, post-consumption, that they're really your husband's supply of Christmas Hamlets). Except for those days when you feel up to facing your public, and you can muster up the required energy to beat a path through you leg hair and mountain of newspapers to answer the door to the takeaway boy. (Who you now consider family.)
- You escalate your OCD to medical intervention levels. You occupy hours categorising and cataloguing your books, vinyl and lipsticks. The new filing system, satisfyingly only understandable to you and the Indoor Cat, means it takes a guaranteed 48 hours to find your treasured copy of 'The Pursuit of Love' and your child's maths homework.
- You catch your husband - rightly turned off by the crust of your new look - making eyes at the garden shed/hens/weather station.
*I'm not really a hermit at all. I am still getting up, still getting dressed, still working, still mothering. I'm just hiding my fear and pain behind a flippant lip and fictitious laziness. I'm pretending everything is tickety-boo-hunky-dory and that any reluctance to do anything at the moment is my new found commitment to hermitude. It's not. I am not very well and am struggling to deal with sickness and the daily demands placed on my shoulders. Can you smell the self-pity, it has a distinct whiff of ashtray and gherkin?
So there you go. Hopefully normal service will resume shortly. In the meantime let's take some delight in the Judy Garland rattle that now accompanies my walk.
gin-nurtered time waster.