BOREDOM

The rain falls, heavily, consistently, as it has done for days, or so it seems.  The barometer on the wall shows up 'rain and wind.'  There has been nothing else.  Outside, the sky is the colour and consistency of putty. From his seat, which he bought when he left his last full-time employment ten years ago, looking out through the French windows, he can see a bedraggled hedge sparrow slinking along the patio, looking for a morsel of food.  It pecks at a soggy digestive biscuit he threw out yesterday, on the grounds that the biscuit was too soft to eat. Water drips from his garden bench, his picnic table, the shrubs and the trees in his garden.  There is a pool of water at the back of the garden, beside the stone wall, where the soil is compacted. He pushed a garden fork into the ground earlier, but it made no difference. The puddle grows larger.  He expects a drake and a duck mallard to alight on it soon. He curses the garden, not for the first time.  Its inability to support any growth of any colour other than green is legendary. He had planted flowers and bulbs, but they never grew. He made his own compost, but instead of it being dry and crumbly after four years of gestation in a black plastic tub, it turned out to be like the giant molten jell-o man in 'Ghostbusters'. To add a little colour to the greens and duns of the garden, he invested recently in some bunting, which he strung out between two trees.  The prevailing winds there are from the west, so, every morning, he has to go out into the back garden and return the bunting to its original position, because the wind has blown it to the eastern  end of the string and the individual leaves? pieces? pyramids? strips? of bunting are jammed togethuer like shunting wagons, invariably almost out of reach of his flailing grasp. The outside temperature gauge shows two degrees centigrade.  This is 3 p.m. on Easter Tuesday. He cannot recall anything like this weather in thirty years.  The outside rain gauge is full, and is now a drinking vessel for coal tits. He picks up his book. It is a history of Canonmills and Inverleith and Edinburgh. He reads: "The Poppy factory had been established in 1938 in Tolboth Wynd, Calton Road, and moved to 129 Canongate in 1949 where they remained until their last removal, to Warriston Road, in 1968." "Someone save me from this drivel", he says, and flings the book down. In half an hour, he will place several baking potatoes in the oven. In an hour, he will similarly place a casserole dish of chilli con carne he prepared earlier on another shelf of the oven and there will be the evening meal.  He will have to fill in time until then. Across the street, the middle-aged woman who wears peculiar clothes leaves her house and climbs into her car.  She is wearing a blue raincoat, yellow leggings and a beret of shocking pink.  She looks like Bertie Bassett of liquorice allsorts fame. He never found out her name, even though she and her husband moved into the street three years ago. He tries to recall if he has ever spoken to her, and thinks he hasn't.  Her husband reminds him of Mr Pickwick.  He hasn't spoken to him, either.  He recalls how busy he was just a few short years ago and mourns, not for the first time, the cut and thrust of office life that was his raison d'etre for nigh on fifty years.