The past few days have been rather chaotic again. I was starting to feel better, got up and got busy…  then Daddy had other ideas. 

What Daddy didn’t know before that point was that I’d had a couple of hot cross buns for breakfast, so far from just satisfied feelings, our session of passionate lovemaking on a Saturday morning had kick-started the fermentation process in my belly and left me with yet another bad bout of bloat. Bang went my plans to organise the shed. Instead, I was left feeling like I was about to birth an elephant. 

I’m okay now, I’m used to the drill: heat pad, Rennie Deflatine, peppermint tea. And lie on your left side, not your right, unless you want to see your dinner back up.

Fortunately this time I actually recovered quite quickly, and come Saturday evening I was even hungry enough to order myself a curry for dinner. ChatGPT forbade me from my standard chicken tikka masala, given my somewhat unsettled stomach, so I’m on butter chicken and steamed rice instead. 

It was nice, even if after two pieces of chicken and a few forkfuls of rice, I couldn’t eat anymore. Butter chicken is new to me. A loss of appetite as of late is not. 

I did have a wobble with Valkyries yesterday – not a major one, but a silly one. Valkyries is a self-professed domestic god, and I am a self-professed domestic goddess, which led me to a simple (if perhaps understandable) fear: how might we work in a relationship where we don’t have to lead one another? I’m not used to that! 

On the one hand, it’s quite appealing: I hate having to nag my partners to do things, and I will typically resort to “fine, I’ll just do it myself” – but then quietly resent them for letting that be the case. 

On the other, the prospect of not having to nag is oddly terrifying for me: if they do as I ask the first time, or worse, they see the things that need doing without my having to ask… what then? 

In a weird way, I’ve also noticed, having someone that I don’t have to lead allows me to lean into my submission more. It allows me to become soft, supportive and feminine, rather than being the bossy bitch that nobody really wants me to be. 

Valkyries and I did also discuss what it might be like if we were neighbours, given that Valkyries said my neighbour is “infatuated” with me (I told him that was like the pot calling the kettle black). I get along well with my neighbour, and Valkyries seemingly gets along well with his neighbour, so it’s an interesting thought to imagine how we might be if we were one another’s neighbour. I am very much “the girl next door” — or the woman next door — and I have had things for my neighbours in the past, to boot.

I am close to my neighbour now, and we do wind one another up (and help one another out) often, although we’ve both sworn that there’s nothing romantic there. I see him as just a friendly, helpful neighbour, and he says he sees me in the same way — we’ve both said we aren’t each other’s “type”. 

So his need to tell me all of his personal stories, send me little Whatsapp video updates and check in on me regularly makes little sense to me. We don’t love one another, we’re just neighbours. Just friends. 

Valkyries did say that he finds it easy to “chew the fat” with me, a statement my neighbour would surely agree with if only he knew what it meant. It makes me roll my eyes – it’s something only my beloved Admiral would say. 

I did have another incident with Huxley this morning, who decided that Mummy stopping to swap out his soiled puppy pad was exactly the right time for him to empty his bladder on Mummy’s brand new hallway rug. So he is now in belly bands, though ChatGPT has advised me to remove the washable puppy pads from his crate too, so that they smell “less loo” to him — he only gets a wipeable bed pad and a belly band until he learns to hold it, and the puppy pads may, in fact, be encouraging him to go sooner. 

The more you know.

But going back to my neighbour here. The one I don’t have feelings for, and vice versa. 

This afternoon I had a groceries delivery, and I was chatting to the (familiar) driver while I took my shopping from the crates. Normal stuff. 

I tossed a 2kg bag of dog food down onto the hallway floor to be put away as I put everything else away. Again, perfectly normal behaviour.  

The driver leaves, the neighbour appears. 

“What was that? Everything okay?” he asks. He looks concerned. 

“Yeah, why?”

“I heard a loud bang. I just wanted to check you’re okay” he says. 

“I threw a bag of dog food down. I don’t think I threw it down that hard though” I giggle. 

He stops to chat. I roll my eyes. I’ve got things I have to do. 

I grant him five minutes of my time, a courtesy gesture for his concern, but then I need to take my leave. He looks almost saddened and I feel bad. 

To make it worse, I’ve spent some of my time this evening, thinking about some of the other little things that I might have missed before. Not the big things – like the time he watched me build a garage shelving unit – but the small things: the way he looks at me while he sings Disney songs to his daughter, or this – the way he regularly checks up on me over seemingly nothing at all.

The way I told him last week that I’d just recovered from a cold and food poisoning, and he spoke to me as though I’d just returned from battle.

I wanted to suggest Strange Magic to him, because I’m sure his daughter would love a Disney movie with fairies and magic, especially one that I had recommended. I thought he’d love a film written by Star Wars writer, George Lucas, too – nerds unite, amirite?

I’m about to text him to suggest it when I stop myself: what if he gets the wrong idea?