Who is that masked man?

So what has been happening in the two months of my blog hole? Well, there has been the gradual easing of the lockdown which some people said was too early and that the government were forced into it because of the inability of the population to take restrictions seriously. The really hot weather we had did not help keep people indoors. Now it is like a Tom and Jerry cartoon with a Spike popping up every now and then. One of my neighbours said yesterday that he was going to be buying extra toilet roll every shopping trip in preparation for the next nationwide lockdown.

The football season resumed and finished. I doubted it would at the time because I was expecting a player in a team to have a positive test for the whole thing to fall at the first hurdle again. This didn’t happen though and Liverpool got crowned and United managed to throw away a chance at a trophy. Yes, we improved since January but always failed in the important games.

Now the new season is upon us this weekend and yet four teams are not playing until the following weekend. United, City, Aston Villa and Burnley. The latter two because they were due to play the former two. That leaves an extra game to squeeze into an already congested season which ends with the Euros 2020 Rebooted.

Further to my blog at weekend, I have now divested Trouble Cross of the two elements that are now separate books and it is almost exactly 20,000 words shorter. I have made another couple of tweaks by taking out the chapter headings and even splitting up a couple of them because on investigation one chapter was over 9,000 words and one 7,500 words which is far too long for a chapter. I had to decide whether to change the title and I thought I had to as Trouble Cross is the total of the now three separate books. It is now entitled Pratt, Pratt, Wally and Pratt Investigates which incidentally was one of the chapter headings and a title I nearly used initially. This is not on Amazon yet because I still have to create a cover.

On that subject I have now been in touch with someone who designs book covers among other things and she is currently working on one for my kid’s book which definitely needs a better one than the plain one it currently has. May improve sales or may not but it is worth a try.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Mandatory masking came into force although about 50% of people I see in the corner shop obviously have not heard about this new law. Who knew one could have a laugh picking a mask? There are hundreds of designs out there and I decided I may as well go with humour. They are more expensive of course but reusable. The one I really wanted to go with I decided not to because I thought some people could take offence – I find you lack of mask disturbing. Considering the number of maskless people this could have been taken as a comment on their conduct and I didn’t want to end up in any aggressive fisticuffs. Instead I went for the following: