Ever since we first got together, I’ve become something of a closet potter. It was all Christopher’s doing originally – he’d always wanted to understand how to throw a pot on a wheel. So for one of our first holidays together he booked us a week on a pottery course down in Cornwall. The idea […]
Malvern used to be a spa town back in the Victorian age, but that all died away many decades ago, and the old bath houses for the Water Cure are all now banks and blocks of flats. However, a few years back an ambitious developer decided to build a brand new spa in the town. […]
Last month I blogged about the frustrations I’d been having with the administrators of Chris’s pension scheme – letters addressed to the wrong person, with an incorrect return address, missing enclosures, or just not arriving at all. My boss saw the post, and suggested to me that I was actually in a position to do […]
Whenever I think I’m getting close to finishing dealing with the glut of paperwork following Christopher’s death, something else I’d forgotten about comes out of the woodwork. I know that there are still tax affairs to settle arising from his redundancy payment. HMRC wrote back to me just last week asking for yet more information […]
I’ve had quite a tough week for various reasons this week. Christopher’s birthday made me reflect on what I’ve lost, and that was painful. Work has been challenging, with lots of fire-fighting of problems, together with trying to get a bid submitted, and a long meeting at a customer site yesterday, so that is all […]
Christopher would have been forty-seven today. It still seems so wrong that he died so young. I found today rather difficult. I really struggled to get out of bed this morning; I was pretty depressed and really did not want to move. However, I’d taken the precaution of arranging for a couple of workmen to […]
You sometimes read in the papers about houses, or just bedrooms, which have been left untouched by the occupants since the original owner died, many years earlier. That really doesn’t strike me as very healthy. I may have a huge Christopher-shaped hole in my life, but preserving the house as it was last August is […]
I mentioned a few weeks ago that one of the major symptoms of stress I have is teeth grinding. I wear a dental splint every night to try to minimise the effects of this, but even so I’m currently paying the price. On Boxing Day, I was brushing my teeth on the boat in Venice, […]
On the boat in Venice we had a “Gala dinner” on Christmas Day. After the main course (no, not turkey – beef wellington which I don’t think I’ve had before but was pretty good) the Purser made some announcements. First, there were two couples on board who were celebrating wedding anniversaries. They each got a […]
My flight from Gatwick to Venice was on time – amazing really given the amount of snow outside and the massive disruption at Heathrow. But the allegedly “fast” bag drop was a total misnomer, the queues for Security were interminable, and the breakfast service at the airside Garfunkles was very slow. So I only had […]
