I thought I’d take advantage of the run of Bank Holidays and have a few days away. So I booked three nights in a two-bedroom self-catering apartment in Bath, and invited my parents to join me. The flat was in Laura Place, which (if I remember my Jane Austen correctly) was where the snobbish cousin, […]
I had planned to have a nice lazy week before Easter. It didn’t quite turn out that way, as the “maintenance” on the house turned out to be more extensive than I’d hoped. On Monday I had a landscape gardener and a structural engineer come round to look at my back garden and suck their […]
Today would have been our eighteenth wedding anniversary. It gave me quite a jolt when I realised this morning what the date was. We usually marked our anniversary with a good meal, which Chris would cook. So I decided that it would be appropriate to commemorate the date by making a big effort with dinner […]
I’ve taken this week and next off work – making maximum use of the cluster of bank holidays. I’ve deliberately not planned much for this week – I’m mostly tying to catch up on my sleep, and have been doing some of the chores around the house which have stacked up. I took a whole […]
Christopher’s favourite webcomic was xkcd.com. Randall Munroe, who writes it, is an ex-NASA physicist, and the website comes with a warning “This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).” A recent comic strip […]
In this case, I am in fact talking about the perils of living in a Victorian cottage, which requires ongoing maintenance. But I could equally well be talking about myself at the moment – I feel about ten years older than I did before Chris was taken ill. At least it’s moderately easy to do […]
After the last play I went to turned out to be a “comedy” about the effects that someone dying of cancer has on their wife and friends, I was a bit cautious about going back to the theatre. But this week, Malvern Theatres was showing Yes Prime Minister, and I really enjoyed the TV series […]
I posted last week about the Greek poem which had been haunting me as I tried to get to sleep, and about how Christopher’s Librivox recordings were living on even after his death, I suppose giving him some kind of immortality, like Heraclitus’ poems. Today I got a blog comment from a teacher: “For the […]
I went back to the doctor today to get the results of last week’s blood tests. And on the whole they were absolutely fine. I’m not diabetic; my thyroid and liver functions are normal; my campaign to eat more broccoli and spinach has worked as I’m no longer anaemic. Even my blood pressure is boringly […]
Yesterday was the end of the financial year at work, and I’m pleased to report that I made it in one piece. When I think of everything that’s happened over the last year, that seems an achievement in itself! I delivered the last remaining milestone reports on time, then came home with a throbbing headache […]
