Christopher’s sister, Sophie, phoned last night to tell me that their father (and hence my father-in-law) Alan had died on Sunday. He’d been increasingly infirm for a number of years now, but mostly affecting his mobility and quality of life rather than anything terminal. However, Sophie believes that he went into a decline dating from […]
I thoroughly enjoyed my holiday – more than I had expected to in fact. I’d thought long and hard about what sort of holiday I wanted, and when to take it, and it all worked out very well. I was badly in need of a break after the bid had been submitted, and before all […]
Sorry for the break in transmission over the past week. I’ve just got back today from a week’s holiday in Croatia. I made an agreement with Christopher before he died that I would use his small pension to pay for one good holiday per year, and take some of his ashes with me to scatter […]
The landscape gardener came around again this evening, to confirm the price and agree a start date of immediately after the August Bank Holiday. I have agreed to pay up-front for the materials – specifically the steel I-beams and 300 new oak sleepers. That is not going to be cheap – but with a small […]
I’ve been pretty tense for the last few weeks. What with dealing with the anniversary of Christopher’s death, and working flat out on a major bid at work, things have been rather stressful at both home and work. Mind you, I don’t mean to complain about having to work hard – it’s been very good […]
Those nice people over at Librivox have included a tribute to Chris in their anniversary podcast, which is available at http://librivox.org/2011/08/09/librivox-community-podcast-116/ There is a short piece about Chris right after the beginning. Note that it includes an extract of him reading William Wilberforce’s speech on abolishing slavery – so if you do listen to […]
My sister has a new Amazon kindle which she was showing me at the weekend. It looked really good, and reminded me that there is a kindle app on Christopher’s iPad, that even has some e-books loaded onto it. I thought it would be worth giving it a go and seeing what it was like […]
It was a year ago today that Christopher died. Well, it was on 7th August, but that was a Saturday last year, so it was yesterday that really hurt the most. Thank you all very much for your cards, thoughts, emails and blog comments – you probably don’t realise how much help you’re being. I […]
The Big Chill Festival is on again in the grounds of Eastnor Castle, just down the road from me. Last year, the disruption it caused to us locals was massive. On the Thursday night, I had needed to get home from the hospice, and the friend who gave me a lift got caught in the […]
In the end I got two different builders to quote for doing the landscaping work on my garden. They came in within 10% of each other which I thought was pretty remarkable, and gives me reasonable confidence that is indeed the “price for the job”. The main difference between the quotes was that one proposed […]
