This blog was originally started by my late husband Christopher, to document living with and – as it turned out – dying of cancer. I then kept it up, covering rebuilding my life again. Over the past nearly eleven years, I’ve been renovating the house, working possibly too hard (especially at the end of the […]
Yesterday marked the end of another Financial Year, with the associated mad rush to finish reports and deliver (and bill!) them on time. It’s been pretty exhausting – as it is every year. But this year, it’s all been done under lockdown conditions, which has felt very odd. I did go into the office for […]
It’s been a particularly unpleasant few days up here on the hills. There has been an intermittent water leak from the mains just outside my neighbour’s house for ages. Severn Trent have dug up the road multiple times, and each time claimed they’d fixed it. Well, they clearly hadn’t, as they were back again yesterday […]
Normally around this time of year, I’d be taking my annual Girls’ Weekend Away to the Pudding Club, via some extensive retail therapy in Stratford and Broadway. But not this year. I haven’t actually left the house for nearly two weeks – I’m working from home and getting a weekly supermarket delivery. Instead of strolling […]
My mother’s car, which I inherited, was due its MOT this month. Well, actually, it was originally due it over the summer, but the government in its wisdom back in the first lockdown decided that MOTs were not that essential, and handed out automatic 6 month extensions to all cars which were due one. So […]
Oh well, back in to lockdown. Not that I was going anywhere anyway. I’ve been pretty much snowed in for the past week. We had about 7cm (3”) of snow up here on the hills on Monday and Tuesday last week, which still hasn’t completely melted yet. The council did a good job at keeping […]
Two weeks ago, where I live was in COVID Tier 2, so we could only meet in small groups outdoors. In the mini-lockdown before that, I could talk to my neighbour over the fence, or up on the hill, but not in her garden. Then a week ago, Herefordshire was downgraded to Tier 1, meaning […]
The mice are back! They’ve been very quiet for months, but the recent cold wet snap seems to have driven them back indoors. I was rudely awoken at 01:10 on Thursday morning by the sound of something in hobnail boots walking across the floor of the loft, dragging a clanking chain behind it! Or at […]
I’ve not been posting much because nothing much has been happening. Lockdown 2.0 is very much like Lockdown 1.0 but a bit slicker. The shopping is largely sorted, mostly because Morrisons have expanded their delivery service. It now arrives weekly, picked from their Tewksbury store. That makes more sense than previously, when it was delivered […]
Ten years ago, shortly after Christopher died, I was having coffee in Waitrose, idly flicking through the free newspaper in the coffee shop. I came across an article about a recently launched “social enterprise” / not-for-profit company which promised to take old unwanted cars of your hands, regardless of condition. They would realise the value […]
