I’ve got nearly a week off work, with leave that was booked well before Covid Lockdown. Today I ought to be having a glass of wine over dinner in Lille, having spent the day exploring WW1 battlefields and some of the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries in northern France and Belgium. It would have been another […]
After the relative success of the Morrison’s “lucky dip” £35 food parcel the other week, I thought it was worth ordering another one. It is much easier to get a delivery slot for a pre-packed food parcel than it is for a proper shop, and the last one certainly had enough in it to keep […]
For several years now I’ve been getting a weekly or fortnightly grocery delivery from Morrisons. It’s been extremely convenient, though I have wondered how on Earth they make it profitable. While I’ve been in Coronavirus quarantine for the past few weeks, the online shopping and delivery has been an absolute lifeline. However, the whole country […]
My washing machine started making ominous noises last week on the spin cycle. It really sounded quite unwell. But given that the U.K. public is not allowed to have house calls at the moment, I didn’t see how I’d be able to get it fixed. I was just hoping that it would hang on in […]
Today is the last day of the Financial Year for both my company and our main customers. It’s always an extremely busy time of the year, with project reports to be written, reviewed and delivered. I’ve had three significant reports to review and approve in the last two days, which is about par for the […]
My mother died last month. We had been expecting it since around Christmas, and fortunately we were able to hold the funeral well before everything was shut down with the Coronavirus pandemic. Now it’s a case of sorting out the paperwork. My sister and I were both named as executors of her Will, but in […]
I went to an industry dinner about twelve years or more ago, where the after-dinner speaker was a Government Chief Scientific Advisor. He was a very interesting man, a professor of epidemiology at I think Imperial College. He gave the most terrifying after dinner speech I have ever heard. It was all about the next […]
We’ve had a lot of rain lately. An awful lot of rain, particularly in the Welsh mountains that feed the local rivers, which then flood several days later. The river Severn has been particularly badly affected, and the flood defences have been tested to the extreme. Malvern is too high to be directly affected, but […]
In the afternoon, we moved on from the shops of Stratford to the Three Way House Hotel in Mickleton, the home of the Pudding Club. As usual, we started the evening with a bottle of wine, before moving to the lounge for the Main Event. This year we were pleasantly surprised when the expected complementary […]
I’ve been so busy lately, that it had pretty much slipped my mind that it was time for the annual Pudding Club outing, and its associated retail extravaganza. Fortunately my ex-colleague who organises our participation in the event sent me an email saying I’d be picked up from home at 09:15 last Saturday. It was […]
