My college friends Tom and Katie, and their daughter (my un-god-daughter) Tia came to visit on Sunday, on their way home from seeing family in Wales. We all went out to lunch at the Plough and Harrow (again! I seem to be going there quite a bit recently, which is definitely a good thing). Then […]
Last Friday I was invited to a dinner in Oxford, the annual engineering scholars’ reunion at my college. I wasn’t able to go last year, as it was in the middle of Christopher’s final round of chemotherapy – the one which ended up with him hospitalised in an isolation ward with neutropenia. But in previous […]
I think this is likely to be a long-running saga, which I shall spread over several posts and probably several months. You have been warned! This is what my garden looks like currently. It is heavily landscaped, with the first terrace (where this picture was taken) being as high as the house, and two further […]
I went back to work on Tuesday after taking over two weeks off over the run of Bank Holidays. On the one hand, it felt odd being back after an extended break, but on the other I was quite pleased to get back to a routine as I’d pretty much had enough of myself after […]
I’m not over-keen on spas, and was rather underwhelmed with the one in Malvern. But since I was in Bath last week, staying just a few minutes walk away from the new Thermae Spa complex, I took the opportunity to pay a visit. Partly, I was curious to see the new spa, having spent a […]
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 […]
