Our new room; our present world

 

We think we've got it cracked at last.  The replacement glazing panels almost line up, and as I've reported, the furniture removers came in last Friday to bring the sofa bed and Martyn's desk downstairs.  We've begun to populate the walls with favourite paintings and posters, and have moved the router to a better position in the room (the ironmongery in the sofa bed was not helping the signal to propagate round the house).  It would take a bit of furniture removing to allow us to deploy the sofa bed, but a week hence we'll have another double in my old study, and the sofa just about works as a single as is, so I think we've beds enough.

The story out in the garden is less good.  The potatoes are finished after a rather modest crop, my feeble bean frames have gone over, and the tomatoes have got blight.  We ought still to get a few, but not the bumper crop we'd hoped for.  Still, we are beginning to crop leeks, and the first two went into a couple of lasagnes I made for the visit of Martyn's niece and her family: I made a sauce of leeks, garlic, tomatoes, celery and carrots, then did green lentils in one pan and mince in another, and shared the veg sauce between them before assembling the dishes.  

Better pens than mine are commenting on the disastrous situation in Afghanistan, notably Polly Toynbee and the Grauniad leader writer, so I'll keep this brief.  My country has been far too ready to deploy its cannon fodder into hopeless campaigns over the centuries, and seems not to learn.  The intervention may have given Afghan women a brief respite, as well as twenty years of education and relative freedom, but the precipitate withdrawal of coalition forces looks like setting things back another century.  I do hope I'm wrong.

Back here in the land of the privileged, we'd a very enjoyable lunch in the county town today with our friends from further east.  Once again, I found the inside space unbearably noisy, with people shouting over the muzak, and ignoring the shrieks of their 'orrible sprogs.  Fortunately, it was fine enough to sit outside, where the aural surround was disco music from a flat opposite and collapsing masonry down the street.  Sitting outside also allowed us a privileged view of passers by, many of them young, morbidly obese, repulsively inked or, more frequently, all of the above.  Svelte I ain't by a long chalk, but I hate to think what some of these bladders of lard will look like when they're my age (though I doubt many of them will make such old bones). 

Talking of which, I'm sticking to the physio regime, and doing the occasional spell on the pedal exerciser (the packaging of which, incidentally, described it as a 'peddle exerciser').  Things vary from day to day, but the experience of the past fews days suggests that the regime is making things worse.  I'll have a chat with my physio guru on Friday, and we'll see what he has to suggest.  I walked more easily from the restaurant after lunch than I did to it before, so perhaps oenotherapy is the answer.