Busy week

Three lunches with family and friends, a funeral, a wedding, a German conversation group meeting, hours waiting around at the motor trade and a Covid booster jab.  

On Monday I’d to travel to the next county for my Covid booster, which was administered promptly and painlessly.  The following day, as predicted, I’d a sore arm and felt pretty lousy, so it was as well I was kept busy.  Four of us met here to chat in German.  Our practice is for the hosting of the meeting to circulate, and for the host to propose a text to prime the pump.  Coincidentally, my Bern Facebook friend Matthias had posted an article from the Swiss Cystic Fibrosis journal about his participation in a trial of a medication that has transformed his life, so that made for happy reading and a good discussion.  

Straight after that we were off to lunch with Claire and Richard at a nearby hostelry which I won’t be using again in a hurry: we both found the meal a bit testing at the time and more so afterwards.  Great to catch up with old friends, though.  

Lunch out next day at Chris and Jon’s: I took a disused washing up bowl full of plants: Chris is replanning their garden, and I’m rarely short of cuttings and seedlings to exchange with friends.  Super lunch in great company.

On Thursday I spent a couple of hours at the garage, being assailed by Greatest Hits Radio while the grease monkeys tried to find out why the cruise control wasn’t working on the car.  Three test drives later, they found that re-initialising various computers solved the problem.  It also brought into service quite a lot of functions that were not working when we took delivery, eg automatic unlocking as you approach the car, and confirmatory flashes when the car is locked and unlocked.  By the time they’d finished I was starting to get quite stressed and ratty, so I guess my customer card is filed under ‘awkward’.  But the cruise control now works.

Corina’s funeral on Friday was quite sparsely attended, but it has been a few years since her care home closed down - and her customers obviously were no longer in circulation.  We’ve had a few funeral teas lately, and I can say that the Disgustedville Masonic Centre knocks the rest into a cocked hat.

On Saturday we had lunch with Martyn’s sister Sandra on the way to their niece Nina’s wedding.  Churlish to mention it, but as it’s her third, many fingers are crossed.  Her new man Lee seems a happy, sensible sort, so we’re full of optimism.  The reception was generously catered and pleasant - and mercifully free of speechifying - but the room was cramped and noisy, and when the thumping music began, I was very eager to be somewhere - anywhere! - else.  

So today we’ve had a quiet day so far at home.  The jacket I wore to the funeral shed a button on the day, and the one I wore to the wedding was coming close to doing the same, so today I’ve been busy with needle and thread.  The only black thread I could find was in a little étui branded Hotel du Louvre, Paris: my only visit there must have been over thirty years ago.  I could have raided another similar source branded TWA, which was last a brand in 2003, so goodness knows how long I’ve had their needle and thread.  While rummaging I found some Woolworth’s iron-on mending fabric, so have fixed a little tear in one of Margaret’s much-admired quilts.  Good job we don’t throw stuff away, eh?

Photos: our Bramley in blossom, and Annie’s wisteria, and a little azalea, a present from Sandra.

Seemed like a nice idea…

Since the weather is cool but fine today, we thought we’d make a trip to Emmetts, where the primroses and bluebells are beautiful at this time of year.  Had I thought to check the web site, I’d have learned that access from our side of the mountain is blocked by roadworks.  The detour would have taken quite a while, so we opted for a gentle drive home, pausing at Bough Beech to watch a moorhen fishing - and a bunch of old geezers (said he…) sitting on canvas chairs and wielding enormous cameras.  Well, we saw plenty of bluebells by the roadside anyway, plus honesty, lilac, apple and cherry blossom etc, so it wasn’t a wholly wasted journey.  Quite apart from the flowers and blossom, it’s always a joy at this season to see the countless shades of pale green as the trees come out of dormancy.

The little orange car passed the 100 mile mark today, and coped well with the appalling road surfaces that epitomise the legacy of the past fourteen years of - at best - incompetent government.

My new desk arrived on Sunday: fully assembled, thank goodness.  My IKEA skills remain intact, but preferably unused.  Having last used said skills on oak-finish bookshelves, the study thus looks a bit less incoherent than heretofore.  

The packaging was pretty generous, though I feel rather guilty about heaving so much polythene and expanded polystyrene into the bin.  (Given what else has to go in there these days, maybe the plastics are no worse.)  The cardboard, on the other hand has a more honorable future: our new neighbour Lisa is completely restarting the garden across the road with a Japanese theme, so she’s suppressing all the grass, laying cardboard and wood chippings and planting through them.

Chaaarge!!

After much frustration trying and failing to get the car to charge, and three visits from the installers (one of whom put his foot through the garage ceiling), we’re assured that the car will now charge (‘a wire had come off’), and is programmed to be fully charged by 07:00 tomorrow.  You can’t just plug it in and throw a switch: you have to download an ‘app’, register on the same, say who provides your electricity and on which of their list of dozens of tariffs (it didn’t include ours), state inside leg measurement and colour of grandma’s eyes, and goodness knows what else.  Just at the point at which I was running out of blood pressure pills: I’m afraid the installers got somewhat short shrift (though I did offer them tea /coffee which they declined, perhaps fearing I’d lace them with laxatives).  Well, we’ll see in the morning whether the car is fully charged.  Next job is to get the cruise control working.  We use it a lot, largely to keep us down to the speed limits, so would miss it if it didn’t work.

The garden has had a lot of attention today.  We got Ben to weed the bed under the apple tree last time he was here, and I planted it up today with lots of aquilegia seedlings.  Ben was here again today, and lifted a lot of thrift plants from the side of the pond.  They were full of grass and at least one ants’ nest, and are on their way to municipal compost.  He has also moved an acer from where it was too close to the Judas tree.   The garden bin is pretty full now, given also that I cut and edged the grass yesterday.  

The aquilegia seedlings have come long nicely in the nursery bed, so I lifted them with plenty of root ball before planting them out.  Let’s hope they have some of the spectacular flowers of their parents.  I have a lot of trailing fuchsias and lobelias in the greenhouse, ready to replace the cyclamens in the basket at the front door.  Some will populate the pots on the garden steps, replacing primulas and tulips.

Today I’ve had a notification that my new desk is due for delivery on Sunday.  Said notification required me to confirm, which required me to enter both phone numbers twice (even though they’ve got them already), email address (which they’d got by bloody emailing to ask for it), stopping short only of paternal grandmother’s maiden name and date of birth.  Why is everything so complicated these days?  Perhaps, I suppose, because I take longer to learn as I enter my dotage.  

Well, why not?

A flamboyant gesture in one’s declining years.  It’s taking a bit of getting used to: the on-line handbook is practically illegible, looking as if it been three times through a fax machine.  For example, it took me hours to find out how to open the bonnet - no thanks to the manual - and when I finally got in there, apart from the 12v battery, the brake fluid and screenwash reservoirs, there wasn’t a thing I recognised as part of a car.  We haven’t worked out how to make the cruise control work (time for a call to the dealer) and tomorrow’s other job is to try to commission the charger in the garage.  

We went for a ride over the Ashdown Forest this afternoon, so are slowly getting used to how the car drives.  It rides well, even over the atrocious potholes that remind us endlessly of 14 years of Tory government.  Over the 60 miles we’ve put on the clock, we’ve used a quarter of the charge, so that’s pretty satisfactory for our purposes.

End of March

The pension’s in - a few days early because of the Bank Holiday - so that makes for a longish April.  We’ve had a good Easter weekend so far, with a visit last weekend from friends we met on a cruise over four years ago, and next day from Sandra, with whom we’d planned to lunch out.  Martyn not feeling well, we opted to lunch at home instead: I knocked out a pilaff with what there was in the fridge: chouriço, mushrooms, red peppers, onions and garlic, and so far we’ve lived to tell the tale.  with the cruise friends we had home-made sausage rolls, hot cross buns and lemon sponge cakes, so you’ll gather that your obedient servants’ shadows are not exactly shrinking.

Between activities last weekend, I planted a few rows of potatoes in the raised bed at the kitchen door.  Alexandras, chitted from a bag bought at Fortnums, and Charlottes, bought as seed potatoes from an altogether more established seedsman.  Watch this space.  Sandra brought us a fine little azalea, so we’re busily plotting where to plant it.

The rest of the spuds are planted out.  Rather than fanny about with canvas bags and compost, we’ve planted them in the raised bed, and heaved in some blood fish and bone to encourage them.  Which exempts us from the decision what to plant in the raised bed.  I spent an hour in the garden yesterday dragging weeds out of the solid clay of the top bed, and shudder to think how many more hours it will take to clear the rest 

Today we parted company with Egg2, which has served us well for 16 years.  We liked the same model, Egg1, bought a few years earlier, so much that we bought another, so called because they are pointy at the front and round at the back.  Anyway, they both served us well, and Egg2 was altogether more reliable than its elder sibling.  Time has begun to take its toll, however, so we’ve replaced it with an electric car which, right now, is proving rather frustrating.  These days, you need a a moderately ungifted child to guide you through the maddening software and apps that attend modern day motoring.  If I finally master this one, I’ll be happy to hang up my stringback gloves.