The clocks have gone forward; so it must be summer time. Unfortunately, it has simultaneously got quite a lot colder; so although this evening is lighter, it is pretty chilly. Earlier (it seemed very early) we had a joint service at St Luke’s – café church, and I played guitar, with Nicky on keyboards and young Snell on bass guitar. Dot was tired out after yesterday; so she came later and just sang. It was a good service with a strong St Aug representation, and cake.

As it’s Mothering Sunday, Dot and I decided to put flowers on the graves of our parents and wondered if anyone would put flowers on our graves (in due course). It’s all to do with proximity, and very easy for us. After North Walsham cemetery we went and walked in Bacton Woods, which was sheltered from the wind and let some sunshine in. Very pleasant.

The previous two days (starting with Friday evening) saw us volunteering at a Norwich Christian Meditation Centre event featuring Rachel Rose Reid, who is a brilliant Jewish storyteller. Learnt quite a lot about the Old Testament! We also looked after the money and were on the welcome desk. Those two days were actually quite warm.

On Thursday evening I met Dot in the city and we had a snack in The Exchange at Jarrolds, followed by a drink in the wine bar and then a Book Launch, which actually took place up on the third floor. It was a photographic book about ruined Norfolk churches by a guy called Clive Dunn (Don’t panic; it wasn’t him). He gave a short but interesting talk. Susan Curran, the publisher, seemed pleased to see us ( I often patronise her launches) and we chatted to her and her husband – also to Matt Williams, who goes to our church and is shortly to publish a book on Submerged Norwich. He is a geologist, but I am trying not to hold that against him. Really nice evening, and very well attended.

The previous day we had afternoon tea at Des and Chris’s, and they told us about their far eastern holiday, though without pictures. Nice biscuits, though.

And as I mentioned last time, Jessie’s funeral was on Monday, when it was extremely cold, but bright. David drove up for it, and gave Philip a lift down to Centre Parcs at Elvedon afterwards. He was having a break there. Also present were Teresa and, amazingly, Sheila, who is 90. Both of them seemed very cold; so I hope another funeral is not imminent. Eleanor took the service – very gentle, as Jessie would have wanted. Afterwards there was food and drink at Elm Court Farmhouse up the road in Horsham St Faith’s.

Since then I happened to notice in the paper that Lily’s husband Roy Lond had died; so I wrote her a card. Am thinking about going to the funeral, though I never met him.

We had an enjoyable weekend – made even better by our granddaughter calling us yesterday evening on FaceTime and having a long chat about what she had been doing. Showed us a really good drawing she’d done of Jenna Coleman (which we gained Brownie points by recognising!), plus a game she is designing and making as part of her graphics lessons. Really nice talking to her.

Most of Saturday and Sunday was spent at Walsingham, where we were on retreat with members of our Cake and Compline group. We took Judy with us, and the Archers and Eleanor arrived separately at about lunchtime on Saturday. We all had lunch together in Norton’s café. Dot and I shocked the others by also having a gin and tonic: gin is a bit of a speciality there. Claire arrived late, which was not surprising.

We had lovely – though quite small – rooms upstairs, which gave us a good view over the complex. We also had the use of a meeting room for our sessions, which I had prepared under the loose heading of Lost in Translation. I made use of Prayers of the Cosmos and Water into Wine, as well as some other material, and it all seemed to go down well. Claire didn’t make it to the first session.

Eleanor went home after the evening meal, because she is now a vicar and had to lead a service at St Helen’s the next day. The rest of us played a few games, including Dixit, in another meeting room. The meal itself was good, and large numbers of other people suddenly materialised: it turned out that they were groups from different parts of the country. The shrine priest had a chat with us. Nice bloke.

On the Sunday we had breakfast and eventually a third session. We were delayed by David having a long phone call from his mother (his father is very ill) and then by Claire deciding to have a bath. However, we did get through it all, and ended the day with a roast beef lunch. The weather was beautifully sunny, but with a very cold wind, getting colder in the afternoon. Dot, Judy and I visited the farm shop before heading home, arriving about 4pm.

The previous day we had our hair cut. These things need to be recorded. On Thursday I spent quite a lot of time at the UEA Sainsbury Centre refectory, where we had a couple of meetings attempting to sort out the Paston Footprints project and then having a meeting of the Steering Committee. I have only a vague idea of what happened, and I did the minutes. I think a good way of getting more out of life would be to avoid going to as many meetings as possible.

On Wednesday Dot and I walked up to Presto, where we managed to secure a table for a light lunch. Our main reason for going was to say goodbye to Kathy and Roberto, who are retiring again. They have many loyal customers, and most of them had booked tables for the last two weeks, but we were early enough to sneak in at the back. Spoke to the retiring couple and to both waitresses, who we have go to know quite well.

On Tuesday evening I went got Jurnet’s poetry evening. I never feel totally at ease there, though the quality of poetry is pretty good. On this occasion Colin Payne, the chess player/musician/poet, turned up unexpectedly, and there was quite a large gathering altogether. The theme was March Hares, and although I usually forget about themes, I did write a poem with that title, which I read. Also one called Birds of Prey.

Today is a bit sombre in mood, as Jessie’s funeral is this afternoon. I still have a b it of a cough (not helped by doing a lot of talking over the weekend); so no doubt I will be rather on edge. David is driving up.

Happily, the passport, driving licence and birth certificate all came back safely, but Phil K is far from comfortable about sending his off. I now have a certificate; so I am DBS-certified, which must be reassuring to someone. Dot and I meanwhile are still under the weather with catarrh and a cough – hers rather worse than mine. It came back last Thursday, but despite that we had Neville and Mary Thrower round for a meal, which took Dot an awfully long time to prepare but was delicious. Very pleasant evening.

On Friday evening I was well enough to drive to Halesworth despite the still persistent windy weather, and read three poems at the Swan. Good quality evening: chatted to Kaaren, Sue and Nina, as well as the Dutchman and Mike Bannister, who fell off his chair while we were talking. I don’t usually have that effect, but I think he was OK.

Earlier that day Paul came round with Maryta, who is now out of hospital (obviously). She seemed a bit subdued but not too bad. Joe arrived at the station to be met by his father while we looked after Maryta. That seemed to go OK. Paul has relinquished his flat, as he has come to the end of his lease.

On Saturday the weather was as bad as ever; so I drove us up to St Andrew’s Hall, despite Dot’s cough being quite bad, for a performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the Norwich Philharmonic (with some help from Koblenz). Parked successfully in the Monastery car park. Halfway through the first half Dot had to go out because of her cough and spent the rest of the performance (before and after the interval) in a chair by the door. During the interval we spoke to Howard, who had forgotten he was preaching the next day. Anna was second violin, and Paul was a bass. In the Requiem, not the church.

We also saw Sue and Roger Eagle and Neil and Harriet from Saxlingham, with whom I had quite a long chat. They and the man sitting beside us were all quite concerned about Dot. Probably thought I was a heartless husband for staying in my seat. But she wasn’t in need of succour: just coughing.

Yesterday I led the service, and Howard turned up with a really good sermon. Impressive. On the minus side, our BT TV box seems to have given up the ghost, but I have been using the BT player via my phone and on to the screen; so no real disaster. However, I guess I have to do something about it.

Norwich are still top of the Championship, and there was an amazing game in the Six Nations, with England 31-7 up at half-time against Scotland, and in the end scoring a conversion with the last kick of the match to salvage a 38-38 draw. Wales won the Grand Slam, but that wasn’t nearly as interesting.

Today Dot is slightly better and has done an REQM assessment at Harleston – getting there just in time after I forgot to warn her that the road was closed at Hempnall Green. She is also, as I write, at a centring prayer session. Hope she isn’t doing too much.

The massage (neck and shoulders) seemed to go well, but following it my cold did develop, and I had a couple of really bad days, though not in the usual way, mainly – but not entirely – a bad cough, which still hasn’t quite gone away. I was told by Luke this morning, after he arrived at 8.30am unexpectedly to finish off our kitchen lights, that massage can reduce the efficiency of your immune system temporarily; so maybe that’s what happened.

It was bad enough for me to cancel a meeting at the NRO on Thursday morning, but then seemed to improve a bit, and I was well enough to go round the Hendersons’ on Saturday afternoon for tea with Paul and Holly. It then got worse again, and I had a bad night before staying at home on Sunday. I then missed the PCC meeting on Monday. It’s an ill wind…

Meanwhile Dot has been going strong, braving some really cold, windy and often wet weather which shows little sign of abating. Yesterday she met William Armstrong, the former city coroner – not to plan for my demise but to help him set up a City College reunion. They attended the college together: there were two other women there who remembered Dot in a lot more detail than she remembered them. They also remembered her being met out of college by some CNS boys who were “all in love with her”. Sort of rings a bell.

In the evening yesterday I drove Dot round to Phil’s so that she could deliver his presents without presenting him with a handful of germs, which might have happened if I’d delivered them. Meanwhile I have been DBS-checked so that I can become an authorised worship assistant. So far I have been an unauthorised one. Bit nervous about sending off my passport, driving licence and birth certificate in the same envelope, but happily they all came back this morning, intact.

Bit of a hiatus there, though not an empty one. Jessie died last Friday: we received a phone call just after we arrived in Buxton for the weekend. My iPhone died too – it lost the ability to charge, and although this was corrected by a shady guy I took it to in one of the murkier parts of Coventry, it suddenly lost all sound. I had been meaning to replace it anyway, but it happened at a bad time.

Yesterday I went to O2 after the Archant pensioners’ coffee morning and purchased an XR. Because my old phone was not backed up to the Cloud (don’t ask me why), I had to take the new one home and effect the set-up myself. This was presented as being very easy, and it would have been if I could have got the SIM card in the new phone. After trying various ways round I gave up and walked swiftly back up to O2, where I was told the SIM card was bent; they had to replace it and swap the information, which they seem to have done all right, although annoyingly my Steps app failed to transfer about 5000 steps. So yesterday I must have done about 8000-9000 steps in all, and I am down for fewer that 2000.

All this may sound very trivial compared with Jessie dying, and of course it is. But she had been on the brink for a while and was in some distress trying to breathe on the last couple of days. We will miss our visits to her very much: she always made me welcome from the time I started going out with Dot all those years ago. She is the last of her generation in Dot’s family.

Yesterday, in between the two visits to O2, Dot and I went to North Walsham cemetery to put some flowers on her sister’s grave: it would have been her 70th birthday. It was odd not going to see Jessie as well. While I was paying my second visit to O2 Dot was attending an Ofsted feedback at South Walsham – possibly the first time she had been to North and South Walsham on the same day.

Our annual visit to Buxton went well. We called in at Coventry on the Thursday, staying at the Premier Inn near the M6 overnight (very welcoming) and visiting Andrew the next morning. We found him in his new, much larger room with a double bed and his new sofa, which I had ordered from Argos earlier in the week and which had been delivered the day before. He seemed better than I had expected, because I knew he had had a fall in the city and been given extra antibiotics. But he was quite perky.

After leaving him (and picking up my phone from Foleshill) we had an uneventful but slow journey up to Buxton, where it was misty but without any sign of snow. The Evetts were already in town, but we decided against joining them there, as we were both tired. The evening meal was excellent, and all the usual suspects were waiting on us.

The Saturday was quite pleasant, though nowhere near as good as the sun and mild weather earlier in the week, and we decided to do a short walk from Tissington, a village which seemed to be anchored in the past. The shops were similar to ones we knew from our childhood (I bought some Fry’s chocolate), and the houses were all old: Tissington Hall was in the middle of the village. We started walking along the Tissington Trail, then cut up across fields and back to the village.

Back in Buxton I had a rest before joining the others for a cup of tea in the Chocolatier’s. Very nice.

On the Sunday it was wet and quite chilly. The forecast was also bad; so we decided on Lyme Park. With our new NT Scotland membership we were able to get into the house and gardens for nothing. We started at the cafe by the pond, then proceeded to the gardens, which were beautiful despite the time of year, and then, as the rain started to fall, went into the house, ending with a scone in the cafe.

The next day we left just after 10.30am and decided to call at Ralph and Lynne Martin’s in Darley Dale. They had just returned home from swimming at Matlock Bath, and we had a good chat and drink, plus a look at their garden. The following day I was able to show a photo I took of them to the pensioners’ group.

Proceeding south, Dot decided she wanted to go to a good quality toilet, and I suggested a National Trust property. We ended up at Kedleston Hall, which had beautiful grounds and an excellent cafe. We shared a scone, and I had indigestion the rest of the way home, which was a bit strange. We stopped again at Cambridge Services, and we got home just after 6pm. It would have been earlier, but Idiotic Transport for Norwich had dug up another road, resulting in huge queues.

In earlier news, Luke has installed most of the LED lights in the kitchen, plus a couple of switches. We had Cake and Compline at Claire’s last Tuesday, and a PHS Trustees’ meeting at our house the next day. Some big crisis is brewing at the UEA, causing them to cancel the Footprints Steering Committee meeting, but no-one really knows what it is. We are carrying on, but the project could be in jeopardy. Dot got annoyed by her orchestra conductor not showing up again and no-one bothering to tell her. She was waiting to give him a lift from the bus station.

Not sure what is happening with Maryta, but am very much afraid that Paul has given in to the idea that he should look after her at home, with professional help. He has frequent chest infections and has just had his varicose veins operated on; so I don’t think this is a great idea, though I understand his reluctance to put her in a care home.

We have enjoyed (pre-Buxton) some lovely sunny and quite mild weather, but it is now back to what we might expect for early March – grey and damp. Am just off for a massage, and I have a bit of a cold that I hope will not develop.