Just stopped watching Wimbledon because it look as if Serena Williams is going to win easily (she did), which is about as boring as you can get. The Nadal-Murray match was something else. Nadal played probably the best tennis I’ve ever seen, and still Murray was an ace away from winning the second set. No shame in losing that one.
It’s been a warm week. The MX5 went in for a service and MOT, and one day stretched into three, because (a) the MOT centre’s computer went down, (b) the car failed on tyre tread that the garage had thought OK and (c) new tyres had to be obtained. So not a cheap day out by any means.
On Wednesday we had Heather, Sam and Simon round for an evening meal which I turned out to be cooking because there was some compelling tennis on TV and the house also needed cleaning. Chicken turned out to be good and we had a very pleasant evening. HSS brought some prosecco to celebrate the publication of Heather’s textbook, and Sam is recovering well from his atypical pneumonia which apparently only one in a million people get. He had a hard time with it.
On Thursday a triple whammy, starting with lunch with Aunt Josephine, Kathleen, Paul, Phil and Joy at the Oaklands Hotel carvery. Good food and an intriguing discussion afterwards about what churches should be doing nowadays. A surprising amount of agreement, considering our backgrounds and the distance we’ve moved. Later in the day Linda came round to cut out hair, and then we went to a PCC meeting at the vicarage. Again, a convivial atmosphere and general agreement. Nice when that happens.
Yesterday Dot went to Dickleburgh school, and I met InPrint poet Lisa D’Onofrio in the city for coffee at Jarrolds. She’s in England for a couple of weeks before returning to Australia, where her mum is very ill, and where she is now living at Castlemaine, north of Melbourne. She is the international arm of InPrint!
In the evening Dot and I went to the Claxton Opera, an annual event which takes place in a theatre in someone’s house. It holds just over 100 spectators and is a remarkable feat of engineering. Our friend Ruth is their leading soprano, and she had the main role in Le Pauvre Matelot, which someone had unfortunately translated into English, thus exposing the poor libretto and plot for all to see. Ruth was superb, but the rest of it was pretty terrible, and Richard White (the owner and impresario) should have been glad the Press failed to turn up. The second half of the programme, Trial by Jury, was wonderfully performed, but of course Gilbert and Sullivan is wonderful to start with, and Le Pauvre Matelot emphatically isn’t. Towards the end the wife kills the sailor with a sledgehammer, which was the only good idea in it. To get to the house/theatre, up a narrow lane, you have to park at a farm on the “main” road and are then transported by bus.
Today we stirred ourselves early and went to North Walsham, taking flowers to the cemetery and dropping in on Jessie, who we transported to Wroxham, enabling Dot to see Frank. I went for a short walk while this happened, and on the way home we called at The Rosary and put flowers on my parents’ grave.