Dot is on her way home from Gateshead after a successful time with Philosophy4Children at the BBC 3 Free Thinking Festival, and I am sitting her feeling pretty exposed after a thorough attack on our hedge by Colin and Matthew. At our request, of course, and I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, but the garden does look very bare – as well as quite a bit bigger.

I contributed to the desolation by cutting back the rose outside the back door rather drastically, taking the opportunity to get rid of the resulting rubbish on Colin’s lorry. This was particularly important because our brown bin wasn’t emptied last week, and there’s now some dispute about whether we’ve renewed our payment for the service. Embarrassingly, I don’t actually know.

The week started embarrassingly too, with a pretty inept loss to Martin Woolnough in the Dons chess knockout competition. I wasn’t feeling like playing, and it showed. Or maybe I’m just getting old. On the plus side, though, I’m feeling quite a lot better: I think I must have had a virus of some kind. And Norwich City have had a good week: Dot and I saw them beat Spurs 2-1 in the Capital Cup on Wednesday evening, and today in our absence they beat Stoke 1-0.

Dot has been working hard all week, preparing various Philosophy sessions that are coming up, and on Tuesday she spent most of the day at Barbara’s; so I put the evening meal together for the Tuesday Group. Nothing special, obviously.  On Wednesday, in preparation for the evening football, we had our hair cut: this is not interesting, just a matter of record.

On Thursday, while Dot went out to Hethersett I visited an ailing Lucy at Paston, returning some of the stuff I’d brought home from Mannington Hall (but not all of it, obviously: that would have been too sensible) and sharing a cup of tea. Later Anne visited Aspland Road, providing some light relief for Dot (and me).

I took Dot down to the Scole Inn on Friday afternoon, where she transferred to Barbara’s car for the journey to Gateshead. Last day of half term; so lots of traffic in the city. I felt it advisable therefore to return home in pretty short order. Not much else happened. I shall now cook a pizza, because I can’t be bothered to go out and buy fish and chips. This is what it comes to.