Just back from a couple of restful days with Audrey at Bury St Edmunds. This morning we went for a walk around Thurston – about three miles – with Dot and Audrey clearly in charge. Beautiful warm weather and a welcome breeze, much as it’s been all week. We had lunch at a garden centre. Yesterday we went to Lavenham, then had an evening meal at the pub down the road from Audrey’s house – Moreton Hall. Excellent steak and chips, and the others were very complimentary about their curries.

Dot needed a rest because she’d had an Exclusion Panel on Tuesday, which is always a bit wearing. Also our son is in a lot of pain from what seems to be a kidney stone – it’s just recurred, and he went to the doctor’s today. Much more concerned about him than about me. I feel more or less OK, though I haven’t been sleeping too well, and have got dates for my MRI scan and my x-ray – both next week. Vicky’s birthday tomorrow, and David has baked her a cake despite his pain – well-known Lenton stubbornness coming to the fore. She insisted he went to the doctor today.

Meanwhile my sister-in-law’s brother has died suddenly of a heart attack, I have to go to Coventry next Friday for a case meeting about my brother Andrew, and my cousin Anne and her husband Jim are arriving on Sunday for a few days. I also need to arrange meals with several friends – one of whom has just been bereaved. You know what they say: time is what prevents everything happening at once – lately it doesn’t seem to be working.

While at Audrey’s I did manage to write three poems – one to go with Lucy’s proposed film for Paston, one to go with Annette’s picture, and the other a fairly random one based loosely on Lavenham and the nature of reality, whatever that is.