I now have a bit of a pain in my lower back. This is easily explained, however. Last Friday we dismantled our old bed, which demanded a bit of detective work as well as unscrewing and heavy lifting, and took it down to the garage. A certain amount of room cleaning and reorganisation followed.

Yesterday the new bed arrived, together with the new sofa. Happily, Carrie and her friends (Robert, Sophie and Dennis) arrived an hour earlier to take away the old bed and kindly carry down both our old sofas to the garage, where they now sit, waiting for someone to want them. Almost as bulky is the packaging on the new bed and sofa. The garage is full, but at least my box of chess books was collected at last by Stephen Orton over the weekend.

Both the bed and the sofa arrived in a boxed-up state, of course. The sofa emerged reasonably easily and was positioned in the room, leaving space for the mattress to rest on the floor after we extricated it from its vacuum pack (an interesting process: once we’d loosened the packaging, the mattress more or less burst forth on its own like a rather large butterfly). The mattress then mysteriously had to be left overnight until it reached its full potential.

Before this epic event took place we had put the bed together and, as I mentioned on Facebook, there was a lot of screwing involved. Happily all the screws, washers, nuts, bolts, Allen keys and spanners were present and correct, and we followed the instructions carefully. The bed fit the space available, which was nice, and even now it is sitting upstairs (we  transferred the mattress on to it this morning before getting dressed), waiting for sheets, pillows, duvet etc. Dot is at a DSSO meeting; otherwise it would have been made by now.

I have also ordered some new phones, as the old ones were looking very shabby. Oh yes, it’s all happening here. And we have a free mirror, which came with the bed. Quite big.

It’s all happening at church, too. On Saturday we had a meeting of almost all the congregation about the vicar (who wasn’t there), and on Sunday I preached at the usual morning service. In the afternoon Dot and went to see Jessie and had a very good time. She has a painful arm but is otherwise looking very well.

Last night, after pancakes, Dot and I went to the monthly Julian meeting at Howard’s house. We were intending to walk as the weather was quite good (though cold) but in the end weariness from our day’s physical work overcame us  – or overcame me – and we drove. We are both feeling a fair bit better.