Spent the first part of Saturday writing my sermon, which went more easily than I expected, though there were only 11 people there to hear it yesterday. Norwich City again played brilliantly but failed to score, drawing 0-0 at home with Cardiff.
On Sunday afternoon we went to visit Geoff and Sophie at their home. Geoff got up when we arrived about 3pm, and is making pretty good progress, but Sophie is feeling the strain, to put it mildly.
The support for her from the NHS has been minimal. It appears that the better you seem to be coping, the less they are inclined to do for you. I suspect that if she had appeared to be near a nervous breakdown, everything would have been done for her; but because she puts up a brave front and visited Geoff every day, they assume she will be able to sort everything out. I felt very sorry for her. Happily she is getting much more help this week (which she arranged herself).
A massive storm predicted for the rush hour this morning failed to materialise in Norwich, though I believe other areas have been harder hit. It has rained a lot, and it’s windy, but that’s about it.
I have more or less finished the tanka book and am hoping that things will get less hectic now. David is back from Canada, landing ahead of the storm. He seemed to have a really good time.
From quite sunny, we progress to extremely sunny, and hot with it. Reminds me of our two weeks in Canada earlier this year. Coincidentally we had dinner last night with two of our Canadian friends – Karol and Pete Walpole – at the new, expanded home of Anne and Philip Robinson, who are just home from another holiday, this time in Crete.
Now Dot has left me: she should be arriving at Stansted airport about now en route to Eindhoven and eventually Hilversum in Holland, where she and Barbara will deliver a couple of P4C workshops tomorrow. I may be wrong, but I think this will be the first time Dot and I have been in separate countries since we were married. The last couple of days have been taken up largely with making sure that Dot knows what she’s taking and is taking it. Hope that worked out all right. Meanwhile, I am thinking about doing my tax return. Eventually, I may even do it.
The other item at the top of my to-do list is the forthcoming Paston poetry book, provisionally named Another Country. We’re aiming at 30 pages of A5, with some art – assuming we can persuade the artists to produce something. If not, it will be with photographs. At the moment e-mails are flying backwards and forwards in an attempt to decide who will pay what towards production costs, and who will receive any profits. Using the word “profits” very loosely. I am going to be putting most of it together. I also need to write a couple of poems, the introduction and some notes.
Our Humax, which has been acting very strangely – recording things it wasn’t asked to, not recording what it should, labelling recordings wrongly and duplicating this that and the other – has suddenly gone very quiet after it seized up and I rebooted it. Suddenly all the recorded programmes disappeared, and it seems to be recording things correctly again. Can this last? I hope so, because I’ve cancelled Ryan (Mr Hometech Solutions) who was going to come and have a look at it. In other news on the technology front, Dropbox seems to have nearly finished uploading my picture files. It has started forecasting the end of the operation in hours instead of days – currently 41 hours.
Amid all the Euro-preparations, Dot and I dropped in at Ethika on Timberhill on Tuesday to view Annette’s new fashion collaboration. Looks good. Teri was also there. Dot bought a bag and a hat, the latter from someone other than Annette.
Still feeling very jetlagged. My uncle rang at just after 9am to confirm arrangements for Kathleen’s funeral on Monday, and said I sounded “very distant”. An accurate diagnosis: I was half asleep and midway across the Atlantic. Still, it was probably a good thing, because it got me out of bed and in the direction of resuming normal service. It would have been even better if I hadn’t been awake for an hour or two in the night. The weather is dull, cool and threatening rain; so I know we’re home. Walked to Budgen’s to get a loaf and ran into Keiron and family on the way back.
Yesterday passed in a blur, with some necessary catch-ups being achieved in the paperwork department. Dot was at Diocesan House for half the day, and “lodger” Matt, still in residence, was saying goodbye to his school at Acle on the last day of term. I barely left the house.
Our journey home had gone smoothly enough. The Murrays dropped us at the airport in loads of time, and we enjoyed a long but fast-moving queue at Air Transat check-in and a short one through Security. The duty-free part of Terminal 3 at Toronto is nothing to write home about, but we grabbed a snack and bought the children a present each before I spotted that the departure gate had been changed, and we got seats in the new area before it was deluged by other travellers.
The plane left almost on time, and the flight seemed to go quickly (it was 6½ hours). I guess I slept for an hour or so, and the children for much longer. Bit of a queue at passport control, but the bags arrived quickly, and we managed to get the 11.01 train from Platform 4 to Luton Airport Parkway – a pleasant enough journey for which I’d purchased advance tickets. Bit of a squash at first with all our luggage, but we sorted ourselves out after a few people got off at London Bridge.
A taxi from the station at Luton got us to Caddington by about 12.40pm. Dot and I stayed for a couple of hours, some of which was spent asleep, before we left for Norwich. Heavy rain between Luton and Royston, and we saw an unusual number of crashed cars, but we got home safely after stopping for egg and chips (or a bagel in Dot’s case) at the “world famous Comfort Cafe” near Cambridge. Not quite as comfortable as we’d expected, but good chips. Bought a bit of shopping at Morrisons in Norwich before entering the house shortly before 6pm.
Matt had left us a bottle of wine and some chocolates and flowers, which was really nice of him. He didn’t appear till we were heading for bed at the surprisingly late hour of 11.30pm (6.30pm Canada time).
