Took a brief step back into the chess world on Monday, when we had a club night featuring rapid games in a kind of mini-tournament, played in the bar. I did well in the first two games, beating Steve Crane and a new guy who gave me a piece early on, but after a bye I came back with two losses – one on time in a winning position against Steve Moore and the other against my bête noir, Terry Glover, where I just miscalculated. That meant I missed out on the semi-finals, but I did have a couple of friendlies against strong players – Jeff Dawson and Jim McAvoy – both of which I won. So +4-2: pretty good for me. Apologies to any readers who don’t play chess.
On the same day we learnt that C had gone into Hellesdon – no surprise, as she’d been deteriorating alarmingly and had become fiercely paranoid – but sad all the same. Dot had been round to see her earlier and had spoken to the social services people who were there to assess her. This has happened to her before, and we expect her to recover enough to come out of hospital in a few months.
Strong wind on Monday, but it’s been quite pleasant since then. On Tuesday I went out to see Lucy, who is in a particularly bad way after her recent rather lengthy hospital visit. She has so many things wrong with her that the consultants can’t pin down the causes. She is still determined to carry on with the Paston Heritage Society, and we had a longish talk about various aspects of the Pastons, in which I am getting more and more interested, but she was clearly very tired and in pain.
Yesterday I spent ages putting words and pictures on to the new Paston website – “ages” because I couldn’t work out how to insert the images to accompany an article. In the end I asked Robin, who created the site, and he sent lengthy instructions. But what it all boiled down to was that although I could do lots of stuff on the site using Safari, it wasn’t showing me the key icons for inserting images. So I switched to Firefox, and they miraculously appeared. It was pretty easy then. I still had several attempts at resizing a picture I’d been sent before I could get it looking sharp enough. They way I did it (in case I forget and look back at this) was to put the picture into iPhoto, export it as a small picture and then upload it on to the site. Seems straightforward, but there are so many other possibilities…
Anyway by 3.45pm I was determined to get out of the house. Dot was due back from Bradwell shortly, but I couldn’t wait, and in fact passed her on the single-carriageway section of the A47 near Burlingham. I pulled in and phoned her, but she decided to carry on when I said I was going to Mautby (home of Margaret, who married John Paston somewhere around 1440 and wrote many of the Paston letters). I don’t think I’d ever been to Mautby, which is off to the right of the road running from Acle to Caister. It’s pretty much on the edge of the Bure marshes and has a nice old church where Margaret was buried. Unfortunately the south aisle, where she was buried, collapsed some time ago; so there is no trace of any memorial. I drove around a bit and walked a little before deciding that Hall Farm was all that was left of Mautby Hall. The current buildings are almost invisible from the road.
So I drove home, stopping briefly at Stokesby, which has a delightful riverside pull-in and pub. Spoke to a woman from North Yorkshire who was sitting on a boat in the evening sun and was envious that we had “all this on our doorstep”. I said we quite liked North Yorkshire.
Today Dot is at a Diocesan House meeting and I have been up to clean mum and dad’s grave: not a very thorough job, but it looks much nicer.