This is Eddie, my cousin’s daughter’s child, who paid us a visit on Saturday, together with his grandparents and mum and dad. To me he looks exactly as his father (also Eddie) did when he was a child. They all came for a meal, and he was extremely well behaved and quite delightful. The five of them were up in Norwich for the weekend, which was bad luck as far as the weather went. For many days now – until today – it has been overbearingly grey, with plenty of rain.
Today we had some blue sky, the wind dropped, and it was pleasant. Dot and I took the opportunity to get out of the house and walked round the Broad at Whitlingham. I took a few pictures, some of which turned out very well. I have invested in a new fast memory card and a gorillapod – a small tripod that can be used to stabilise the camera practically anywhere.
Last night I travelled to Lowestoft to play chess – and lost again after getting a reasonably good position. Either my judgement is totally shot, or I’m getting too old to sustain concentration, or I’m very unlucky. The last is obviously favourite. Gave a lift to a teammate who I discovered is a paramedic: clearly I shall have to give him more lifts. Just in case.
I’ve sorted out my photographs on iPhoto up to the Event stage: I now have 56 events, and my next task is to tag all the pictures. Put three of this afternoon’s pictures on Flickr.
On Sunday we had an alternative guy called Adrian joining us on guitar – in short space of time he managed to upset pretty well everybody, and I have to hope he doesn’t show up next week. Not the right attitude, I know. The evening’s Ambient Wonder event was excellent, with a good attendance despite teeming rain. The theme was “new beginnings”: not strikingly original, but it was refreshingly unusual and left everyone – as far as one could tell – feeling optimistic.
This feeling disappeared for me yesterday when there was still no mention of my page ending in the paper, and no sign of the final page appearing. Felt quite low most of the day, alleviated in the afternoon by a visit to Jessie’s. Today my replacement was described as our “controversial new columnist”, but I haven’t seen him write anything controversial yet. Even Ms P R Bland-Bland still has her page. Bitter? Me?