| Tue 1 | Another month. Another Prime Minister, but the same old faces round the Cabinet table, although having played musical chairs. And the same old obfuscation, deceit and self-interest. |
| Wed 2 | Definitely much better and taking hardly any painkillers. GP pleased with progress when we talked yesterday, but prescribed a fourth round of antibiotics just to be on the safe side. Cellulitis is a real bugger to get rid of and is prone to recur. |
| Thu 3 | A knackering day of work, trying to catch up on stuff I’ve ignored. How did I ever manage to do this every day? |
| Fri 4 | What is wrong with the universe? It’s Friday. And for once it doesn’t feel like Saturday, but more like Monday or Tuesday – and anonymous ones at that. |
| Sat 5 | Remember, remember the 5th of November, when you can easily flash a demi-singe (which you can’t really afford) up in smoke and scare the bejesus out of every living thing within 5 miles. And all in celebration of a terrorist! When are people going to realise that this is just another conspicuous consumption which does nothing but wreck your finances and the planet? |
| Sun 6 | It’s no wonder we get depressed and suffer from SAD when you look at today. Grey, dark, dismal, wet – I’m not even sure it got properly light all day! Well what do you expect in November? |
| Mon 7 | It’s monthly household finances day – again! And it was one of those where everything was awkward and nothing would reconcile easily. Still at least we’re still solvent, despite splashing money on a new laptop. |
| Tue 8 | Not liking that Elon Musk has made Twitter his private fiefdom. Been exploring Mastodon, which seems the most popular alternative. But it’s impossible to see how the hell it works for the average Joe User. It’s just too convoluted and opaque. |
| Wed 9 | Left on my own for much of the day, as N was out at dawn for check-up at Royal Free Hospital. She wasn’t back until getting on for darkrise. So I had to wear my hearing aids all day (can’t hear the doorbell otherwise), and for once they were not being uncomfortable. |
| Thu 10 | Is it just me (well both of us, actually) or is it bloody cold, even for mid-November. I’m not normally cold – never have been – but I’m definitely feeling colder this year than I remember previous years. I suppose I must be getting old. 😟 |
| Fri 11 | I can only think that the people who pick the grocery orders can’t read, can’t see (poor lighting?), or are just slapdash. We order 5 Bramley apples. How many do we get? One! Just one! What use is that, pray? |
| Sat 12 | “Crazy plants! During the summer we bought two small plants of Pineapple Sage, Salvia elegans. It is a sage, but not of the stuffing kind; more of the add it to your Pimms kind. One plant was put into one of the raised beds (about 1m square); the other in a large pot. They’ve gone mad. The one in the raised bed has taken over the whole area, and the potted one is trying to catch up with it. And now, in late autumn, they’re rampant with spikes of bright red flowers. |
| Sun 13 | Awake early, so got up, and left N sleeping until 09:30 gone. Then had to rush round to make ourselves decent and have some breakfast as we were expecting the gardener. But the gardner didn’t show, and as usual didn’t bother to tell us! Gah! |
| Mon 14 | What a wonderful misty/foggy morning; in fact its been like this most of the night. It isn’t very thick, visibiliy probably 2-300m – not really quite dense enough! I love fog; and I remember enjoying foggy mornings as a kid – mind they were thick then and nastily smoggy — but they were great at muffling the sound. And that’s part of what makes fog so mystical and magical. |
| Tue 15 | Afternoon trip to the dentist for check-up and hygienist. First time I’ve worn shoes & socks in 6 weeks. Pleasantly surprised at how well the feet survived – nowhere nearly as uncomfortable as I expected, although I had acquired a pair of soft shoes. Definite progress. |
| Wed 16 | Squirrel antics. There’s a tray hanging under the birds seed feeder to catch debris; otherwise pigeons trample the grass to death. Squirrel wants to get on the tray. Up the pole and down the seed feeder – cheeky nibble on the way down. Tray tilts precariously. Rinse and repeat. Until one of the hanging chains detaches. Tray now at 45° angle. Squirrel tries again: down the feeder, but ooops it can’t grip on this tray and falls off. And again. And again. |
| Thu 17 | CT scan this morning. Why is everywhere in every hospital a 5 mile hike from the main entrance, with a single glacially slow lift in the middle? Just as well I arrived 15 minutes early. Once at Imaging, the scan took literally seconds – conjunction of canula and hand took longer than the actual scan! Appointment at 10:00, out the door before 10:30; as it should be. |
| Fri 18 | Actually managed to cook tea tonight – for the first time since mid-September; that’s how bad I’ve been. It was a bit of a trial, especially as I’ve lost some of my touch – but I did it! And we shared a bottle of wine for the first time in 7 weeks. Now to recover the touch etc. |
| Sat 19 | We’ve got a fixed rate, fixed term bond maturing in a couple of weeks time. It’s earning a pathetic amount of interest. But roll it over for a couple of years and we get something approaching a decent rate: almost 5%! Well, that’s before the Chancellor gets his hands on it. |
| Sun 20 | I blame November for another Meh day. Dark, grey, drizzly and not very warm. As observed before, it’s no wonder so many of us have SAD. Light therapy is supposed to be the fix. Not here it isn’t. |
| Mon 21 | Small (5x3cm) bruise in the crook of my right elbow from where I had the catheter inserted for my CT scan last Thursday. Beginning to fade now, but has been all sorts of pretty shades of black, blue, purple, and yellow. |
| Tue 22 | Had a couple of crusts of garlic bread left last night, so they were thrown out on the lawn. Surprisingly nothing purloined them – I can only assume foxes don’t like garlic! – and they were still there this morning. That was until squirrel hopped along! |
| Wed 23 | A very odd light this afternoon: obviously sunshine, but not obviously sunshine; very dark but golden; really showing up to autumnal leaves on our trees. And it was raining, that very fine but persistent rain. So the most magnificent rainbow I’ve seen for many years; really bright with clear colours, although my eyes could only just see the violet. (Photos taken through some rather grubby glass.)  |
| Thu 24 | Saw a brilliant trick for peeling apples quickly using a power tool and a vegetable peeler. For once, not too good to be true; I tried it; it works a treat. With not much practice you can peel an apple in under 5 seconds. OK you still have to core and slice it, but that’s relatively quick. Great if you need to do a lot of apples. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1hTKfkJtzM |
| Fri 25 | Adnams New England IPA. I’ve had a few small cans in stock for a while – I think it was a one off brew last winter. It’s a curious beverage. A cloudy beer which tastes a cross between very bitterly hopped and (pine) loo cleaner. I don’t mind the cloudiness, but loo cleaner isn’t really my taste. But Adnams do lots of other fab beers: Southwold Bitter, Ghost Ship, Dry Hopped Lager to name but three. |
| Sat 26 | Sat for a long time over dinner with a bottle of good wine and a liqueur. Mostly spent discussing the eccentricities of all our friends’ kids. They’re an interesting bunch; all very different; but all delightful and slightly eccentric in their own way – as are their parents. |
| Sun 27 | While it is lovely to have the Tilly Cat on my desk – stretch, wriggle, chirrup, purr – it does hamper work because she’s almost invariably lying on the papers I need! Find me a cat owner who doesn’t understand this! |
| Mon 28 | About 100 yards up the road, at the bottom of a garden, is a large tree – I think a sycamore – about twice the height of the houses. Right at the very top, on a long straight branch, is a tree rat. Said squirrel then decides to run, full speed, down the branch, in similitudine a ball-bearing down a steep slope. A few minutes later the Boy Cat was out hunting down by the pond. He sat on the path edge; quite conspicuously white. But there’s a squirrel, scurrying to and fro, not 10 feet in front of him, sure in the belief it was quicker than the cat. Squirrel athleticism and agility just defies belief. |
| Tue 29 | Zoom meetings can be brilliant, in many ways. But hybrid meetings, with some in a room together and some joined by Zoom, really don’t work. The remote people get excluded, if only because they can never hear the room conversations fully and clearly. And two hours of it is exceptionally painful. |
| Wed 30 | A magnificent golden, autumnal, oak tree (and silver birch) bathed in sunshine this afternoon. The photo really doesn’t do it justice! |
