We also asked X what good it was doing for mankind to know about these extraordinary birds which use compost to keep their eggs warm. And there doesn’t seem to be any answer, except ‘It looks good in one’s CV’!
And I suppose it teaches her something about scientific method, which is probably good for her and could be applied later in life to some really useful research.
Compost warms eggs
X phoned the other night to see if we’ll be seeing them over Easter for long enough for her to do one of her psych. tests on them – last time she did this she sat on the stairs outside their bedroom and heard them planning awful things and didn’t tell the fond parents. They weren’t amused!
I must do a little practice on my bass recorder as we have a new player with us who plays a flute and is much better than we are, in that he plays at sight everything we have laboured on for years without getting much better! Still, very good for me to have some incentive to practise, I know quite well it is lack of practice which is why I never get any better, but don’t manage all the same to do it!
The Professor is rather dry but with an obvious interest in the subject and the odd ray of humour: ‘Now to come to another aspect of English; I’m going to write an obscene word on the board. Er… just give me a few minutes to think of one.’!
If you need to put any stamps on letters to us and the Stephenson rocket ones are still about, could you use those? They tell us scrounging is the first thing to learn as a teacher!
This is a new sort of letter which I hope in a moment to illustrate – not done with my word-processing program but with another called ‘gem’ which includes a facility for ‘painting’. One of the problems is that it shows no margins and does not seem to wrap around like the W.P. And another is that I can’t see how to go backwards except with the mouse, which is not very accurate.
No news here re X yet either – he has another gruelling weekend with umpteen interviews – he was told unofficially at 11 p.m. that the ‘assessors felt v. positive about the application’ – I s’pose it could be positively NO but he didn’t take it thus – I fear he’s going to be very hurt if turned down.
I spent two days making a spread sheet on the computer summarising my expenditure for the last two tax years: only to find yesterday evening when I turned it on again to add a bit that the first year has disappeared altogether. It’s maddening: but at least I have one copy printed out to prove that I did do it once! I don’t know why it happens, but think it is something to do with being given the choice, when you start to save the programme [sic] between making a back-up and ‘Over-writing’ which the book says ‘Use with caution’ without explaining why. Or it might be because I thought to save time by making a copy of the first programme and then deleting all the figures to leave the description of what I had spent them on, and then renaming that with a new file name, and filling in year 2’s figures. Perhaps I forgot actually to copy Programme 1 when I had loaded it, so that it was the working copy which I deleted. Anyway it was very annoying, and undermining to my self-confidence!
X drove me to the airport only to find the place had been closed all night to in and out traffic because of the very high wind. They were on the way to the circus so I waited and eventually our plane was given the OK as the wind dropped quite suddenly but we didn’t get in until three-quarters of an hour late, we settled in and were then asked to return to the waiting room: a small private plane had pancaked on the only runway, it took over an hour to remove it (we’re just a wee bit primitive here!) Anyway then we were off.
I saw the ideal petrol saver the other day. A tricycle with enormous balloon tyres – very safe and comfortable. You could even put a big plastic sheet over you to keep you dry like an umbrella!
There were many pictures to choose from: cameleer posties, policemen on camels, soldiers on camels, women (only one described by profession – governess), couples on camels, camel trains, camel buggies, camel carts, camels hitched to ploughs, hitched with donkeys or horses… Camel riding was obviously a necessary attribute for many of this nation’s forebears.
When I got the Maxi three years ago it used to take $8 of petrol at a time. This week it got a bit low and took $17.96 worth to fill. It is a real pleasure to take my Honda in to be filled for the next 75 miles or so and have 75 cents to pay!
X wants to examine the passenger lists of ships sailing from England to South Africa between 1871 and 1876. Could you ring up the National Maritime Museum in SE10 and ask them whether they still exist (the lines that is) and if not who took them over. It is difficult to believe that the passenger lists won’t have been pulped decades ago, but I suppose there’s a chance that they may exist in some archives somewhere.
It was certainly a great deal easier to manoeuvre the van being almost level with the drive now and a smooth surface. I hope I shall be able to get it out more easily too – up to now I have had to haul it forward with a cunning pulley wheel device I got, on the end of a rope round a tree on the other side of the garden!
The pulley thing
X kindly lent us her Mini which we returned to her yesterday. They are an odd contrast to drive. A Mini seems very ‘tough’ compared to the Fiat: a matter of ‘Esau was an hairy man but Jacob was a smooth man’!
You wouldn’t expect to have a lovely time on a canal in London somehow – though I seem to remember a very leafy glimpse of it once round about Regent Park somewhere. A pity about the collision in the tunnel. Glad it was only paintwork – though paint is bad enough with most boatees!
I must say that the problems of garaging on the street sound reason enough for moving, to me! I’m glad my bike has never fallen over (or been pushed) yet; how the people with the really big ones manage I can’t imagine. I got into conversation with the tyre man at one of our local garages a week or so ago, when he was kindly repairing my back wheel which I discovered to be flat on arrival in the village – he has a Japanese 600 or 750 of some sort. I made some remark about having avoided death so far (since I’ve always heard that about 30% of the people who buy those big bikes kill themselves in the first six months) and was told very firmly that the class of rider who had most accidents on a mileage basis was the 125 and downwards. (Mine is a 125, you remember.)
A string of cars appeared coming north towards us. Suddenly from behind the first one appeared a red car, overtaking. But when he saw us he braked to pull in again. However the road was damp after rain, and he went into a front wheel skid right in our path. All along that straight on our side of the road there is a high bank, with sometimes up to a car’s width of hard shoulder – and sometimes not! There was, at the point our paths were going to cross, so we avoided a head-on crash but did a very hearty side-swipe from just behind our front wheel. The hard shoulder than disappeared, and we went up the bank and ended up with my side of the car on the ground and X hanging in midair above me in her seat-belt. From looking at the place some time later, it appeared that we had travelled about 17 yds between the place where the strip had come off the side of his car to the point where the glass came out of my window as I put my elbow down to take some of my weight, so our deceleration had been comparatively mild compared to a head-on smash, and we were lucky to escape with only very mild bruises – and X with a stiff back for a few days, which was probably from her gymnastics getting out of the car when people arrived very quickly from the other cars, and opened her side door, while I was able to loose off her seat belt once she had some other means of support.
Also have an arborist coming this week to trim a large maple tree in my backyard which hangs over a rather troublesome neighbour to the East. This woman lives alone with 2 cats and a very belligerent noisy dog. As far as anyone knows she has never worked. Her resident man left her about 4 years ago. She occupies herself by reporting the neighbours to the City at the least opportunity – though I think that now the City people don’t bother to listen to her!!
We both went to have our hearing tested a week or so ago, and I have just ordered a thing to fit in my left ear, which is apparently worse than the other. It remains to be seen whether it is going to help, but I do find that I have to ask X to repeat herself more often than she asks me – though (privately, of course) I think that that is because she is so deaf that she keeps the radio on too loud which interferes with my hearing her the first time!!
Have you heard X has remarried? A doctor 2 years widowed – I hope he’s a better bet than her first disaster – he sounds nice, with a mind of his own, as he proposed after they’d known each other 3 weeks.
He’s about X’s age – his wife suddenly upped and ran off with a friend of theirs about 2 years ago – so he’s married a charming widow (twice widowed) of about 60 and they appear to be enthralled with each other and madly happy!
She tells me his sister- who we knew and her husband, a solid little solicitor whom I liked, but X made disparaging noises about – have separated – 4 young too – tho’ I s’pose the twins must be 16 now.
X gave us a gorgeous lunch today at the hotel. It was beautifully and lavishly presented and as [partner] said coming in, ‘I’m having a holiday. No lunch to get and I ate so much that I shan’t have to give you much for supper’!
Look after yourself – I sometimes wish you had someone to look after you – but I doubt if you’d let them!
X still lives there and still happily married to the rich old man who was a great friend of Y.
She’ll probably end up getting a brilliant degree and marrying this vicar bloke or someone similar! She says there’s nothing but friendship between her and this ‘wotsisname’ but X seems to think otherwise. We shall have to wait and see.
He said his wife went back to UK for a holiday and took $3000 with her and so liked being home and everything was so much cheaper she’d put down a payment on a house and bought a coloured TV and he was now going back too!!
I agree with you, I think he’s a honey, not a ball of fire, but then he was regular Army!! He’s always been the same, and far too nice for X in my opinion.
I was fed up with X – he’s really been smoking much less lately but he must have had 8 in the evening even when I demurred politely. It’s difficult as if I make him mad he’ll just be foul and that makes her asthma worse.
She was difficult to make progress with. You couldn’t see her face as she wore a lot of make-up; she hardly said a word the whole time, and it was very difficult to prise X away from her – he was being super-protective the whole time. They did not appear to talk even to each other very much – so it’s very difficult to form any opinion about the whole affair. It must have been very terrifying for her – rather like being thrown into a tankful of piranha fish I should think.
Meeting the piranhas
In company they appear to be quite close and equitable, but I’m afraid X does not get much joy out of his marriage, and the peace is only maintained by a good deal of self-control on his part just refusing to get upset by her more pathological traits.
I went up to see her that afternoon and discovered that X (her husband) had gone to sleep on her bed, a state in which he remained the whole half-hour or so that I was there. I think he must be very difficult to live with, because is he manic depressive, and liable not to take his pills into the bargain.
They have a son who married 3 years ago and went off the rails a few months later departing with an ex-girlfriend and leaving his wife in an advanced state of pregnancy. This largely I think through sheer immaturity: he was probably finding it difficult to make ends meet. Anyway he came back and his wife forgave him (one up for Rome – she’s an R.C.) and the whole family moved to a 30 acre patch to grow vegetables.
I’d have been v. frightened if I’d had X’s hoax phone call, but what a disaster shooting herself.
We had to go to the new house because a couple of young trees we’d ordered had turned up and needed planting. The rain got steadily heavier. We spun out the journey having lunch and saying hopefully that it was getting lighter. But eventually it could be deferred no longer so I donned my shower-proof mac and dug the holes, drove in stakes and spread roots and applied manure and filled in – apart from a few minutes when the rain changed to sleet and I cowered behind a bush – while X sat in the car morally supporting. We drove to Woolworth’s and bought a bright orange towel to dry my hair – and drape over my de-trousered legs while X drove home. But I kept them (the trousers) round my ankles just in case she had an accident and I needed them in a hurry!
orange towel for modesty
X phoned t’other night to cheer us with the news that the sewage is coming up through the front lawn at the house! It’s time it was pumped out – so we hope it’s just that and the Jehovah’s Witness hasn’t misled us – Y was full of praise for his uprightness (?!) so we hope for the best.
We had great manoeuvres yesterday getting the van out from its ‘hard standing’ as I had to take it for a warrant of fitness test. Putting it back is easier being downhill – except that at one critical moment the jockey wheel fell out having been unscrewed too far and I was left holding the front up until X could put it back!
On the whole the general impression of this Christmas has been almost completely secular, spurred on by that fat chap in red urging everyone to make it a ‘cracker Christmas’ by spending more than they can afford. A bit sad, really, and I suppose it is no surprise that the news this morning is dominated by the number of children in hospital as the result of drink-inspired ‘domestics’.
I set to and tidied up the rhubarb and this afternoon put some on to cook – come an hour later there was a suspicious smell – it must know I don’t really like it!!
The FIRST time I took it out going round the bay the gear lever came out in my hand, very NARSTY- fortunately it freewheeled round the corner and to the curb before stopping. However the firm was most efficient and have replaced the gear lever with a new one. Plus the light system for the dashboard that fell to pieces on X’s feet (glad that wasn’t my own effort too!) and now we hope for the best.
I daren’t try and hang any more paintings – I was fixing something in my glass-room and getting down I found my standing leg gave way and me and chair fell in a heap on the concrete floor – felt sure I must have broken something, but praise be only more bruises.
Apologies if my typing takes a sudden dive like that at intervals. One of the Shift controls has broken and although I have got used to using the other, the broken one can’t actually be removed and every now and then jiggles itself in play in that irritating way. As my machine is now twenty-five years old and Swedish to begin with, and long out of production I gather, there is not much to be done.
Far worse is Old Jordans which was called the Hostel was turned into a conference centre and then became a hotel and has now gone seriously bankrupt and the bank is insisting on them paying up a very large loan. It’s on the open market for sale but it has so many restrictions on its use that only a charity could buy it. Luckily George Fox lived there (?) and William Penn who is buried in the graveyard. So Pennsylvania will probably come to the rescue. It sounds like the wrath of God!
X had a couple we hadn’t met coming to tea today. I got held up gardening in the morning and had to dash out to get my glasses in the afternoon. I trod on one pair and dented the other ones when I fell over so was in a rush – and did everything wrong; the biscuits didn’t look right, the cake leaked through the moveable bottom all over the oven and I forgot to put the lemon it it – so it’s so dull I didn’t produce it today, I ran out of icing sugar icing some Russian Squares then this morning I did shortbread and dropped scones and …’no, I won’t eat anything, I’m on a diet’!!
Did I tell you that I ran into a rock which had fallen off the bank at the sharp bend which is called ‘the devil’s elbow’? The car bounced a foot into the air, and I discovered that it had a hole in the gearbox, and the gears were not connecting any more. We had so many things on this week, it seemed, that I had to hire a car to keep us going – which was expensive, and perhaps not entirely necessary, because now the hire car has gone back and Bill the local garage man has made ours work and says it should be OK over Easter. He had ordered and obtained a secondhand gearbox as required by the insurance assessor, but when it came yesterday it was the wrong shape and didn’t fit. Maddening. So he took a large hammer to ours, and apart from the fact that the gear lever nearly runs into the passenger seat before it goes into first and second, it seems to work nicely! Knowing when and how to take a hammer to it is a great art in these days of ultra-complicated motors!
Poor X. I know what a mess it can make leaving the cap off the oil, having done it once myself. But over £100 is certainly adding insult to injury.
The ancient Mini sounded a very questionable convenience from the garage, especially after I had looked up ‘HGV’ in my dictionary to appreciate the horrors of finding yourself in front of it with no power. I hate it when one hears the hiss of brakes behind one, and finds the mirror completely occupied with a Mercedes symbol or whatever, sitting a yard or two behind ones back bumper.
It worries me that you find it easy to go to sleep in the bath, having had the experience of not being able to get out and fearing the same for you with no one to shout for. Perhaps you need the equivalent of tramways ‘dead man’s handle’ which you have to hang onto on pain of a shattering bell if you loosen your grip. That ought to stop you going to sleep.
Poor X tripped down the step in the middle of our sitting room after breakfast and caught his face just above his eye, between eye and temple, on the corner of my grandfather’s old oak table – blood everywhere but his mother was marvellously calm – I suppose she is getting used to it as they had had I think seven lots of stitches between – picked him and shoved his head under the kitchen cold tap, and then we took him off to the doctor – but in fact it was only a plaster job and not stitched.
Right under our noses with the TV at full blast, a mouse has been running to and fro all evening. X set a trap beside him on the fireplace and the cheeky thing has managed to eat it all and not set it off. We saw the first one since we’ve been here this week, and caught him. We hoped to get t’other one before we got a clutch, or whatever you get of little mice. … The mouse has been layed?!!laid? to rest – now we’ll see if a family appears too.
X was attacked by one of our vast magpies when she went for a walk at the w/e – it dive bombed her for 100 yards actually hitting her head – ugh.
Your efforts with your frames and the varnish sounded a bit like my efforts to make a new box for the Scrabble set which I recently finished. It was a question of using up bits of wood that I had on hand, and I ended up with the box just an eighth of an inch too narrow to take the Scrabble board flat, so it has to go in on an angle with both the bits of wood that hold the pieces on the same side. Maddening. And apart from that the lid which is made to slide in and out jams when it is fully shut and is liable to fall out of its grooves altogether before it is fully withdrawn. Not a successful piece of carpentry, I fear.
X had the car out two days ago, and came back unaware of a large dent in the front wing on the driver’s side. Maddening! I don’t know whether it was a friendly shove from a larger car – maybe a four wheel drive with a high bumper which just nicely come above our wheel arch, or whether she did it herself against a post outside one of the shops she stopped at. Which doesn’t seem likely but is possible because she remembers trying to reverse and getting out of the car to check she wasn’t running over someone because the car resisted reversing.
A mob of hippies had a demonstration outside Parliament and they – some 100 strong – mobbed the official’s car when he was leaving and came into the car park as we were all coming out. Some sensible young priest (from X district so he’s v. likely had experience!) invited them in to see the cathedral. They flocked in girls on boys’ shoulders, smoking cigarettes and climbing all over the chairs in bare feet. The organist rose to the occasion and played the organ so loud they couldn’t shout the odds but in fact got talking in several groups and some joined us for tea in the hall and eventually the chaplain for the university who’s a very good type suggested they weren’t having much fun and now they’d seen it why didn’t they go – and they did!! As some 8 had already been arrested outside for abusive language, damage and knocking a policeman down, I think we got off lightly.
I’m sorry for not replying sooner, especially as you were sounding altogether rather miserable. I confess it was semi-deliberate as I thought X would think it odd if you didn’t share the letter but that to commiserate about the difficulties of cohabitation would not be news she’d really want to read! However she’s safely back here now so I feel freer to write! We went out to the airport today to make sure she caught the right plane. It was good to see her and all went well once we’d actually got her through customs – first she had to borrow $30 to pay her duty and having done that she left her two bags on the collection turntable – how she got past the customs guys without the evidence I can’t think! – I could well believe that the two of you in a single flat for 3 months would be potentially lethal. However she was most effusive about how well you’d got on and seemed really enthusiastic about the whole trip.
It’s really stupid of Mrs. X – she’s made her command performance ‘Regrets only’ put on awful printed bit of pink office paper, why she thinks any of us would ‘regret’ I can’t think!
[re puzzle] How queer it is that one can search and search for a particular feature and be sure that that piece, at least, must have got lost, and then ten minutes later when you are doing something else, you find you have filled that particular gap up without noticing. Talk about gremlins!
On the whole, the leadership was hot on the results to be achieved, and weak on how to achieve them, I thought. And that is not new.
The hospital rang me for my long awaited op. (Coincidentally a cancellation occurred only one day after our speech director phoned up to complain about how long I’d been waiting!) Alas the op was not so wonderful. The guy doesn’t seem to have sealed the fistula and when the surgeon saw me 2 days later the conversation included a priceless, ‘Oh, if it’s your speech you want to improve it’s your soft palate I should be correcting; I could do something with that’. Grrrrrrrrrrrr! So I’m back on the waiting list for round two.
We were just off to bed last night when there was a bit of a furore in the road outside. Some young lad had come off his 756 cc mini-motorbike and broken a leg. We called the ambulance and directed traffic etc. for a while. What did seem rather bizarre was that while the ambulance guys were doing their thing at one end of the victim the traffic cop was busy booking the other end for riding an unregistered bike, having no licence, being under age etc. etc. – at least I suppose it kept his mind off the pain!
Summer is upon us, meaning that there is seldom ten minutes of the day indoors when one isn’t being bombarded and threatened by the buzzing of our enormous brand of bluebottles. We have at last invested in two fly bats of plastic, which are a good deal more effective than rolled up newspapers, but still not much fun especially as they are very difficult to hit on the wing! and sometimes take a terrible long time buzzing round and round before they decide to sit down for a rest.
The bluebottles
X and co. moved out of their house on Friday and came down to us yesterday – they are to stay until I think 17th (by which time I expect we shall all be round the bend) when the house they are renting to begin with will be vacant.
But perhaps you hadn’t heard that the Xs finally got out still owing us $400. We’re pretty fed up with the solicitor who said Monday 10 days ago yes, he would get a summons out the next day – but when I called on him this Monday at a time suggested by his secretary the summons was no further forward. But yes he would do it directly he got back from a funeral and wouldn’t wait for the bailiff, but would serve it himself on Tuesday for certain. I rang him this afternoon and he was just then hoping to get it from the Court! We are beginning to despair of anyone when your solicitor can no more be trusted than your defaulting tenants!
[continuing saga]
And talking of giving up – we have a tremendous and frustrating hate on with the solicitor who seems by now almost certainly to have lost us all chance of getting any of the money the Xs owe for rent by the most unremitting negligence and inefficiency – added to which, when we ring him weekly to hear what he hasn’t done, he manages to sound patronising even when he obviously can’t remember where the ‘due processes of law’ had got and what he was supposed to be doing next.
I’m handicapped in writing this as I have a shrewd suspicion I posted the first since my return without a stamp or on a UK form – so you may get it in 6 months or not at all, or have to pay vast sums for it – but I don’t want to leave it longer to hear it’s arrived.
Too maddening, after working all day to get ahead so we’d be at the club on time, we had to rush through a delicious steak and kidney pie and go before our pudding – and were late – and then I got annoyed with a silly woman who first told me a spit and sawdust dubious joke and then tried to be funny at my expense. After this my play got worse and worse – we revived the fire when we got home and ate our puddings – mine cold bread and butter pudding – and didn’t get to bed before 12.15.
My heart sank for you about the lecture you turned up for a day late. I knew just how you felt as I did the same – we were flat broke and X came to visit and we had that ghastly Swedish girl and Y with us and I’d got tickets for one of the outdoor plays and we arrived to find it was for the night before – I could have wept.
But on the way back the car developed a definite ‘ticking’ noise which I put down to a very loose tappet – but was perhaps something more serious which I didn’t recognise as about 5 miles from home there was an almighty bang followed by horribly expensive grinding and cracking noises and a smell of hot oil! It has since appeared that a con rod broke and the loose end thrashing about went through the sump, demolished the oil pump and cracked the cylinder block beyond hope of guaranteeable repair. All of which adds up to about $600 of new bits and $200 of labour pulling them together – on top of which I shan’t ever feel confident in towing with the car again – so that we shall have more expense in changing it for something a bit more powerful – unless we give up the van which would be rather a policy of despair.
I think she’d be bored stiff here and I’d hate to lend her the Viva – she’s the most erratic driver.
It was me who convinced you there were humming birds in the hot houses at Kew as I took you there to show you and I even got one of the old gardeners and he denied it – I was v. put out and quite unconvinced – but now you have solved it for me as we lived quite near Syon Park and I must have seen them there and told you the wrong place – I get quite despondent how often I’m wrong!
I achieved my first real bit of work on the computer this week. When it finally came to printing it I pressed he button with trepidation, only to discover that the last eighty or so letters of each full line were being printed as the beginning of a new line. And of course I didn’t know how to stop it safely, so I stood there wringing my hands like the sorcerer’s apprentice while it wasted about eight sheets of paper (I’ve got it running on continuous sheets now).
When we got back from the station yesterday X discovered that somebody had picked and gone off with her only two daffodils, which were growing temptingly near the front gate. A rotten trick!
It’s a maddening thing that our TV, which is more or less audible and with a vague and rather snowy picture most evenings always seems to degenerate into a blizzard complete with a gale-like roaring on Sundays, when there is a David Attenborough series which we like to see.
I am sorry about the bird down your chimney. I can just imagine how distasteful, to say the least, dealing with the plagues has been. [Bluebottles and maggots…] It seems a pity you can’t have a holocaust up the chimney. But I suppose that might be rather tempting the fates.
I must be a sore trial to the doctors, I think, as my symptoms always seem to disappear when they come on the scene. I had this pain in the side of my chest last week, which was very inconvenient, as it hurt to cough, and often when moving, or even lying down in some attitudes. Eventually on Wednesday evening, X insisted that I should get a doctor, which we did about nine thirty. She didn’t confess until afterwards that she was being largely influenced by a doctor drama going on on TV which revolved around a man having a heart attack!
X has hada nasty ear do – she complained of deafness – we put it down to swimming but took her to the Dr. after a few days and he said it was only wax and syringed them both and all seemed well and she heard beautifully but 2 days later got awful pain in and behind the ear so of course it was Saturday again and we had to go to yet a different partner who said there was some ‘infection and it was a mastoid process’ – whatever that means – but mastoid anything frightens me. He put her on gigantic doses of antibiotic which has improved it but she finishes them today and it still hurts. I’m not sure she shouldn’t go to a specialist willy-nilly.
I actually got around to the ‘barium meal’ x-ray he ordered months ago. ‘Where is the pain?’ said the operator and I couldn’t remember!! The ‘meal’ was revolting – the result quite negative, d.g.
Having boasted the day after we got home of our freedom from all bugs and tummy upsets I developed one the next day, which failed to respond to my usual white pills. So eventually I went to a young man who was standing in last week for our doctor who didn’t seem a bit perturbed and told me much the best thing was to let the bug ‘burn itself out’, and that the last time he went to H-K it took him 3 weeks. Mine, I am glad to say is d.v. now burnt!
People were fantastic during X’s comings and goings [to hospital]. Apart from having us to meals and looking after kids, we were given biscuits, pies, fruit enough for an army and masses of people visited X. Even an old dear of 85 insisted on having us to tea and providing us with fruit and biscuits – and then phoned me up 2 days later at 7.10 a.m. and told me to send one of the kids round to collect some warm scones for our lunch!
We had some rather shocking news of her yesterday. She was due to have an operation on Thursday and her husband rang yesterday to say that the Surgeon had started but not been able to do anything as she has a cancer which has spread and is now inoperable and he gave her a few weeks only to live.
After 3 weeks of the 2 months, X discharged herself from hospital not upsetting the Dr. or nurses by so doing as she’d been so bad tempered she’d upset everyone! I’ve had 3 v. lengthy letters since she returned and she sounds as tho’ she’s in full flight again – she really is remarkable.
I can now actually see the cards at bridge as I’ve had my old black glasses reglazed (?) with the reading prescription of my bifocals and if I sit well up to the table and ‘bosom’ my cards I can keep all in focus.
I have put on all I lost and more. The doctor’s jolly hormone pills seem to have made me swell up round the middle but he swears it’s just because I’m so much better!!
We had difficulty in getting a doctor to come (you know how they expect you to rise from the dead to go to the surgery here…)
He’s also had to have some atomic isotype something to do with the brain – which the brain man says he’s almost sure will be negative – I asked what it meant if it was positive and X said it meant he was mad!! Oh dear, oh dear.
I’m not sure if I’m glad for X or not – it must be awful for her and all the family if it’s just a matter of lying in pain and waiting poor dear.
We heard from X who seems to have completely forgotten not only that she had told us of her accident but also that we had exchanged more letters and sent her some flowers.
I think we’re both a bit tensed up. It’s too depressing the number of people who regale us with tales of how they’d planned a trip abroad when they’d retired and one of them died at the crucial moment – not good for one’s morale!
I’ve just put my hand on the stove to see if it was working – it was – HELL.
She offered the receipts etc. but was told he’d take her word for it – took off 2/3 of the price and charged 25% on remainder which came to $6!!! X said when I phoned it was all a toss up and depended on the man on the spot. Someone else told me it was left fairly loose so the types who were trying to pay for their holiday by calling here could be charged the whole 110% as it was becoming such a racket.
I don’t understand why you have a Trust to manage the finances of your job, but it doesn’t sound as though they are making a very good job it. How much I agree with your remark about having fewer managers and more people to actually do some work. It happens all the time with our Health service now, and all they can manage it seems is to cut down the services provided when they haven’t enough left over after paying themselves.
Our latest effort at service for the public is a threat by bank clerks to strike from the Friday before Christmas right through until after the New Year (and you can imagine the fun the thieves will have – there are reports of crowds of them booking flights!!).
Thieves travelling
Having spent 2 weeks since last writing being without a driving licence my news is limited. I quite enjoyed it actually and it was v. economical not being tempted with inessentials! Friends drove me down on ‘the day’ – at the end of a run round a square he said I had broken the law 3 times! All the things I’ve done for 60 years – but I didn’t push this and thanked him for putting me right – and I got my licence! – I am mellowing!
Certainly your bureaucrats sound very trying – but do not be mystified. They work on certain principles by which their actions and reactions can usually be explained e.g. ‘Never on any account admit that you have made an error – whether of fact or of judgement.’ Secondly, ‘Do not accept any other person’s actions or requests at their face value, especially when they are apparently philanthropic or economical.’ They are obviously seeking some hidden advantage for themselves or trying in some obscure way to discredit the bureaucrat. The one must of course be frustrated as wholeheartedly as the other. Thirdly ‘Never act without precedent or make an exception to a rule.’ Such initiative might be called in question and it is worth much labour even to the extent of letting one’s tea get cold or STAYING LATE to argue oneself out of the necessity. I dare say there are others but that threefold cord is not easily broken without adding other strands!
It is a pity that X’s claim to fame was to do with such shady episodes as the Profumo affair, and the subsequent choice of Lord Home as prime minister after Macmillan, which of course also proved fairly disastrous for all concerned. He was much too nice a man to make a successful P.M.
Hopefully we shall get a letter tomorrow – no, not tomorrow as it is Labour Day when like the gasmen we do no work at all; and probably not Tuesday either, because that will be like a Monday and we hardly ever get any letters on Monday – but say Wednesday! On the whole our post has got much worse since it ceased being a Government service, and quite often it seems as though they are saving up such miserable brown envelopes as they are prepared to bring us at all for two or more days of the week. The Post Office were horrified when we told them and couldn’t understand it at all. That sort of thing is definitely fifty years out of date.
He was filling in a form about her and asked ‘Have you any convictions?’ to which she replied, ‘Yes – I’m a Christian.’ Fortunately when she realised what he meant they both had a good giggle!
I am continually amazed at how like our bureaucracy is to yours – they must send representatives back and forth to learn from each other, I think. Our Ministry of Education is constantly making cuts in funds until the schools have to cut services in one way or another, and then sending commissions of enquiry to examine the school’s methods and to complain, just like your department having to cut the services to special schools and then being told off for having done so. It is difficult to imagine any more effective way of lowering morale and encouraging frustration!
My vegetable garden is really looking quite creditable now though it would be better still if the wind hadn’t broken off or down the tops of some of my potatoes. I’ve got 3 sorts of them, a row of peas just podding, a row of celery, carrots, parsnips and a couple of pumpkins all under way, a few tomatoes and at about the fourth attempt some French and runner beans – though I think they are going to be very behind and may get drought struck – or else will be ready for picking while we’re on holiday!
We stopped to show her the garden of our old house – sad, sad – I didn’t know weeds could grow so much in 3 months
I’ve laid another 50sq m of garden in lawn; slowly but surely the barren waste is coming under control- my fastidious (and retired) neighbour even smiled at me the other day so I must be doing well!
Congratulations on your vegetables. I have put some garlic in (a month late I fear). I had some little Brussels sprouts growing which hadn’t any stalks but otherwise looked healthy at one time, but now they been eaten almost to the bone by something and can’t possibly do any good, I fear.
I hope the orange tree is more successful at going on growing fruit than our lemon which has produced endless beginnings and no reasonable continuations.
We bought some new plants and a copper beech tree and a bush X has always wanted which has all its new leaves a deep red. We put them in one afternoon and that night the damn sheep got in and removed all the red leaves!
Sheep eating all the red leaves
The story of your garden almost brought tears to my eyes. It seems that for exterior exhibition you’ll have to stick to cockle shells and silver bells (though they wouldn’t last long in these inflationary and criminal days).
Apart from occasional sudden cold days, spring is here: blossom on the apples, strawberries and boysenberries, buds on the roses with one or two out, and so on. Enough grass has grown to hide most of the black patches on the lawn where I tried to kill the moss with iron sulphate, but I don’t think any of the expensive grass seed I sowed has taken root. But a few of my veggies are looking quite good, and we had some more of the broad beans from over the winter for lunch.
We are having a three day summer, (today is the third) and I ought to be out hosing the beans, and weeding the veg plot which has remained scandalously empty so far, apart from one crop of carrots and a few parsnips, plus lots of self-down parsley. Unfortunately the pumpkins which used to appear of their own accord in some numbers have given up. Alas, no soup! And the entire plum crop this year year has been picked – four plums! The blossom all got blown away when it was much too cold for bees. I suppose I ought to go round with a rabbit’s foot another year. I must enquire into the technique. But the apples are looking good so hopefully we can fill the deep freeze with them.
My runner beans have suddenly sprung halfway up the strings and the broad beans five feet high, but a lot of things are not doing so well – beetroot stuck at two inches, carrots refusing to appear at all, tomato plants tuck at a foot high, and the broccoli bursting into yellow bloom when they ought to be forming nice green heads. (I always find that particularly irritating!).
I’ve been doing all the things we’d done before X died, fixing the funeral and putting down money for it and writing a new Will, all of which has made me feel ‘proper poorly’!!! But it will be a load off my mind when I’ve tidied it all up.
There’s virtually no flower beds but all grass and trees, there’s 5 acres practically flat with a stream running through it, milking shed for both cows!, a good sleep out which would take two bunks, and I can see X sitting on a mowing machine and being able to cope indefinitely, and each year we could let the sheep graze nearer and nearer the house as we got more and more senile.
[searching for a word before the days of Google] ‘Ponentially’ is a nice word but I don’t actually recognise it. Opponentially, perhaps, or potentially? … [and added as a PS] I woke up this morning at 5.58 saying to myself ‘The word is exponential’ – and there is such a word, but does it mean anything? [and indeed it did – just the word to describe the growth in the number of plants I had achieved and hadn’t been able to describe because I couldn’t find the word for the previous letter.]
I’m quite worried about X – I haven’t had a letter for some 3 months and the briefest signed X card. Her daughter wrote on hers that X had been v. taken aback about her sister-in-law’s death – they never got on – but X didn’t expect to outlive anyone. She’s incredible – 70 and 3 big cancer ops since she was 34 plus endless other complications.
The last 2 days I’ve been worrying I have Alzeimers (?) decease [sic] – I had to see a solicitor about putting the house in my name… I remembered the man asking if I had a safe place to keep something or should he keep it for me. I was a bit high hat about it but couldn’t remember what it was we’d been talking about. I must have wasted hours hunting for a new strange bit of paper – to no avail, so I phoned this morning and admitted I couldn’t find it – BUT actually he hadn’t given it to me – I felt more than silly!
The trouble about the big retirement village is that while you are more or less sure of nursing provision for any sort of demise, it is liable to cost you dearly. First you buy a house, which costs you all your present house, though much smaller. Then when you need an apartment, with meals provided in a restaurant you have to swap that for the house, and finally, when all you need is a bed where they look after you, that costs you your apartment. This business of getting old is very trying!
Retirement village death cycle!
X has a great clean-up urge on at the moment so I spend my time rushing between the lawyers and the funeral home checking on the preparations for casting off this mortal coil, and getting them up to date – when I’m not busy with our Income Tax for the year.
Of course it’s that darned memory again! Which reminds me that your comments about the Banville made me go and have another look at it – we read it in my group some months ago – and I looked in disbelief – had I really read this? I barely recognised it at first, tho’ bits did start coming back, but not enough to make any intelligent remarks. As you say, Hey Ho. … I now write down everything I read or else I can’t remember. Fortunately a recent radio prog I heard on the subject made me think I am maybe not that abnormal!
We then have exercises (very gentle but made to cover every muscle in your body) – I must get back to my 10 minute daily ones – I’m so bent over it depresses me I know I must be looking 90 as so many people try to help me and ask if I’m still driving!!
X only sits in the TV room all day and goes up and down. We have one medium dog who keeps him company. He is incontinent now, so senile at times too, walks very slowly and often needs help to get up from chair to dress and wash etc. … I hope they don’t hear me shouting at X too often, he can be so frustrating! I will be away 3 weeks and I really do need it.
It was a super surprise to see you but I do apologise for the number of clothes all over the floor and the general confusion which greeted you – how could I be so senile not to have put the date in my diary? Your flowers give me enormous pleasure – I took them downstairs to show them off – even the dotty residents loved them.
Yes, I think (and worry a bit) about how I am going to die. What will happen after that I can’t imagine but am optimistic that it will be enjoyable, though I hope I shall have time (and inclination) to appeal to Our Lord for the help I shall need to come to Him.
It is a bore getting old! In that connection, I was moving the power plus by a yard last week because X wanted to move her furniture round, and found it very exhausting kneeling on the floor to do it! And made a very clumsy job of it in consequence. I felt stiff for the next two mornings as a result, which I suppose means that next time I should get the man next door to do such jobs for me. But it’s a comedown for a self-respecting do-it-yourselfer!
We were a bit late leaving. I said I’d follow her down in my car; we set off with me in pursuit, it struck me she was going a very odd way, and then she disappeared, I hadn’t a clue where I was and tiptoed through two wet gardens knocking on doors for directions, to find I was in an unknown bit of X: I had been following the wrong car! It was now 15 minutes after the meeting was due to start, so you can imagine the trauma. I just can’t see in the dark especially when it’s raining and the car headlights coming at me; however I eventually got there, and spent 5 minutes trying to get in, by which time she had rung home and her husband was out looking for me! Anyway they were all very nice about it.
She really should give up, her back has packed up again, this crumbling business, and has to have another op.
X broke the news of our departure at the end of June this week – it was a bit of a damp squib actually as I think it was expected – we haven’t hidden the fact we’ve got the house, caravan etc for our retirement. There are always regrets tho’ when it becomes imminent – I take so long to know people – I’m only just getting anywhere with some – but I long to play house.
[and from X] Of course when it comes to it I expect I shall be sorry to leave some of the people here. But only some! I said my last word to quite a number of them in this month’s Parish mag in which my letter (instead of being addressed as usual ‘Dear Friends of the church) started ‘Dear Fringe…’ I reckoned there was nothing to lose at this stage!
I do think the bureaucrats who run your job are the absolute end for inefficiency, not to mention plain rudeness and indifference.
In reply to my Christmas card which asked for news of his family, he wrote on his that he got to the office at 6.45 a.m. and didn’t leave it until 7.30 p.m. – and I reckon he will find his X gone one day soon if he doesn’t get home a bit earlier than that.
I am glad that you can treat as funny your chief’s appropriation of the idea you borrowed from your last chief, which you mentioned when you were describing the meeting at which you released it. I think I should be hopping mad, even though it wasn’t my original idea.
I’ve changed my jobs. I was quite sick for a while so I gave up my other job and have had a break for a few weeks but am noticing the drop in income amazingly so I’m getting another job. Same but quite different. This time it’s a restaurant that’s just opening – the owner is the chef, he’s a really nice family man, and the emphasis is going to be very much on quality food and service compared with the last place where it was on fun! I hope it isn’t too much harder!
She’s had a rather rotten 18 months in a research team at UCL – personality clashes, incompatibilities, and total frustration with inefficient and downright lazy colleagues – she’s chucked her hand in and is now on the loose with a friend in India and Pakistan for 3 months.
I fear that however nice the woman was who did your review, she will have had orders to bring in some changes which are designed to save money, so her hands will have been tied. In other words the review will just have been a device to save the Government’s or the Department’s face. The same sort of thing is always happening here. If there is any good news, such as some extra money to be spent on health or education, it is announced with a flourish of trumpets by the minister, but if the boot is on the other foot, it’s someone else’s foot that gets the blame, always.
I’ve had a series of run-ins with the project engineer. Although I’ve had the occasional win they’ve been battles rather than wars! I fear it’s a case of ‘he might not always be right, but he’s always the boss’! He’s one of those blokes with whom I’m unable to have a discussion, only a contest!
I used to find it a relief when auditing to change locations and conditions every fortnight or so (there was always a chance that you would strike a place that would give you chocolate biscuits for 11ses and plum cake for tea! I suppose we should have suspected these of having things to hide that required us to be kept sweet!) – but going to a round of different places every day must be exhausting – like ‘If it’s Tuesday it must be Brussels’ which they showed us on TV around Christmas – most amusing and rather pathetic at the same time.
The office has not yet collapsed; we did have structural engineers in to assess. They did not seem concerned. I still don’t understand how a concrete floor can drop. I sit on the toilet and notice the 1/2 inch gap between the floor and the tiles on the wall. Some tiles have cracked and/or fallen of and the rows are out of alignment with each other!!
Poor work environment
X tells me that you didn’t get the new job which you ended up not wanting – sounds a bit Irish. I’m glad or not as I should be!!
Has X written since she was tackled round the legs by a policeman?! After an exhausting evening waitressing she’d just changed, came through the kitchen door only to have a large man throw himself at her and brought her down a resounding whack against the corner of the metal coffee trolley, which fortunately empty but previously had two large jugs of coffee on it. She had a deep half inch cut on her thigh which bled all over the place and still had bruises all up her leg when we were there 2 weeks later. There was a big table of police cadets celebrating and one bet another who was pretty drunk he wouldn’t tackle the next person to come through the door, poor X. She was sat to recover with a large drink and the man came and apologised but she was pretty shaken up. Y phoned the powers that be in the police and complained fairly forcibly. He was told the man hadn’t proved very satisfactory in other ways either, so I fear he’s cooked his own goose.
A colleague forgot to turn off the computer terminal when he finished using it on Friday afternoon. This combined with a program error to produce a ‘dump’. This miserable machine proceeded to spew its miserable guts out all over the printout throughout the weekend. By Monday morning the golfball had battered the ribbon on the printer to a shapeless pulp. You think you have problems.
Gosh, what a set-up there is in hospitals nowadays. I can’t get used to all the hierarchy and even the question of a Charge Nurse is a deep mystery to me! As to Sector Administrator – all nuts and baloney as far as I am concerned and I long for the days of the Hospital Secretary and two consultants who decided everything between them.
I had applied for a job as director of works on X ( a tiny coral island just on the tropics). We had to rush up to town for interview. Although I felt we presented ourselves in our true colours, they can’t have been the colours they were looking for, as I gather I haven’t got the job. Pity! it looked ideal both job and family-wise.
X has got a part-time job in a local PO – the idea being she’ll earn enough for Y not to have to work all over the long vac. – last year was a ramp – he got only just over dole rates and was more senior than the top man at the job – let alone the one he was standing in for – and had an hour’s journey each way at his own expense. He was fairly philosophical about it – in that he enjoyed the work – BUT…
It will be good that she has the teaching qualification so that she can always look for part-time work as a relief teacher – though I can’t myself imagine anything more deadly than relief teaching – constantly being faced with strange and unruly bunches of kids and having to pick up at short notice in the middle of someone else’s teaching programme.
I do think whoever it is who is responsible for the organisation of your job must be quite mad. It is so inefficient to expect you to tackle such an overload of work; obviously you cannot be expected to actually do it all to your satisfaction or anybody else’s. I don’t wonder that you have such a high turnover of staff – which obviously is an extra load, by reducing the continuity of treatment, apart from the extra load on the Horatios who hold the bridge.
I imagine your hilarity at work is of the maniacal sort. It wouldn’t matter so much having your case load in waiting doubled if you were playing a sort of monopoly, but when they are real kids, with real mothers and families, it really is too bad. I loved the picture of the preschool parents discussing their memories of the mad lady with the rat chained to the leg of the table! [One intriguing facet of reading old letters is not having the other half and forgetting what on earth can have occurred!]
Filed words 