Another grey and chill day.

 

James and Cathy are due here later on. I am busy worrying about how they will get in. They are both competent, professional people in the prime of life (or at any rate not much beyond). They know the code to the key safe. Or they could ring the doorbell. Or they could ring me up – I keep both a land-line and my mobile phone beside the bed, and I don’t think I sleep very soundly. So there is nothing to worry about. But...

 

Helen was here this morning. She thinks I am sufficiently lame that I ought to move in with them until I have this famous surgery. It’s a thought, and a noble one on her part. I hope I can stay here. I think she thinks that the surgeon’s scalpel will rejuvenate me. But I’ll still be 90, and recovery will take some time.

 

Comments: Chloe, I looked up Fosamax. It sounds like something I was once prescribed for osteoporosis, after two broken arms. I eventually stopped taking it when the bones were stronger and it (the drug) was suspected of causing indigestion. That was quite a while ago. And – that’s not me, in the new header. That’s Rachel, with two of her grandchildren.

 

The story of our house and the neighbours and easements and right-of-access is a long and troubled one. We now have a permanent heritable servitude (I love that phrase) across the edge of their field. It cost us blood, sweat and tears and a lot of money. BUT they have planted leylandii in a strip of land  next to it, and just beyond that is a ditch which needs to be cleared every two or three years if it is not to flood the driveway. These are inconveniences which can be endured when the house is occupied only occasionally; not if Helen and David are to live there.

 

No, Mary Lou, it’s not money. Helen and David long ago offered to buy the strip of land containing the wretched trees and the ditch beyond them. Which is well out of sight of their house, because the land rises beyond, and of no use to anybody. The Troublesome Neighbour (in his 70’s) is the only boy in a substantial family of girls. (We have been neighbours for a long, long time.) He was/is severely dyslexic, so writing emails full of sweet reasonableness doesn’t cut much mustard. Helen’s husband David is himself a lawyer, although rustic disputes about driveways are not his speciality.

 

And, hey – knitting went well today. I have finished a pattern repeat (12? – I’m not going to hobble through to the sitting room to check) in the centre of the new shawl, and made good progress with the next one.

 

Wordle: Six for me. I’m not having a good month Theo and Roger (the DC contingent) also struggled: five for both. Thomas and Mark scored three. Four elsewhere.