My new carer promises well. She is nothing if not interesting. She is an asylum-seeker (who has been granted asylum) from Oman or some such place, a non-practising dentist. I am her first paid job in Britain. She lives in Cumberland because that is where the British sent her. She has never been to Edinburgh before, nor presumably Scotland. She speaks remarkably good English. She has a tendency to put loose papers into piles but I can live with that.

 

I‘m hard at work on calories. Wafa is in the kitchen this very moment making me a salad for supper. I’m feeling somewhat better. Kirsten (comment yesterday) I’m very grateful for your suggestion of A Room with a View and even more for the suggestion that I may still be suffering from the after-effects of that antibiotic. At the moment I am trying to read Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy. He’s good, and the tatters of my education still cling to the subject. We shall see.

 

Wordle: yet another four, and it was again a popular score. Theo, Alexander, Rachel and Ketki joined me there. Clever Mark got three, Thomas five, Roger six.

 

One of my principles for Wordle-solving – perhaps the only one I’ve got – is to try Q whenever I find myself with a floating U. Yesterday my starters gave me a green A in the middle position, and a brown U and R. So I tried QUARK, without much idea of what it means. Wrong, but it gave me green UAR in the middle, and from there to GUARD wasn’t too difficult, given the letters available. Those were the two words which WordleBot told me afterwards were the only two possible from my starting position.