It’s Sunday evening and, apart from the David Bowie piece last Monday and yesterday’s little thing about my delicious chocolate fudge ripple ice cream, I am feeling deprived of blogging. Who thought that would happen? The upsides are that I can go to bed a little earlier each day and I’m not fretting about what to write and agonising when the clock ticks around to 9.30 and I still have nothing. Blogging can be stressful.

I’ve got a few snippets to share with you that probably wouldn’t, on their own, constitute blog posts (although last year I would have contrived to make them into freestanding posts, no doubt) but I can put them together in a sort of digest of the week.


It’s been a slightly traumatic week for me as I’ve withdrawn from a committee on which I served after receiving a rather poisonous email. I’m not going into it again here but it made my position untenable so I walked away. I was considerably reassured by the people who went out of their way to contact me, express their dismay and ask me to reconsider but sometimes it’s good to make a stand.

A similar thing happened on Twitter yesterday. Now, I’m not going to whinge, although earlier in the week I drafted a return email to the person who wrote the email, which expressed rather fruitily how I felt – feel – about her. It was a rather well written and humorous piece, though I say so myself, and it’s a pity I couldn’t send it, but just writing the thing made me feel more calm. Perhaps I’ll post it on Cathartic.com, the blogging platform where people can share their feelings and stories in complete anonymity.

It’s so frustrating, isn’t it, always trying to be the better person; not descending to that level? Just once in a while I wish I could give some people a smack in the mouth with a large wet trout but it’s only in the films that that sort of thing ever magically solves anything. Normally it just causes more problems.


Our garden work continues, though with far too many hold-ups because of the wet weather. They’ve now installed the artificial turf, but, who would have thought, the current outside temperature is too low for the glue that they use, so they’re going to have to come back and finish the job when it’s not so cold. I’m going to try and post a picture here now, though I’m suddenly unable to upload files larger than 2MB, and being passed from pillar to post trying to remedy it.


I heard an alarming fact on the radio this week too. There was an item about bed blocking – where people who don’t need hospital care but do need care are stuck in hospital beds because there is such a shortage of suitable carers or places in care homes for them. You’ll remember that this happened to my mum almost two years ago as I planned to take her to her Dignity Lifestyle resort in India. I was told by the nurses that my mum would “End up killing somebody,” by occupying a bed needed for a sick person, presumably.

Prolonged hospital stays are not good for people, apparently. The person on the radio said that a healthy 65 year old who stays in bed for a week ages their body by a DECADE! It’s reminder of the importance of getting out and about and staying mobile for as long as one can.


We’re all different, aren’t we, and it’s usually quite possible to accommodate each other’s different ways of thinking. Sometimes, though, someone is on such a completely different wavelength that their way of thinking is totally incomprehensible. A friend passed this passage from Julius Caesar’s commentaries to me, as they thought it might be amusing.

“Cato also objected to me because he was quite unable to fit me into any of the rather limited categories in which he was accustomed to think. I was, he considered, frivolous…”

‘”I have always felt a certain antipathy towards Cato. I disliked his affectation of rectitude and that deliberate rudeness which his friends called integrity”.


And finally, a picture of our work-in-progress garden in the snow:

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