Sunday, 10th November, 2024
Well, I was wrong about the shorts. Lovely, warm morning for walking by the beach. There were even people in the sea. I walked past a garden full of blooming roses this morning – in the middle of November.
As part of our year of travel, we are considering again a couple of Winter (UK) months in Australia. We would do December (2025) – January (2026) for the best weather and, we think Sydney for the best overall experiences. Flights at the beginning of December and back at the end of January with Emirates via Dubai would cost us just over £7,000.00 especially if we commit early so that will be under discussion this week.
Currently health, fitness and diet are high up the agenda. It is the reason why we are not travelling. Enjoyment, relaxation, indulgence are all part of travelling. I can’t risk that at the moment. It would encourage me to eat and drink outside my plan. It would make the exercise routine more difficult.
I’m not just thinking about calories in the diet. I am trying to think healthy holistically. There was an interesting but horrifying article in The Times yesterday about the all round problem. It sort of establishes the narrow options for a healthy diet. It almost entirely dictates non-processed foods. Processing involves sugar/salt well over safe amounts, additives and preservatives both of which are dangerous. The cooked meats in the picture above used to feature in my meals. Not anymore. The salt content and preservatives are seriously dangerous just as fried food has been dropped.
My diet over the past decade has increasingly become fish/chicken and green vegetables. Salt & pepper don’t go on the dining table but are just a part of the cooking and herbs and lemon juice replace them for flavouring. One of the ways I control my hunger is through drinks. I love fresh coffee and I love wine. The Times article makes clear that just 4 cups a day of the former and complete prohibition of the latter is the advice. I’m not sure I can go that far but I have done 75 days without alcohol although I have also been thinking of buying a new coffee maker.
Monday, 11th November, 2024
What is happening? The world looks different. We have blue sky and sunshine this morning. It is warm outside. Not sure if I can cope.
The walk was done in shorts and tee shirt in lovely, warm sunshine. What a joy. Makes such a difference after a depressing fortnight of greyness.
Back home, I am speaking to our home security installers. I need the software controller upgrading and I want a video doorbell installing that I can back up to my own, home cloud. If I’m spending months in Europe and Australia next year, it will be important.
Talk about surveillance. As we parked up at the cook shop this afternoon, I had the distinct feeling that I was being watched. These massing starlings seem to be starting later this year.
The big event of the afternoon is a trip to Lakeland. Being married to a cook, they have featured quite a lot in our lives. Back in the 1970s, they used to be called Lakeland Plastics because they were founded to supply plastic wrappings to the Agricultural industry. Over the past 60 years, they have transmogrified into a kitchen/cooking products suppliers with about 90 outlets across the company. They figured in our lives because chef could only source some, cutting edge, things on their website. We have spent a fortune there over the years.
Now, an outlet has been opened a couple of miles away from us. Chef came home with a (drumroll) …. cake icing turntable and the big prize, a complimentary Lakeland shopping bag. What more could any girl want?
Tuesday, 12th November, 2024
Oh, what a gorgeous day ….. Thank goodness normal service is resumed in some ways. Warm and bright to raise the spirits. Mermaids in the sea.
East Beach Cafe outdoor seating is a lovely place for coffee and basking in the sunshine. Early in the morning, the promenade is quiet. I must admit even I am surprised how long into the end of the year people are still able to swim. I don’t think I will be trying it.
On this day exactly a decade ago we were in Athens not for leisure but for business. We were spending a lengthy, nervous hour in this bank securing thousands of pounds worth of Euros from the final payment tranche from the sale of our house. It was a nerve wracking situation that you had to be in the middle of to understand. Getting money out of Greece in particular was especially difficult. They had gone through the financial crisis and well-off Greeks had been smuggling most of their cash out of the reach of the tax authorities. As a result, all money being moved out of the country was closely supervised.
We were going to the National Bank of Greece where we had an account but we were using a branch in Syndagma, Athens – pictured above. The people were not known to us and we were strangers to them. They were extremely suspicious. Were we money laundering drug dealers? Were we trying to avoid paying Greek Government tax? Well … You may think that but I couldn’t possibly comment. Having established the probity of our money, the bank manager then tried to sell us some investment bonds which we declined and the money was winged electronically to our UK account. A big sigh of relief followed by an even bigger glass of wine. A decade on, that money has been working hard for us through careful investment management. It will warm-line the cold winds of our old age.
Wednesday, 13th November, 2024
At least it’s not Friday. With clearer skies come beautiful sunsets. Where were you last night, Dear Reader? The South Coast is beautiful on evenings like this.
Of course, clearer skies bring colder nights. We went down to 9C/48F last night which is quite cool. This morning has opened bright and sunny. Going out early for a long walk beside the sea and then collecting my new, varifocal glasses. I’m hoping they will improve my driving experience. I need to be able to see the road and read the car’s digital information at the same time. Everything – speed sign, actual speed, sat.nav. direction, lane-keep setting, etc. – is projected up on to the windscreen just above the steering wheel. I am peering over the top of my driving glasses to read it. It is a bit dangerous.
On to hospital to sit outside an office for an hour in an almost empty waiting room. It is hard to understand how this has been achieved after previously packed hospitals and long queues. Anyway, things are moving forward and may be sorted out later this week …. Spoke too soon. It isn’t sorted out at all. Might be 3 months wait.
After a long and tiring morning, this afternoon, Chef begins to cook for Christmas. Two huge Christmas Cakes and two Christmas Puddings none of which will be eaten by us. An hour in Sainsburys sourcing all the ingredients and then another few hours in the Kitchen with the early preparations. This is fun for her. I will be in the Gym working out and watching the new adaptation of The Day of the Jackall.
This is my sort of escapist fiction. I have absolutely no idea why. It is one of the magical things about human beings that we cannot fathom but which is so attractive to see. My secretary – long since dead of breast cancer – had an inexplicable fascination/obsession with fire engines and firemen. She could be driving to work or the shops or home and a passing fire engine with all the lights and sirens going compelled her to turn round immediatedly and follow it. My fascination with espionage is not quite so extreme but it is there none the less. Human beings are so interesting!
The new adaptation of the Frederic Forsyth novel on Sky Atlantic is cool and gripping and filmed across 10 x 1 hour episodes. It is the perfect foil for exercise in the Gym, Dear Reader. You should try it.
Thursday, 14th November, 2024
Been feeling sad for a couple of days. This morning I have a full body scan at the hospital and, over breakfast, the BBC Today programme had major items on prostate cancer and the need for early diagnosis. It rather overwhelmed me. Pathetic, I know. I am pathetic. It has to be acknowleged but that doesn’t really help. I heard about a man who had his cancer identified early, had it treated ‘successfully’, went on with his life and then it returned just 4 years later and unbeknown to him. It killed him. When you feel sad, these things seem to attach and bolster the feeling.
Eight years ago, we were spending the month of November here. It is the Rocca Nivaria Gran Hotel on Tenerife. It was magical weather and a glorious time. It was our third month there in a short period over the time we were moving to West Sussex.
Of course, we were in a lovely hotel which was feeding us the most fantastic food & wine whenever we wanted it and however much we wanted but didn’t need. It was all totally over-indulgent inspite of the fact we spent time in the Gym and the Pool, walking on the coastal path and generally keeping active. I still put on weight.
It all seems so far away in terms of Time and Geography. We are stuck in the gloomy, self-disciplined straights of a generally dark month. Yesterday, I missed a gathering of similar old men. As T. S. Eliot said, Humankind can not bear very much reality.
I am facing my reality full on and I have turned my back on fantasy, indulgence and so I carry on my lonely path through a 2024 of work and self-denial. The prize is the promised land in 2025. Sorry about the biblical references. They are so much part of the language that I can’t be bothered excising them.
My wife is currently seriously testing my resolve. Two Christmas puddings have been steaming outside – 6 hours in all. Now they are cooling off in the kitchen with the all pervasive scent drifting tantalisingly in to my nostrils. I won’t be tempted. I am just about to embark on my 80th day without alcohol. I am walking 7 miles a day so I have done well over 500 miles in this time. The weight is coming down. I’ve been plateauing for a short while and now on the way down again. My trainer has lost as much as she dares. She is now allowed chocolates.
Friday, 15th November, 2024
Winter is coming. You can feel it, Dear Reader. There is an edge in the air, a harshness, a lack of tenderness:
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”T.S Eliot – The Journey of the Magi (1927)
Last night we had the central heating on for an hour so it must be serious. Before the hour was up, we were sweating. That’s what I like about modernity. The house is a new-build with all the advances in insulation and comfort that owners of older properties could only dream of. I love the heating controls. It was one of the best decisions I made to install it. It makes the use of heating so easy and so infinitely controllable.
Unlike the old days, we can now control the heating in different zones of our house at the press of a button on our smartphones. It means that we don’t waste money heating areas we aren’t using or heating those we are using for longer than needed. This is what the internet-of-things can do for us. This is what life should be like.
I have an app on my computer that downloads weather satellite video projections/forecasts for the days ahead. It allows us to map the movements of clouds and winds, of rain and temperatures. When I lived in the North of England – in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire – Winter was always an experience. The journey over the Pennines was difficult and often snowbound. School was often closed because it was unsafe. The school was a 1950s build with drafty iron-framed windows. Pupils lived in old housing stock which were often cold and damp.
We are not immune to cold down here but snow is extremely rare. Certainly the last sighting was long before we arrived 8 years ago. (Of course, now we will see avalanches this year.) But the sea is like a ground source heat pump. It holds temperature when the sky is losing it. Living on the coast, we are usually 2-3C above the countryside inland. Doesn’t sound much but it is enough to make all the difference.
Was sent a memory yesterday which really put life into context. This photo is of the College Refectory where we ate at the beginning of the 1970s. It was a grey, analogue time of plug-in 3 bar heaters, warm clothes and of calorie-busting food. So long, so far away …..
Saturday, 16th November, 2024
Wonderful full ‘Super’ moon last night. The garden was floodlit at midnight. Quite magical. The sky was full of huge and brightly shining stars. A night when people of a religious persuasion would look up and say they could see the light of heaven. They would imagine their dead loved ones leading an eternal life in a mystical, starry afterworld.
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us ….And voices are in the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.T.S. Eliot – The Hollow Men
You will know, Dear Reader, because I have said it often enough that I am an atheist. I have been all my life although there was a time when I trotted through the rituals of a Roman Catholic faith in a narrow complicity. So my views on moral/spiritual issues come from the standpoint of Humanism. The Assisted Dying Bill in UK which will be voted on in a couple of weeks has interested me for my own stance on it.
Growing up in a world where, before the Suicide Act 1961, it was a crime to take one’s own life and anyone who attempted and survived could be prosecuted and imprisoned, while the families of those who died could also potentially be prosecuted. In part, that criminalisation reflected religious and moral objections to suicide as self-murder. Because of that, I have always believed that the State could never preside over individual life and death. I am utterly opposed to Capital Punishment and I have always held the view that every person had the right to take their own life ….. until now.
Now I am having doubts – not that we should have the free-will over our own lives but the burden it will put on doctors. I have seen people with terminal illnesses have their lives hastened away in over worked hospitals with drugs that blur the lines between pain relief and death-induction.
The first rule of Medicine is to do no harm but this would be severely tested if elderly people press medics to administer or help them self-administer life-taking drugs. It is an area fraught with ethical uncertainty.
We are already in this uncertain world with DNR notices. A Do Not Resuscitate is a legal document that’s usually written by a healthcare provider after discussing the risks and benefits of CPR with the patient, their loved ones, or their legal decision-maker. People who choose to have a DNR often have a terminal illness or other serious medical condition. We are in the world of Assisted Dying already. Geriatrics could easily slip into Euthenasia. Moving towards the geriatric stage myself, I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.
More than anything else, what this has shown me is that I am capable of change. I can have my opinion altered by sound argument. I am not set in my ways …. completely. There is hope.