Sunday, 2nd March, 2025
Gorgeous morning. Sunshine does make one feel better doesn’t it? We live about 36 miles from Gatwick Airport. It takes about 45 mins to drive there. By the time planes have reached us to cross the channel, they are silent specks in the sky with long, white trails behind them. How much more traffic we will have with an extra runway remains to be seen.
Already I have booked 8 flights for this year – each one with Easyjet and each one from Gatwick. It is an easy transition. For some, I drive and park in the Long Stay and for others, I get a taxi allied to a night’s stay in a hotel at the airport – usually I book Sofitel because it is a nice hotel with a convenient walk across to Departures and I am a member who gets discounts. I like discounts.
Effectively, all my trips excluding those to the North of England are ways of buying sunshine. Of course, Florida is a guarantor of sunshine but I couldn’t face it at the moment under its current regime. I would be in the assassination market myself which could prove problematic. We don’t want to let M&K down because we know they get so lonely without us but Manchester is more appealing at the moment. They’ve got Andy Burnham after all.
Music today is an old favourite that I haven’t heard for years. Last night BBC2 was devoted to Elkie Brooks and this brought back so many associations with the past. Lilac Wine, I’ve learnt today was a Song by Nina Simone from 1966. I only remember it from Elkie Brooks in 1978:
Lilac wine is sweet and heady,
Like my love
Lilac wine, I feel unsteady,
Where’s my love …?
Down at the beach this morning, I found myself singing quietly in my head with an blur of softness on my breath. Embarrassing really because the world, his wife and her dog were there drinking in the sunshine.
The coffee shop spilled out on to the beach and the sunshine. The regatta was far out on the sparkling sea and the cycles were parked up to rest in the warmth. It’s coming, Dear Reader. It’s coming.
Monday, 3rd March, 2025
Another gorgeous morning to drink in the sunshine. Went round to chat to Honda and book the car in for Friday. Spoke to a lovely, little girl on the desk who wasn’t even born when I bought my first Honda. Of course, the central locking is working flawlessly this morning. Anyway, it will all be sorted out on Friday.
Back home, I am working on a project of insurance for my data. I generate so much ‘stuff’ that I would be very upset if I lost it so Backup is essential. I use an automatic backup program so I no longer have to think about it.
Computer crashes and security infections are far less prevalent today than when I first started. In 1988, my Masters Degree Dissertation was always in danger and had to be saved on floppy disks which were easily open to corruption. By 1994, computing had moved on but hard drives were limited to 32mb and backup on floppy disks was still very vulnerable.
Just 30 years ago, hard drives were limited to 32 mb. Today, my hard drive is 1,000,000 mb or a Terabyte and houses more pictures and files than could be imagined. Of course, some are more precious than others. I received one 4 years ago today that I never want to lose. It came up in my Records Box this morning and was immediately backed up three times.
I use a cloud store – One Drive that comes with Micosoft Office-365, a local cloud store in the form of this small Terrabyte drive and I have a simple flash drive. There’s insurance and there is real insurance.
Music today is the guitar. The classical guitar of John Williams. I don’t play this too often but today I am listening to Aeolian Suite for Guitar composed and played by John Williams.
Well the day remained wall-to-wall sunshine and reached 15C/59F. Walking was warm. If I hadn’t got my Housekeeper painting, I might have set her on garden tidying instead. Still, there is time.
Tuesday, 4th March, 2025
Another glorious morning. The temperature only says 7C/45F but it feels warm in the sunshine. I’m going out for an early walk. My Housekeeper is painting and the house is invaded throughout by the smell of new paint.
The sea, on the other hand smells freshly of … sea water. It is a good and relaxing place to be. I am walking over just about 3000 miles per year. I feel fortunate not to suffer with joint problems.
A number of my fellow College friends are waiting for or recovering from Hip and knee replacements. That is not something I’m suffering from currently. I have worried that all this walking will bring those problems about but I have been reassured that walking makes them less not more likely.
The Mayo Clinic research found that the average American walks only 3,000 – 4,000 paces per day and 5000 paces should be considered a baseline to health. Although some activity is better than no activity, one should always be challenging oneself to go further. You have to constantly look for fresh ways to integrate walking.
Going to have to try this one. The Lowry Centre in Manchester has an interesting new experience inviting people to walk in to a Lowry painting. Must be worth a visit, Dear Reader. Lowry360 will be open at the beginning of May.
Walking, walking through time and memories …I’ve always loved this quote from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future ….
Music today is from Helen Shapiro (who is only 78 now) singing Walking Back to Happiness which expresses an idea so close to that of Eliot’s it is amazing. Walking back to the present is an incredible concept. It was the first ‘Pop’ song I ever heard. It was in 1961-2 and played over the tannoy of the first ever supermarket I ever went in to. It was in the Summer before I went to Grammar School where boys were already talking about The Beatles. It took me a while to catch up. Story of my life.
Just received a letter from the Le Ministère de la Transition Écologique et de la Cohésion des Territoires with our Crit’Air vignette attached which will cover us for driving in France and assure police that our car is environmentally clean.
Every time we change the car, we need to buy a new vignette because it uses the car’s VIN number. It costs less than €5.00 and it saves a fine in France so I always do it.The biggest problem is sticking it in the windscreen correctly.
Wednesday, 5th March, 2025
Unusual start to the day. Thick fog all around. Don’t often see that down here. Went down to the beach to collect a fish order and took the chance to walk by the Marina.
Quite chilly 5C/41F under the heavy sky and so different from yesterday’s sunshine. I suppose it is good to see the differing conditions but I prefer the sunshine.
My father died of a heart condition at the ridiculously young age of 49. He actually had a heart attack while he was in a hospital bed but was unable to be saved. This morning, the news carried an innovation being urged on the Labour government by experts from University College London (UCL) who report their view that a single, daily “polypill”, which includes a statin and three drugs that lower blood pressure, could be a flagship initiative to boost the Government’s drive to prevent disease.
Because of my own heart condition of Atrial Fibrillation and my family history, I have taken a handful of pills to cover cholesterol, blood pressure and anti coagulant for the past 16 years. Most of these things may now be offered to all over 50s in a combined pill which is so cheap since they have run out of licence-time. I feel fit. I don’t really worry about heart attacks and stroke any more. This combination of drugs has freed me of those concerns.
I am much more exercised by the threat of cancer. I am adequately tested for prostate cancer now. I have been regularly tested for bowel cancer but it is not automatic and I have to fight for it each time. How often should it be? I do the NHS Bowel Cancer Screening test every 2 years. I have had a colonoscopy at the same interval for the past 4 years. This morning I was told that it should be every year at my age. It was by a private testing company but their data was compelling.I may have to break the habits of a lifetime and pay for privately enhanced treatment.
Warm sunshine has returned and most things are well with the world. The days are coming when fog will lift permanently and sunshine will flow warmly. It will be a time of clarity and blue, mediterranean skies. Music today is Torna a Surriento (Come back to Sorrento) sung by Mario Lanza. If only I could, Dear Reader.
Thursday, 6th March, 2025
A delicious morning. Up early to greet our new central heating service engineer. Really nice, salt-of-the-earth lad who turned out to be a Grecophile who wanted to buy a place in Lefkada. We have been paying British Gas about £350.00 per year for their Gold Standard service. This lad used to manage a team of BG engineers and now works for himself. His service was more thorough and cost just £70.00. He’s already been booked for next year.
These are uncertain times of world destabilisation. Since the Trump-Vance attrocity with Zalensky in the Whitehouse, so many of us have carried round a heavy heart. A friend from Yorkshire sent me this yesterday which relieves the anger momentarily. Just click to play it when you need a ‘joy’ fix.
It is such a lovely day that I’m playing Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 – Pastoral. There really is nothing else on a day like today. When I go walking in the sunshine today I think it will be shorts and tee shirt for the first time for a while. Good things are coming closer and more rapidly now. Not long until May.
My old flatmate, Chris Tolley, has just heard that I am alcohol-free for 191 days. He is away in the sunshine of Lanzarote and sent me a photo to make me jealous. There are many things I want but a glass of warm lager in Lanzarote is not one of them.
The back garden is bathed in strong and hot sunshine. Chicken Stock is being made in the pressure cooker simmering away on the induction hob outside on a table, pervading the air with its distinctive smell and sending all the cats in the area wild.
The upside of Trump’s America First policy is that it throws UK back into the European sphere. However much ambiguity surrounds our government’s attempts to bridge the transatlantic gap, it is becoming clear that there is only strength in European unity and a European defence force that the Atlanticists have been denying for so long. So many of us have thought that for so long as we opposed the Brexit idiocy. It is all coming home to roost.
The Peace Dividend idea at the end of the Cold War was a reason cooked up to allow European nations to divert spending away from Defence into other channels. It was a nice idea but just plain wrong. There will always be aggressive agencies against which we have to defend ourselves. Arguments against nuclear weapons were made on cost and value. Arguments for rested on Deterence.
Boris Johnson famously argued against rearming Military Forces on the basis that it would all be hight tech. in future. He said fighting won’t involve tanks anymore. Just a couple of years later, what has been most needed by Ukraine’s Armed Forces has been Tanks. What we don’t need are the Aircraft Carriers that we bought at extortionate prices in order to support US forces in the Atlantic Ocean.
Friday, 7th March, 2025
Another lovely, warm, Spring morning. Out early to Honda to have the central locking mechanism checked and a Recall on the Fuel Injection system which they only advised us about yesterday.
We will leave the car and walk home. It is a 40 mins walk so we will walk back a couple of hours later. The walk is through the woodland surrounding us. It is still mainly dormant although buds on trees are about to wake to the Spring. This current warm spell will probably do it.
The walk there and back will amount to enough outside today and I will go on to complete my Gym routine this afternoon while my painter & decorator continues freshening up the house. It is amazing how faded the unpainted areas now look so she has inflicted a life time of work on herself equivalent to painting the Forth Bridge which they say needs restarting as soon as they get to the end.
Of course demi-gods like me have more important focusses. Diet, Health and Fitness are the centres of some of my friends mine’s thinking. My friend in Yorkshire and another in Rochdale are obsessed with something I hadn’t heard of but will investigate now. They talk about the Withings Scale from which they quote their Fitness Age.
I thought it was a chart but it turns out to be an actual set of bathroom scales which provide detailed reports of the body scan the scales perform including fat and muscle percentage, cardiovascular risk assessment, and detection of certain early signs of diabetes-related complications and vascular age.
All of this information can be deduced from scan of feet and hands each morning which is then relayed to a smartphone app. Now they’re talking my language! I am trying hard but not hard enough. All that information is a little bit scary but I think I will have to submit to it. Kevin tells me that, although he looks 80, he has a fitness age of 60. That is my target.
My Chef cooked what is turning out to be one of my favourite, healthy and delicious Suppers last night. It consisted of roast Sea Bass with pesto dressing accompanied by Portobello Mushroom stuffed with shallot and parmesan and roast Cherry Tomatoes.
Other than Muesli, this is the only meal of the day. It is accompanied by a glass of alcohol-free wine and fits well within my calorie-intake target. When you get me 7 months into this routine, I find it quite easy. The problem will be when I start to relax it. Will I be able to pull it back whenever I want to?
This morning, I’ve been invited to book the first of a two part annual health check at my Surgery. They are absolutely fantastic down here. We get appointments when we need them. Everything has been done on-line almost since we arrived 9 years ago. Results are delivered on-line to an app on my phone. The service itself is proactive as in this case. I didn’t request a health check. I was invited. When you are in your mid-70s, these things are increasingly important
While keeping up the spinning plates of my body and the car’s, I’ve chosen Take That‘s What is Love. I’ll sing along in Greek because that’s what I associated it with. You can sing in English, Dear Reader. No pressure!
Saturday, 8th March, 2025
Gorgeously warm day for early March. We are reading 17C/63F this morning in the back garden. My walk at 9.30 am was delightful being greeted by shiny, new blackbirds, sweetly voice thrushes and aggressively determined robins all jostling for space and food building up their prowess in readiness for the big love-in.
Before I go on, I have been contacted by a clever clogs who has taken issue with my solution to one of the mathematical puzzles – see Wednesday, 12th February, 2025.
A.C. Clogs says that my solution ignores the BIDMAS rule which says one should deal with multiplication before the addition. This means that the answer to this puzzle should be (4 x 6 = 24) + 3 = 27. Much as I don’t want to acknowledge it, she is right.
Today is International Women’s Day after all as my Bavarian-Australian next door neighbour has just reminded me as I returned her Hot Tub towel which had some how fallen into our garden. My wife is celebrating by being allowed to continue painting the house. I am giving her freedom by watching football and Six Nations Rugby. We all have to make sacrifices!
I’ve also been enjoying exploring the 1911 and 1921 Census releases this morning. They are providing lots of lovely information going back to the early 1800s. Interestingly and rather disappointingly, I thought my Mother’s family had closer ties with Ireland than they did.
Neither my Grandparents nor my Great Grandparents were born in Ireland so the connections really do go a long way back. No chance of me claiming EU identity via my ancestors unfortunately. I will have to rely on Labour taking me back in and Trump making them go faster than they want.
I was supporting Ireland against France this afternoon but it didn’t go right. The French were just too good in the Spring sunshine. Haven’t had time for music today.