Sunday, 12th October, 2025
The warm weather continues after a warm night. I think we were double the temperature of the North of England last night. Out early walking as the sunshine began to break through the clouds from last night.
The world is decorated with dying. Everywhere glorious colours of decay adorn the pavements. The sound is lovely as we push our feet through Autumnal debris.
Of course I am in my own Autumn as has been pointed out. I posted the projection of me at 90 yesterday. I will be only too pleased to see that day. Since a diagnosis of prostate cancer, mortality and time scales have been brought much more sharply in to focus. Even though I live in a relatively prosperous area with excellent Medical provision, my cancer was caught early and treated ‘successfully’, it is constantly nagging away at me that the cancer will return. Will it be the shedding of my leaves upon a pavement to be blown away in the next gale?
I was shocked to read last week that men who had received radio therapy and hormone treatment to eradicate prostate cancer could expect to live at least 5 years. Well, 99% of us could. Will I be the 1%? I am receiving excellent monitoring – two PSA tests per year and one full body scan per year followed by a consultation with the Oncology Team at my local hospital. My next one will be after I return from Tenerife in December. As far as I am aware, that will continue for life.
Of course, not only is that sort of treatment really reassuring but it is fairly comprehensive. As this report from The King’s Fund makes clear, poorer areas have less access to healthcare due to a whole series of factors like:
- fewer GPs per capita
- difficulty accessing appointments
- transportation costs
- financial barriers
It may be my own fault if I don’t get to see the promised land of a nonagenarian. I must try harder! But, it will come to us all. I can feel it coming in the air tonight ….
Monday, 13th October, 2025
Grey and mild and that’s how the week is forecast to be down here. We were 14C/57F over night which isn’t fantastic but felt quite warm – if you’re not sleeping out on the streets. The clocks go back in two weeks and the street lights clocks will be adjusted accordingly. I mention that because our local services are excellent here and work like clockwork.
I am sometimes criticised for being a bit of a fly-by-night, constantly moving house and location, not settling into a community. Actually, I think I get to know more about each community I move into than others spending a life time in theirs. I have been on the South Coast for a decade now and I love it. Some who have lived in the village of Angmering for years complain about its continual development, expansion, gentrification. What so many of them don’t realise is that all the world is constantly in flux just differing in its pace.
Yes, you can criticise the Parish Council for not embracing this change. As in so many places, the car has not been easily accomodated and commerce has moved out of the village to the nearby towns but most of us can live with that.
These pictures are of Angmering Village in the early 1920s – just after the First World War when so many of it’s young men died. The streets of our development are named after individual men who died in that war. These people were survivors and had no idea that war would break out again within 20 years. They did not know electric lighting. Just think about that. Their lives were dominated by nature, the seasons and the hours of the day with sunlight and darkness illuminated by candles and spirit lamps.
At the time of these photographs, the residents had not got mains water. They used hand pumps to raise water from underground aquifers and wells. They had no mains sewage systems until the end of the decade. Electric lights weren’t brought to domestic homes befor the 1930s and street lighting wasn’t installed until 1964. Now, the tiny village is struggling to cope with electric cars inspite of the developing bypass.
And here I am. I don’t know for how long. Our 5 year plan has already stretched to a 10 year plan and we are tending to concentrate on travel while keeping our base constant. Who knows, Dear Reader? Who knows?
Tuesday, 14th October, 2025
Warm, grey morning. Have to visit the Calm & Gentle Dentist to deal with my broken tooth. Needed someone to hold my hand.
Rescue me
Ah, take me in your arms
Rescue me
I want your tender charms
I don’t do pain. Fortunately, things turned out well. I saw an emergency dentist who was brilliant. I have a temporary filling which will be replaced with a crown when I return from Tenerife in December. Do you know that it will cost me £1000.00? Can you believe that?
What is there about this bit of engineering that is worth all that cash? I will pay it because it means I will not lose my tooth. After all, Dear Reader, my ongoing beauty is paramount. Also, I couldn’t face living on soup for the rest of my life.
What does help is music. Today I am listening to the soothing music for violin and piano – Lili Boulanger Nocturne pour violon et piano (1911) – peace before the war.
On my walk this afternoon, I walked through the woods for the first time in perhaps a year. All had changed.
On the one side where the old Nurseries which grew salad vegetables for the County were, Houses were already being lived in. On the other side where once the rabbits had once had their playground, a full housing development reigned. Through the centre, the lane still ran under the arches of trees – a pastoral walk for the newcomers to say they are living in a village.
Wednesday, 15th October, 2025
Glorious morning for the mid point of October. The time really is flowing fast at the moment. Beware, Dear Reader! Hold tightly on to the coat tails of each day.
Today would be my Dad’s 110th Birthday. Unfortunately, he missed 60 of those years. He died just short of his 50th Birthday on the 24th September, 1965. I must admit, I don’t miss him because I hardly really knew him. He supplied me with a comfortable childhood until I was 14 years old but he was fairly remote in my memory. I do wonder how my life would have developed if he’d lived but that is just in a pensive moment.
Even so, my Mother loved him dearly and they were a great partnership. I never saw them have a cross word ever. He worked extremely hard in running the business and it took its toll on him. He died of a heart attack in Burton on Trent General Hospital where he was being treated for angina. Now, he would almost certainly have lived. I often think about the things that he missed and how he would have adapted to them. He was practical and embraced early change. He was the first person in his village to build a transistor radio receiver in the early 1950s. He had the first sports car in the village. He was quite early in installing central heating in our house.
Having said that, from what I remember of him, he was fairly traditional and East Midlands, small village centric. He was in Palestine in the army and had clearly travelled but he showed no inclination of venturing abroad subsequently as far as I was aware. I do wonder how he would have viewed the arrival of mobile phones in his 70s and the internet when he would have been around 80. I like to think he would have been an early adopter of electric cars and lorries for his business. Mind you, he did read The Daily Telegraph and vote Tory.
Thursday, 16th October, 2025
Went to bed late and feeling rather sad. Woke at 3.30 am and didn’t get back to sleep until the radio came on at 5.45 am. Those early morning hours are a nightmare for thoughts and regrets. So hard to dispel. Consequently, I didn’t get up until 7.15 am and felt late for everything all morning.
It had been a warm day yesterday and a warm night opening up on a glorious morning. The past few weeks’ wonderful weather has rather arrested the development of Autumn, revived the growth of grass, the hedges, flowers and my outdoor tomatoes. I’ve just found the bed that I thought I had cleared of potatoes months ago are suddenly sprouting …. new potatoes probably from small ones I missed first time round.
Got quite a busy day. Shopping in Sainsburys. Grass cutting before I go away. Flu jabs this afternoon. Car needs cleaning.
No so long ago, Boris Johnson got elected on the shallow promise of Levelling Up a Conservative Party manifesto policy that aimed to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between areas and social groups across the United Kingdom. Like so many things under the Tories in general and Johnson in particular, it was said to get elected rather as Brexit was in name only.
Consequently, Rochdale elected a proper Labour MP – a fantastic MP and respected journalist, Paul Waugh. Suddenly, Levelling Up becomes a reality. They have managed to negotiate a development pot of £20m to pour into the lowly, working class areas. I’m looking forward to seeing for myself.
In just the same way, Oldham’s Labour MPs have managed to save the historic and nationally significant theatre – Oldham Coliseum – from closure and reallocation by getting the funding for a full refurbishment. My friend, David Johnson, dead now for 7 years, would be rejoicing.
Friday, 17th October, 2025
Do worry about the medical profession at times. They employ some amazingly low level ability in supposedly high level positions. Still, I suddenly realised yesterday why low level can be quite appropriate for some jobs. This letter in The Times amused me.
My treatment by the NHS has been nothing short of wonderful over the past 50 years or so. Admittedly, I’ve had more call on it in recent years as bits have started to drop off but I haven’t been failed. In an area where residents are screaming about the burgeoning house development and population increase, the medical services are coping very well here.
Each month I complete an ONS NHS Survey which attempts to chart the nation’s developing views of the service. It takes a few minutes and is the least I can do. Other people in my area give up lots of their time freely to help out at the local surgery. Yesterday, when I walked down to receive my annual vaccinations, there were people organising the car park, organising the checking in, the preparation for the doctor and showing people out afterwards. Must have been 15 volunteers involved. Puts to shame some of the highly paid lunatics at the top who struggle to spell and punctuate.
One of the questions on the form each month is: Is your Doctor’s service getting better or worse? Since the pandemic, our doctors have been improving immensely. We are delighted with them. What hasn’t improved is Dentistry. The survey asks questions about that but it stops abruptly after say I have a private dentist service because there is no NHS one available. I have to have a crown on my tooth. It will cost me £1000.00. If I could have it done on the NHS, it would cost me a third of that price.
When you think of the poor, little people out there struggling to afford their food bill each month; struggling to manage their rent each month. How on earth can they afford to find £1000.00 for a tooth? The Dentistry Contract definitely needs redrawing.
À propos of absolutely nothing and only because this page should be illuminated with great beauty and smooth singing, this clip has been recovered from archives by a friend and is from 1971. Sorry about the hair but I had a savage barber!
I’m shattered. Just finished two hours of mowing and two hours of walking. Feels good but tiring. Lovely, warm day at 17C/63F for mid-October. Wonder what it’s going to be in the North tomorrow? Must call in on Mike and update him on his twin sister. When I get back, I will be looking to have my tooth fixed and the local (Brighton) implant clinic will do it for almost half my dentist’s price at £525.00 so I will be going to see them urgently.
Saturday, 18th October, 2025
It always seems to be on a day like today that I debate in my head that burning issue – Burial or Cremation? Which would I want for myself. It is sparked by the fact that my lovely Mother in Law died on this day in 2010 – unbelievably 15 years ago. We visit the crematorium in Hollinwood, Oldham to view the Book of Rememberance and to focus our minds on her for a moment.
It’s not as if we would forget her. There are memories of her around the house and we even have some flowering fuscias with her name in the garden in the garden now but this is a poignant moment every year. We still have such vivid memories of the dash home from Greece to be with her because she wasn’t well and of the hours and hours spent in Oldham Royal with her before the end. It is important to mark that time.
En route to Oldham, I call in to visit my Mum & Dad’s grave in Repton and to just focus my mind once again on the start they gave me to my life. Just as in Youth, we tend to reject our parents’ generation, so the older one gets, the more we recognise our antecedents as signicant in the developments of our lives. You will probably know Gray’s Elegy, Dear Reader.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard – Thomas Gray (1751)
This time of year, the atmosphere is always so appropriate. There is dampness on the ground and dead leaves laying, rotting. There is something particular about graveyards that is evocative of sadness, death, decay but also remembrance. They are a particularly graphic focal point for a visit. They are living and dying History.
And so we turn it back to the present and the living. Cremation or Burial, Dear Reader? As a Historian, I have always favoured Burial but now, as the time comes towards me, I am increasingly moving towards Cremation or not caring at all. I just don’t want people feeling an obligation to visit …. except for coffee.