Sunday, 10th August, 2025
Glorious morning, Dear Reader, and it’s going to be a glorious week. And then to Athens where the daytime temeperature will be 36C/97F. It won’t fall at night time much below 25C/77F except in an airconditioned hotel.
This morning, I’ve been out in the garden picking cherry tomatoes which is strange because I haven’t planted any this year. In fact, the last time I did was in 2022. They grew like mad and nearly knocked the fence over. When you grow and pick vegetables, it is almost impossible to make sure you collect every one and tomatoes are notorious for escaping to regenerate. The plants this year date back to seed from the fruit 3 years ago and they are just as vigorous.
Fruits of my past constantly seed my mind in the present and point to the future. It’s good to look back and take stock some times. Time can rush past without one realising unless we take the time to review and understand. Three years ago, I had raised beds installed and my lawn replaced with carpet-grass and I don’t regret it one bit. Maintenance has been made so much easier.
Now, we can go away and not worry about keeping the whole thing watered, fed and cut. It used to take hours of labour to keep it in a manner that I would like.
The one thing I can’t grow at home but which I love is Sweet Corn. They are not easy to grow and take up far too much room for my garden and are very cheap to buy. English Corn-on-the-Cob smothered in melting butter is a Summer delight.
They are on the menu this afternoon outside in the sunshine …. from Sainsburys at £1.00 for two. Unfortunately for me, the butter is essential and massively calorific so I an not allowed to eat many of these delicious treats. I’ve tried the Greek way which is to BBQ the cobs until well charred and then eat them dry but it just doesn’t cut it for me.
Monday, 11th August, 2025
Gloriously hot and sunny morning. It is only 10.00 am and two strange things have happened already. We both had Dental appointments – well, Hygenist. My wife loves going to the Hygenist so her teeth are expertly cleaned. I hate it because he always hurts me.
I always go in first to get it over with. After my torture is over, I go out into the waiting room to find my wife looking very pale. She says she feels nauseous. Over the next few minutes, she feels worse and says she can’t cope with the Hygenist and would I take her home. She holds my arm as I walk to the Desk to say we have to leave and we are just shuffling to the exit when my arm goes light and a pale faced girl falls lightly and daintily on the floor beside me – almost like a circling feather falls through the air
My first thought is, She’s Dead! She hasn’t done the ironing yet. When my Dad died, I was 14 and I remember distinctly saying out loud, Who will give me my pocket money on Saturday? I am blessed with this great sense of empathy, Dear Reader.
Anyway, help was at hand. Assistants and Dentists rushed to help. They are trained to deal with fainting after a patient’s treatment so at least they knew what to do. As my dead wife started to come round, they listed dehydration, heat exhaustion and lack of food as likely causes. She was given a glucose tablet for food, a glass of water and time to come round. I was useless! I walked her back to the car and drove home so she could carry on doing the washing and ironing.
Back home, much Googling of symptoms is carried out with increasing bouts of fear provoked by possible causes. Eventually, her colour comes back but not until I’ve given her a very strong cup of hot water. And life goes on. I go out to Sainsburys to buy Rehydration treatments and Glucose Tablets in case this happens again. The Laundry Woman must be kept alive!
The second strange thing to happen actually occurred at 1.00 am this morning. I didn’t realise until around 5.00 am when I woke and found I had a Whatsapp from an old friend, Anne-Marie, who I hadn’t heard from for about 5 years. My relationships are rather slow-burn, Dear Reader.
She and her husband live in Edinburgh. They are both Arty. Amazing how many of my friends lean that way. Anne Marie’s husband, Bjorn, taught Art at my school while she lectured at Manchester University. Bjorn left us to Lecture in Project Design at Edinburgh’s Napier University. Anne Marie, who trained at the Royal College of Art and went on to research at the School of Art, Edinburgh University, became Internationally renowned and specialised in Jewellery Design and 3D Printing. We went up to Edinburgh to see them about 5 years ago and have just exchanged Christmas cards since then.
Life throws curved balls at us all the time when we least expect it. That’s why it is so interesting and one should never give up hope. This afternoon, it has posted us a temperature of 32C/90F and it is wonderful.
Tuesday, 12th August, 2025
Another gorgeous morning – hot and sunny and good training for Athens. The English Patient is improving but not back to full strength and confidence yet. She did an E-Consult with the Surgery this morning and is awaiting advice.
When we fly to Athens next week, we will be entering the hot arena of something like 36C/97F so she’ll need to be fit for that.
It seems hard to believe but 10 years ago today we signed the sale of our Surrey Duplex and, within a couple of days, bought this current house on the South Coast off-plan. It would be 6 months until it was ready for us to move in.
The Duplex was enough for 6 months a year but too small for all year round living and we’d sold the Greek house a year before. We only had the Surrey property for 5 years and we were amazed to find it had almost doubled in value over that time. It was the best investment we ever made.
We sold to a lady who was relocating back from Australia. We kept in touch for about 6 years and then she developed dementia and died last year. What was shocking was the price the duplex fetched 9 years after we sold it was less than we got.
Suddenly the City commute was out of fashion as so many are working from home and need bigger properties. In fact, it is quite fashionable to live on the South Coast and just go up to the Office occasionally by train. It is fuelling a huge house building expansion plan. It is also spawning Working Hubs where fast IT connections and individual work stations are rented out along with hot desking meeting areas and, in some cases it includes complimentary coffee and craft beer on tap. That’s the way to work!
Wednesday, 12th August, 2025
A strangely overcast and much cooler morning. The North is basking in 27C of sunshine while we are just 20C and grey. Despite the wonderful weather yesterday, it wasn’t a good day. Pauline got an immediate Doctor’s appointment after her E-consult but the diagnosis was confused and confusing. She has had to provide blood and urine specimens today but our research already suggests she is suffering from Gastroenteritis which just needs rest and rehydration to irradicate.
I don’t know anything about anything medical so Google is my first port of call. It is full of brilliantly technical illustrations like this one isn’t. Anyway, we should know the results of her test this afternoon on the NHS/PKB app and we can move ahead from that.
I have bought about 25 cars in my adult life. I have never bought a second hand one. I have written off a few but at least they were all shiny, brand new ones from my first in 1974 – a sandglow orange Skoda Coupé which I wrapped round a tree in Bolton on my first lone drive to visit my sister to the pageant-blue Mini that Richard – an executive at British Leyland – helped get a discount on before someone drove through the middle of it and nearly killed us both before it was 12 months old. It was replaced with a pale blue Datsun Cherry which lasted a year before the wing mirror rotted off and was traded in for a dark green Nissan Stanza.
That was the end of one era and the start of the Honda bromance. In 1984, I bought a brand new Honda Accord and have only bought Hondas since. About 5 brand new Honda Preludes, 15 or so CRVs and so many of them silver. Of course, everyone said I was mad and spendthrift throwing away money on depreciating assets but I didn’t care. I loved new cars – the smell, the feel, the look – and I could afford them so I indulged myself.
All the time I lived in Yorkshire, I bought from Hepworth Honda in Huddersfield. They moved to the outskirts of the area to brand new premises but my salesman who became a friend, Chris Woods, remained. It became so regular that I bought new cars – for one streak a new one every year – that it hardly cost me anything to trade in and get a new one. He knew it had been looked after and treated well (when I wasn’t writing them off) and he could resell them as ‘nearly new’.
This morning, I was shocked to read a notice on social media that Chris had died. He was younger than me at 72 but I had no idea he was ill. We kept in touch after I left Yorkshire for Surrey and subsequently Sussex but it was largely through Christmas cards although I did go back from Surrey to Huddersfield 10 years ago to buy one last car from him to help his pension fund.
The old Showroom was the place I confirmed the sale of my Helme house to my GP. I was buying a new car when he phoned to say he couldn’t raise the cash to buy the house because he was committed to the building of a big new surgery. I offered to let him pay in installments over the next year and the deal was done. The brand spanking new showrooms and garages were built on Honda‘s insistence and cost some couple of million pounds 25 years ago. What shocked me this morning was to find they had recently been bought up by a huge conglomerate and virtually no one could remember Chris Woods at all. I remember him with fondness.
Thursday, 13th August, 2025
Another warm but grey start to the day. The patient has had a bit of a relapse. It is beginning to cast some doubt on Athens next week at the moment. No point in going there to be ill when you can be ill at home in comfort. We will see.
While the patient is resting and being fed with continual cups of hot, strong water, I have been taking the chance to address some technical issues in the house which I haven’t thought about for a while. We have been using Sky for our TV services since the mid 1990s – about 30 years. In the early days it seemed quite expensive but has become almost dismissively cheap nowadays. Actually, I didn’t even know how much we paid each month until this morning. It turns out we have been paying £127.00 per month for a package which includes Sky Sports and Netflix as well as every other channel known to man other than children’s channels.
I have a Sky Q 2TB box plus 4 satellite mini boxes. I would prefer two more but 4 is the maximum allowed plus the main TV. It seems a long time since I had one television fed from a satellite dish in the garden. We had to have it there because we lived in a Conservation Area and were not allowed one on the house wall. I’ve been using Q Boxes since I moved here in 2016 and all the boxes are nearly 10 years old. One was playing up recently so I’ve finally got down to sorting it out.
I went on the Sky website to look for help and found that my 2yr contract had ended. I went to renew it and was given a reduction in subscription fees for loyalty. You see, there is some advantage in being faithful. I got the help I needed with my faulty box and had it upgraded remotely which was good but they are trying to tempt me with a new delivery system that I’ve been resisting for a couple of years Sky Glass. The TV sets don’t come big enough yet and mine are perfectly good for the moment but wifi delivery is definitely the way to go. All the properties we rent in Europe have been using it for quite a while.
The other thing I’ve been doing is restoring Alexa Echo Spot routines for my bedside. I have to program it to sound the alarm at 5.45 am with increasing volume until I tell it to stop. At that point, I have programmed it to announce the time, tell me what’s on the calendar for the day and then play BBC Radio 4 until I tell it to stop. I’ve also programmed it to pick up The Newsagents political podcast from Global Player which I listen to in the car and to just seamlessly carry on from where I left off.
How wonderfully life has moved on since I started out. I was jolted into this thought when a friend sent me a photo I haven’t seen before but which was taken in 1971.
Remarkably, all but one is still alive. The lad on the left with his head up died shortly after this but everyone else is still plugging on. Haven’t seen Christine, the girl on the left, since. She became an Art Adviser to Kent Education I think. The girl hiding at the back, Anne, has lived in Germany for years. David lives in Bolton but taught SEN in Salford. Peter behind David was a Primary Head in Yorkshire. Nigel (Head of Art) and Julie (Artist in Action) live in North East Yorkshire. Christopher, front right was a Deputy Head in Yorkshire. Tash/John was a Primary Teacher. The girl on the right, Liz, lived in Holmfirth all the time I lived within 3 miles but I didn’t realise until I had moved away. The girl on the far right, Carline Herbert, is an enigma.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drownedW. B. Yeats: The Second Coming
And yet, you know, everything is still there to be reclaimed by the memories of those people and those times.
Friday, 14th August, 2025
Talking about reclaiming memories. I moved to Oldham in 1972 and learned many weird and wonderful things. Some were to do with language like brew, ginnel, kecks but there were also grammatical reconstructions of the English language. One of the first teachers I met said on my first day: I’m going there me, down the ginnel and up that brew. I have a smattering of foreign languages but this was completely beyond me. They ate barm cakes for Lunch which they called Dinner. They thought I was ‘posh’ because of the way I spoke and because I didn’t want to drink from a mug but brought my own cup & saucer. I have never been able to use mugs.
The Northern stereotypes of women in curlers and men with whippets on strings really weren’t so far fetched at all. I mention this because Friday is hairdressing day ready for the big night out. After a week of long hours of the dust in the mill, girls had to look their best for the evening out in the pub/club with their boyfriend/husband. I must admit, I didn’t see many whippets but there is definitely a North/South cultural divide.
Sorry, musing on because Friday is Hairdresser day down here – at least this week. The patient has made a miraculous recovery in time to go to the Hairdressers’ – £85.00 for a minamalist trim. Mine is cut for free but, if I was paying, it would cost me £40.00 so I reduce the hairdresser’s bill by almost half – and there are no curlers, headscarves or whippets in sight.
It looks like Athens is back on, which is just as well because the hotel has taken £4,000.00 out of my account this morning and contacted me to say they look forward to welcoming us next week. I can’t wait. I’ve worked out that this must be about our 80th trip to Athens since 1981 and that we have actually lived in Athens for just over one year if you amalgamate the stays.
It is a city that has definitely improved over the 44 years we have been visiting. We have only missed Covid Year in that time when we didn’t visit at least once. It would feel wrong to stay away.
It will be hot in Athens and it will be fairly hot down here although the first signs of Autumn are appearing. The fruits of the Summer are well underway in ripening. Apples, Cherries, Pears, Blackberries are all being eaten. The trees are starting to show the brown-tinged stress of aging. The grass is slowing down its growth and the days are shortening.
In the 8 days that I am away in Athens, Sussex loses 46 minutes of daylight. That is a hell of a lot to lose in just over a week. Soon, we will be complaining of cool, Autumn evenings and chilly Winter mornings. And another year over, Dear Reader. Hang on, hang on.
So hang on, hang on
Hang on, hang on
Hang on, hang on
‘Cause you already come so far along …
Saturday, 15th August, 2025
Warm, grey morning. We are driving up to Surrey to visit M&K and possibly go to the Dementia Home to see C. It might even be a goodbye because he is refusing to eat which is very worrying. One of the interesting things about Dementia is how the present disappears almost immediately but the distant past remains imprinted on the memory banks quite vividly.
Last time I sat with C and talked about what he had just been through, he honestly could not recall it from three days previously. I then asked if he had ever played cricket and his face lit up as he told me about Waterhead Cricket Club in Oldham. He hasn’t lived up there for almost 30 years and hasn’t played cricket for 50 years.
Found this document in a box of old photographs. It is a reference for C written either by Pauline’s Dad or Grandad from his business premises in Solomon Street, Oldham in the 1960s. Magnificent handwriting. I couldn’t have done that in my prime writing days never mind now in computer land old age. I’m still trying to find where Solomon Street was. It doesn’t exist any more. Maybe it will jog his memory and C will look through the mists of time and tell me. I’ll let you know, Dear Reader.
The person this reference was written for cannot remember Solomon Street, Oldham. Fortunately, I have a resident Historian who will tell me within days and I will go up to see him after the Athens trip. I have a number of people to see. This will just be one more. I look forward to it, Dear Reader.
Athens calls. Do you want to come? It’s going to be hot but very luxurious. You would really enjoy it.