Happy new year!

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, and I'm pleased to report that knees are much improved and apart from a little numbness seem to have suffered no lasting damage.

Christmas was a civilised affair with plenty of food, drink, pressies and excellent company, and we managed to keep going until nearly 2am. The most important point I should mention here is that mother does the best brandy butter on the planet. Seriously.

I caught up on some films I've failed to watch previously, over the holiday period. Most notably St Trinians with the wonderful Rupert Everett - Camilla looks like a lady of my acquaintance, but I daren't tell her! - who gets to camp it up. Even the kids are mostly not annoying and even pretty good - I thought it a good little film.

Captain America is good with clever CGI, and Chris Evans is extremely nice to look at - it falls short of brilliant only because the action in the second half takes up too much time - good for a potty break and making a cup of tea without having to hit pause.

Profiteroles can be gooey as well as scrummy.

Thor has the most amazing CGI for Asgard, and is worth watching in HD for that alone. The rest of it somehow doesn't quite work, as the characters don't really engage with the viewer, which given the very talented credits both behind, as well as in front of the screen, is surprising.

New year's was also a civilised affair with each person contributing a course for dinner (and washing up after that course!), lots of wine and glammimg up in posh frocks and heels.

Scarily, the 2012 diary seems to be already heavily booked, with work events, racing fixtures, girlie weekends, visits to the Harry Potter attraction and canal holidays scheduled.

The trains on the first working day of the year were bad both ways, but can't hold it against southeastern as it was all due to trees and recycling boxes being blown over the lines by that howling gale. Let's hope it's not a sign of things to come.

The first big event of the year is the anticipated arrival of number one nephew later this month and excitement abounds. Watch this space.

Trees and knees

My Christmas Tree arrive ten days ago, and it's very pretty, if I say so myself, hee!

I've been to lots of Christmas events over the last couple of weeks, with much alcohol and high-heeled shoes involved. The irony is, I had an accident that did not involve either, which irks me greatly.

I was doing well, had spent the Wednesday (7 Dec) at an industrial estate in Basildon, and managed to have swift Christmas lunch with a friend in Chelmsford along the way.

On Thursday I had lunch at Aldwych One, a place I'd been to before, that has a little theatre with popcorn where one watches the presentations one was there to see.

One glass of wine for lunch, and some time to kill before the next event, a couple of us went to TGI Piccadilly Circus - halfway between the two events - to indulge in some work type activities over a couple of diet cokes. Honest.

We then walked to Portman Square, where we were due to meet people at Home House. Unfortunately about 200yards away, I managed to trip over my own feet in the middle of the road and face-planted in the most inelegant way possible.

Because I couldn't feel my legs, an ambulance was called and failed to arrive. After five mins or so, I had enough feeling to crawl out of the road, after about twenty minutes my knees de-numbed enough that I could feel my legs, and as it was also raining and ice cold, we managed to hobble to the Starbucks about ten yards away. There were several passersby who were wonderfully helpful, and my colleague was a complete star.

We called the ambulance to see where it was, over half an hour after it was called, and it hadn't been dispatched. With our destination so close, we decided to cancel it and hobble to Home House. The staff there were gorgeous and helpful with the first aid kit, and after finding the people we were there to meet with, I spent a couple of hours with my feet up gossiping, eating chip butties and working my way through a couple of large glasses, before heading home.

This is the spectacular knee...

...and this is the knee I actually did damage to.

This was a task that was made surprisingly easy with colleague and I taking taxi to Charing Cross and station and Southeastern staff looking after me, and finding me a taxi home from the station. With Friday and Monday off, I spent all weekend with my feet up.

I now have one spectacularly bruised knee that I show everyone, because the knee that I've actually pulled ligaments in, doesn't look like I've done anything to it, hardly.

With wraps on my knees, this week has been very civilised, with lunch at Mosimann's on Wednesday, which was just divine.

Thursday I went clay pigeon shooting near Oxford, and I killed 28 out of 48 clays, which I hought was quite good for a first time. Although I will totally admit to loads of help from the instructor which basically involved me just pulling the trigger when he whispered 'bang!'. And we won't mention the M25.

However, we will mention the enormous gigantuan fork-lift farm vehicle carrying three hay bales that didn't see us - me, my boss and two colleagues in my little car - pootling up the farm track to the shooting. It was stopped in a yard when we went down the track that ran past the yard. He came barrelling out the gate and on to the single lane track straight towards us. We tooted, and I thought he'd seen us and was moving over at one point, but no, he was clearly negotiating a pot hole.

His forks were quite literally about go straight into my baby's engine, so with all four of us screaming, I hit reverse and shot backwards faster than Michael Schumacher could have managed. The driver heard that, and braked so sharply his hay bales all fell off.

We were all okay though, and we all waved and laughed, and I now have super-lightning-fast-reflex-hero status. *beam*

Friday was the office party, on a quirky boat on the Thames which was very cute, and I lay in this morning til 10am, so it must have been a good party.

The way home last night was a bit of an adventure, as I got to Waterloo East to find trains cancelled left right and center. My train came in ten minutes late, hobbled along minus three motors for a while and then dumped us off at Hither Green. To give them their due, Southeastern made the next Ramsgate (via Ashford) train stop to pick us up, which was excellent and reasonably prompt decision-making on their part.

Unfortunately, Hither Green couldn't make up it's mind which platform the train was coming in, so four platform changes for two hundred people via a little footbridge was not fun. My knees weren't impressed either. Bizarrely, I bumped into an associate from one of the organisations I deal with, so we chatted for a while, and then I sat next to lovely gentleman on the train and we gossiped about planning applications, which made the journey pass very quickly.

Heaters, Holidays and Silly Macs

Some may recall from my last missive that car cabin heating wasn’t working. However, I’d worked out a temporary system of fleece throw, hot water bottle and gel heat packs to keep myself warm during the longer drives.


Monday 17 December was particularly cold, and after driving from Croydon to Chatham (via Rochester) I was looking forward to melting in the warmth of the dive club bar. However this particular evening was my first Committee Meeting as Treasurer. Which was held in a room that doubles as a freezer. Armed with my hot water bottle, I attempted to pay attention and sound intelligent. I’m not really certain I succeeded, although Chris’ Minutes afterwards made me sound like I knew what I was talking about. It was rather fun actually, apart from the cold part.

Tuesday, at work we had Xmas Lunch held at an Indian restaurant. Thing is with Croydon and such London type places is the sheer grottiness of the shopfronts, and this place looked like a real dive from the outside, but inside was comfortable, and the food was just wonderful.

Old computer decided not to work. *headdesk*

Copied some stuff to my laptop with the promise that Old computer would be fixed over holidays.

With no Haynes manual for the Puma (and I don’t care if the Haynes for the Fiesta almost fits), the usual method for lay persons car repair doesn’t work. If one doesn’t wish to fork over vast quantities of money to Ford, Peugeot, Vauxhall or whoever, one usually goes online and searches for the problem in the hopes of getting a clue. The result is usually something like ‘that problem sounds like the crank widget over compensating for the carburetor belt, which can be solved using page 463 of the Haynes Manual’. Not for the Haynes-less Puma though.

I looked up the heating problem (as in, there wasn’t any) on the Puma Drivers website, and found it to be a known problem. Which was excellent news, as with no Haynes in existence, step by step instructions on fixing these things are readily available on the web. Headed by the cheerful note from whoever put the instruction up, announcing that the entire exercise would take approximately four minutes to complete, I printed off the entire seventeen pages (including diagrams and bar charts) and with a big smile and a large Baileys, handed them to Chris.

Before commencing with exercise, we needed one new part, a heater control valve. The parts centre at Ford wasn’t open on a Saturday. Or Christmas Eve. So after watching the pretty Halfords adverts on the telly depicting intelligent auto-knowledgeable persons who know exactly what is wanted, and can cross reference on their sparkly new computers to find the exact part number, sub part number etc, we thought we’d stop by on the off-chance.

At the parts desk we found one bloke pored over a license plate maker struggling in his attempts to spell out NU55MTY for the frustrated looking couple in front of us. And a second employee who was no older than eighteen and was lucky if he had that many IQ points.

We would like a heater control valve for a Puma, would you have one?
Whats a Puma?
A Ford.
Never heard of it, are you sure?
Um, yes. It’s a bit like a Fiesta, try looking up the heater control valve for a Fiesta.
I can’t. Computers crashed. Give us a couple of minutes.
Okay, no problem.
Computers still not working. ‘Ere, Gavin, do we do heating bits for Fiesta Pumas?
What’s a Fiesta Puma?
See? Gavin doesn’t know what a Puma is either, you sure you got that right?
Ford Puma.
Yeah, well, if Gavin doesn’t know what a Fiesta Puma is, then we probably don’t do bits for it.
Huh. Yeah. Going now.

Christmas and New Year were wonderful, with quiet, relaxing visits to friends and relations. Christmas Day and Boxing Day was a relaxed with parentals, enjoying good food, good company and a four way fight to the death by way of dominoes.

27 Dec, we went to Chris’ parents and had a lovely afternoon there in good company as always.
Then Chris and I went our separate ways for couple of days, with Chris going to see his son, and nan, while I had the girls down. I for one certainly had a fab time! Xmas tree and decos came down, and loot was stashed.

Went to Ford, and nice man there knew exactly what we wanted (we took it out of the box to make sure it looked like the picture on page one of the instruction), and let us have it for the princely sum of twenty quid.

After half an hour of swearing, comparing notes with the neighbours, and providing entertainment for those of us snuggled up in the warmth of indoors, Chris managed to replace the heater control valve and Ghostie is now nice and toastie warm inside.

30 December we had a Chinese meal with the Dive Club, and speculated on the idea of the New Years Day dive, which both Chris and I had agreed to take part in.

New Years Eve was a quiet affair with Chris cooking rather scrummy ten course meal that we ate over the evening as we watched a couple of movies and Jools Holland. Debated New Years day dive as sniffly cold seemed to be attempting to arrive.

New Years Day snotty cold arrived, so Chris and I joined the spectators on the bank, watching and laughing, er, I mean supporting the five ‘Ard divers what jumped in the lake. The part that was particularly amusing was when one of the divers (Branch Twat) discovered a fishermans domed green tent (with torch still attached) in the lake and decided to rescue it. This might have been easy if the tent was neatly packed away, but it wasn’t. In fact not only was it fully assembled, but it’s front door was zipped closed, which made the physics of water weight versus gravity in lifting the thing highly amusing for the spectators right up until someone found the zip. At which point things got really smelly as all that stagnant water poured out.

02 Jan, back at work. Old computer still not working due to relevant CDs not arriving from supplier. Apparently Next Day delivery isn’t guaranteed over the holiday period. Now having my own laptop armed with work specific software, I have been happily using that.

04 Jan. CD still not arrived. Huh.

Saturday we very productively did not a lot. Apart from Chris buying himself a beard trimmer, which since doesn’t have a beard we will not ask questions about.

Today, we are going to explore Leybourne Lakes where we have spent many a happy, murky hour diving, but never actually walked around.

New job, new era

Okay, for those of you living on a planet not in our solar system, it may come us news that I started a new job this week. Not only a new job, but also a new career. Scary stuff.

So, first week. Was fun.

Got email telling me to turn up at 10.30. Yay, like that idea muchly. Now, outside the rush hour, home to new work is an hour, pretty much on the nose. Inside the rush hour I had this idea that at least doubling that would be a fair estimated as there is to contend with, lemme see;

Getting out of Ashford (mostly okay)

M20 at Maidstone (slow but okay)

M26/25 junction (slow)

Clackett Lane (slow to standstill)

Purley Cross (guaranteed queuing time of one hour)

So, I thought I’d leave home at 8am.
Got there 9.30, surprising everyone, including myself. Chatted with Receptionist, Director and IT boy until boss came in at 10.30. looked around the place and met everyone.

Boss was in receipt of new computer. I was in receipt of Very Old computer, an interim machine until Old computer was ready for me, an interim machine until New machine is authorised and purchased. Went for lunch with boss whilst both new and Very Old computers were being persuaded to work.

Nice local pub with decent lunch menu.

Came back to find new computer throwing tantrums and Very Old computer failing to get out of bed.

Managed a little bit of computer time to play around and got first assignment issued to keep me occupied Tuesday when boss was out. Got home in one hour ten.

Decided to leave home at 7.30 and see what time that got me in. Arrived 10.00. Hmmm. Did assignment and struggled with writing first assignment due to uncontrollable urge to write comedy which was fuelled by Very Old computers unwillingness to wake up and do anything. IT boy assures me that Old machine is almost ready and that its much better. Got home in one hour forty five.

Weds was one hour thirty in, and two hours home due to M25 standstill. Arrived to find Old machine installed. Excellent. Much more spry than Very Old machine. Lots of quirks and foibles but am able to type more than three words a minute on it. Serioused up Tuesdays assignment and started sub-editing other peoples stuff. And playing with pictures. Am sure that at some point I will learn how to make a picture of a loo seat look interesting.

Am learning about all sorts of things that I am deciding that I want in my house. Whilst sitting in the outside lane of the M25 going nowhere, compiled potential shopping list of things I’d like done to my house. After shopping list had grown to the length of a large redwood, gave up. Baby car’s cabi heating element also gave up.

Thurs was two hours in. Nice colleague volunteered to show mw short way to M23/25 junction on way home. Played with new machine, learned about forklifts, u-bends and health and safety issues. Received second assignment to play with on Friday when boss not in. Followed colleague down to M25 via every tiny little humped road and leafy suburb in south London, only to run into standstill on M25. However, the back roads were so quick, that despite standstill at Maidstone due to very nasty accident and stopping for petrol, I was still home in one hour thirty. Replicating route? Even using sat nav, multimap and ordnance survey? Don’t think so.

On Friday, had dive club dinner, so left at 7.05 with the idea of getting in for nine so that I could leave at five. Arrived 08.15. Hmmm. Meant I could leave at 4.15, but took two hours to get to Chris. *snerk!*

Now I have benchmarks for timing, next few weeks will be spent exploring short cuts.

Dive club meal was excellent at the George Vaults in Rochester,an event Chris organised. Zippy got the Albatross (booby) award (sighs of relief from both Chris and myself who were also contenders!). In classic Christmas party tradition, the sprouts bounced, but there was no food fight this year.

Christmas is approaching way too fast this year, I’m not at all prepared and still awaiting presents arrival. And, oh sh*t, I should probably do something about xmas cards. But at least my tree is up.

Fish and food

It’s been ages since my last missive, and having just dot pointed everything I want to get in, I’ve realised that anyone who has the time and/or the patience to read this might want to either get a very large glass of something nice and put their feet up for a while, or just skip to the end to find out which characters live to see another episode.

There's a lot to cover and I've missed loads, but i think the salient points are covered.

Let me introduce Leo. He is one of my very first original fish. A leopard spotted Danio. Who had a swim bladder infection in August and has since been swimming at a funny angle. Unfortunately Leo had a relapse in December and has been swimming upside down and slowly losing weight. As of the 22nd December, he was so thin and so desperately trying to stay away from the surface, it was clear that he had only hours to live. *sniff*.

On 23rd December we went diving; or rather, Chris dived and I gossiped with Buoyancy Ade on the side of the lake, ignoring those in the water. I hate colds.

Chris and I had our Christmas on Christmas Eve. And in case anyone mistook either of us for grown up adult types, we were happy as kids in a toy store; Chris with his shiny new fully working replica Darth Vader’s light sabre, and me with my totally unexpected shiny new PSP with some games to start me off. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire immediately loaded. Then we went to Chris’ parents.

Christmas was a fun affair with family popping in and out, pressies swapped and vast quantities of food and alcohol consumed. Harry and I were very happy. Of note, was a musical fish given to Chris by his brother. You have to feed it sound, and it’ll sing and dance, and if you’ve made it really happy, it’ll make noises like its blowing bubbles.

We came back to Ashford on Boxing Day to find cats armed with dirty looks and Leo still swimming hard. Also discovered that we’d left musical fish behind.

You just know there has to be a dive story in here somewhere, don’t you? Well, we decided it would be a really good idea to do a night dive on the evening of 27th December in the lake. Six degree water, not a problem in a dry suit, although my fingers nearly dropped off with the cold. Slightly shocking was the decent down the shot line as we landed on top of the worlds largest pike. It seemed a bit PO’d at us disturbing its night time wanderings, scowled and moved off into the dark. Maybe we’re ‘Ard, jumping in six degree water, maybe we’re crazy and the three degree air temperature might support that, or maybe, according to some people, we’re just wimps because we should have gone in without a suit at all. Crazy, maybe, but not insane!

Decided to take Ghostie to the car wash the following day. A treat as we don’t normally touch them, preferring the bucket and sponge method. After collecting my voucher, it was only when I’d finally located the end of the queue, half way down the block, that I realised I was in for a wait of the best part of an hour. Fortunately at some point my PSP had fallen into my handbag (still don’t understand how that happened), and Harry and I whiled away the time happily together. Slightly concerned when Ghostie took two tries to start afterwards – she has *always* started first time.

On the 29th we had a dive club dinner. Large quantities of Chinese food and alcohol were consumed. With over a dozen of us, we asked the Maitre D’ if he’d organise a selection of each course rather than us selecting, and he truly outdid himself, supplying items that were unpronounceable in the English translation, let alone the Mandarin or anything else, and it was lovely and a good laugh.

New Year was a fun affair at Annelies and Richard’s house with family, pressies swapped and vast quantities of excellent food and alcohol consumed. Harry and I were very happy. We returned home on new years day to find grump cats and Leo still fighting onwards. (Hey, it’s my monologue and I can cheat if I want to!)

The weekend of the sixth of January was one of my girly weekends. More pressies, alcohol, food were consumed, along with the avid reviewing relevant DVD’s as usual. Chris’ fish tank blew up with no survivors.

Some of you may be aware that Ashford is having its one way ring road converted into a two way erm… something or other. The big picture may or may not have been planned properly. The roadworks, really haven’t. Most roadwork types tend to shut off bare minimum of lanes, especially during the rush hour. Junction 10 for example has most of it work done at night. The town centre roadworks however, seem to think it’s a really fun idea to close three out of four lanes for no particular reason, and on all the five different lane merging points (on what amounts to a mile of actual road) the signs that inform drivers of the impending lane merge are strategically placed at the er… actual point of merging; nothing like advance warning or anything… *blink*

With Annelies’ wedding just four weeks away, on the weekend of the 13th January, I went to meet Annelies in Sandhurst for our dress fittings, and also met the other two bridesmaids, Emma and Clo. Without giving anything away, we all looked totally gorgeous. It was good fun, and whilst Annelies was detouring to organise various bits, Emma asked the question, what were we going to do on the hen night that Annelies doesn’t know about. A survival kit was decided upon, so much plotting occurred over that weekend and the following week, roping in the other seventeen ladies going on the hen night in on it. Which is why I now have half her friends on speed dial *whistles innocently*.

I returned home and Leo was fighting ever onwards, but with a now concave stomach, and reduced to thrashing to keep himself off the surface, only minutes, much less hours were left. Sadly, Chris’ uncle Dave passed away after a long illness over the weekend.

On Monday 15th January, I went to the Dive Club to take the first of three lectures I need before I can take the Dive Leader Theory Exam. With five of us on the course, all seasoned divers and one being the club chairman, a, uh, light-hearted approach was taken. I laughed so hard I had a stitch for two days.

On Tuesday Mel came around, and as usual, my worldview expanded in directions I never even suspected existed. Less said, better.

On Wednesday, I got a letter advising me it was upgrade time on my mobile. Got shiny new toy that they gave me sixty quid to take off their hands. The down side is that it’s a Motorola and I’ve always had Nokias. Which means that all the buttons are in the wrong places. And the calendar reminders all go off at midnight. *funk* Oh, and you know how some people just *have* to have new gadgets? So it was no surprise that when I got my new toy, someone else was forced to go out and get a new toy too…

On the weekend of the 20th January, we drove across the country to somewhere outside Oxford for Annelies’ hen party. A gorgeous little old village in the middle nowhere that was extremely quiet and quaint. Chris dropped me off before driving on to meet up with Richard and dad for the stag party. After a small amount of fortification, once us girls had mostly arrived, we went for a short walk before retiring to our rooms to change. We had one hour to change. Yeah. That worked very well. Apart from the bit where on the five mile walk from reception to the room that mum and I had, I was accosted very many times as various ladies kidnapped me at various points to stuff various contributions to the survival kit down my jeans, up my t-shirt, inside my sleeves and... well.

I was lucky I could walk, and rattled so much I just knew I was going to bump into Annelies halfway there. Fortunately I didn’t. Unfortunately, mother had lost me on one of the occasions when I was temporarily kidnapped, and I had to head back to reception to meet up with her. At six o’clock, mum sailed off in a gorgeous swathe of turquoise, whilst I waited for everyone to go over to the pub where we were meeting up before tottering over to reception in my six inch spikes and micro-dress carrying a large wooden box filled with goodies. By myself. And did I mention the five mile walk to reception?

The evening was fantastic. The murder/mystery was convoluted, the thought processes well oiled with good food and alcohol (can you detect a repeating pattern here?). Graham, the host was fantastic, there enough to guide us, but not too intrusive. Sally made an excellent foil for mum, as well as a very attractive corpse. Mum was in her element, and Annelies was… very fishy. The box was presented at the end, and the best bit for us watching? That Annelies didn’t know about it. After much gossiping and retiring to the hotel bar for a night cap, we all staggered to bed some time around 3am. I brought earplugs to guard against mum’s snoring, but either I was too drunk, or she was to snuggled in her cocoon, but I forgot to use them, and didn’t get woken up by snoring. A superb time was had by all.

On Sunday, after the boys had woken with hangovers and decided that the logistics of manoeuvring one car out of the fleet parked on Annelies and Richard’s driveway were just too much for fragile hangovers to handle, us (apparently) more robust ladies decided to drive to them. And from there we extricated the car and went back to Ashford. We found the cats giving us the stiff tailed salute and Leo unable to leave the surface, but he was refusing to give up.

On the Monday, I woke up and jumped in the car to go to work, taking her in the whole two miles because I was going straight up to Chatham after work. Click click click, and I discovered her battery was dead as a dodo. Which explained the occasional difficulty in starting. Planned to fix at the weekend. Fortunately Chris was able to pick me up and take me up to the dive club to attend the second dive leader lecture. It transpired that there were only two of us that hadn’t done it. Light-hearted attitude was taken to whole new levels.

Chris snores horridly when he has a cold, He had one. So I tried out my super duper new wax earplugs. I truly think I may have discovered the cure to the insomnia I’ve had for many years. *bliss*

Tuesday was the day of Uncle Dave’s funeral. It was in Milton Keynes and we went via Hillingdon to consolidate cars with the rest of Chris’ immediate family and pick up the musical fish. The journey up was good, and we stopped at a service station for a quick dash to get dodgy stodgy food as we thought it was the only chance we were going to have – the nibbles being provided after the funeral being assumed to be peanuts crisps and pretzels. The service was simple and concise yet managed to convey that Dave was a real character.

Having the congregation sing the Beatles’ ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was class. The wake was lively and well attended, and the ‘nibbles’ turned out to be the most gorgeous lasagne, en croute, new potatoes, salads, hams and cheeses, trifles, cheesecakes and strudels. Next time someone says they will provide nibbles, I’m going to take the chance of starving. The journey back was interesting and made up for the several trouble free trips we’ve had recently.

The A5 achieved a maximum speed of thirty mph, the M1 managed forty-five at most, which was all a little frustrating, but okay because at least we were moving. However the M26 managed to take the biscuit when we parked up in the outside lane for half an hour. It was during the quiet at this point that we heard the merry sounds of the fish singing and blowing bubbles. In the boot.

We returned to find Leo still soldiering on. And that the first of two Miners Lamps that we are acquiring in remembrance of Great-Granddad Robinson arrived.

They say as one gets older, one becomes more like one of ones parents. For some reason, since the New Year, I have written four stroppy letters of complaint to four different agencies, three of them for work purposes. Huh. To date, one has replied promptly and we are currently in negotiations, and the other three have failed to respond, but respectively stopped sending us nasty letters for money we don’t owe, stopped taking money by direct debit for services we no longer receive, and uh, well, nothing for the last.

Have suspicion that hot water plumbing at work may be at too high a pressure. Kitchen tap has always leaked a bit. Silly old plumber said we’d just have to live with it. Lately kitchen leak grew up to be a waterfall. Pending plumber, we switched it off at the kitchen stopcock. On the other side of the stopcock, the pipe goes to the bathroom. The tap sprouted a leak. New plumber came and fixed them both on Thursday. Twenty-four hours later the kitchen hot stopcock sprouted a leak. Hmm.

On the same day, DB (full time employee for last five years) noticed that I’d had the bathroom window fixed. That is, the very large hole in the glass of the very large covering half of one wall frosted window. That I’d fixed in November. Points for observation.

On Friday I talked with our new staff, JC, and she is good to stay. Yay! Celebrated with wine at the Phoenix.

As Chris had a spare aquarium going, I ran the idea past Charles about having an aquarium in the waiting area. After a serious conversation about costs we decided it was a goer. At which point Charles went from 50yo to 5yo, and bounced up and down with requests to have sharks and eels and seahorses and anemones and koi and Japanese fighting fish. All in the same fresh water tank. Uh, no. me in mom-mode. Lets start with Danios shall we…? And let’s not let Charles buy any fish…

Got home to find that Ghostie had a acquired a new battery. Lovely surprise! And Chris lurking with smug grin.

Went immediately over to Margate for a meeting regarding the Scapa Flow expedition in August. And believe me, it *is* an expedition! We didn’t want to go via either Canterbury or Dover/Pfizer in what was still the rush hour, so sat nav took us via Faversham. Longer, but faster. After many biscuits, we came back home to relax.

Leo is still here and still fighting. I have a new treatment for him to try if he’s still with us tomorrow.