18 March 2011
Today’s highlight was a visit from our dear friends Nancy and Brian Osborne. I’ve known Brian for the best part of 30 years since we both played golf together in the Chartered Surveyors Meeting at Sunningdale. We subsequently paired up to play in the East Anglian Foursomes at Hunstanton, Norfolk, but to be honest, we never worked well as a team. The competition was played as a Stableford (points scored against par) on the Saturday and people being pair off, in flights, from the highest to the lowest for match play on Sundays. Brian and I were you be so bad we were always knocking somewhere near the bottom flight, so much so that a whole new terminology was coined amongst the regulars asking whether you were AC or BC (after Cato or before Cato). You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that if you were BC you must’ve played extremely badly on Saturday. The point being that the lowest flights went off very early in the morning. Anyway we played together in this for many years and met a great number of lovely people and it really didn’t matter that we never won many trophies although I do have a vague memory of having won our flight one year. One of our better years, I believe, when we were around halfway in the field of 14 flights.
Having known them both so long I fondly recall the birth of their twins, Tom and Kate, of whom have very fond. They both turned into a lovely children, or should I say young adults, and their parents can be justifiably proud of the way they’ve been turned out to stop Young Kate is currently in Uganda spending some months , between school and university, helping out in a impoverished village. Tom, who is a very keen and promising triathlete-he was one of the three swimmers in the Great London Swim, earlier this year – 3 Miles from Mark – which raised something in the order of £15,000 in two separate appeals for the MND Association- is doing a design course at Nottingham Trent University. They have another lovely older sister Anne. who is very talented and making her way in the fashion world. Mother Osborne, Nancy, is an extremely keen gardener and has recently been engaged as a researcher into various plants which will form the subject matter of the book being written by a friend of hers. The mere fact of being asked to undertake this task is a reflection of the high esteem in which she is held in this field.
The Osborne’s, following a now ‘beginning to be well-established routine’, kindly brought their own lunch and we ate it in my study, on our laps, which saves the whole exhausting business of transferring me through the house into the breakfast room. It works very well.
On the medical front, having tried antihistamine for my runny nose for over a week now, to no obvious beneficial effect, we are switching today to an anti-congestion,Otrivine, and, on the advice of the Papworth consultant, will try that for a week or so and then switch to Rhinacrom to see which is most effective. I really would like to crack this one as a runny nose morning and evening, particularly at bedtime when I have to wear the respirator, really is not amusing. I will report back for the benefit of any other sufferers.
My copy of Outlook turned up today and I was able to install it with the assistance of AbilityNet. It wasn’t so much as a problem of installing the actual software as importing my address book, with which I needed assistance. It turned out to be quite a complicated affair. Thank heavens I shall be back to some form of sanity after having to live with Microsoft Live Mail the past few weeks. Even this latest version of Outlook is slightly different from the earlier one so again: I will have to learn new tricks.