10 February 2011

A  day of activity after a quiet day yesterday. Quiet in terms of people coming and going, that is. The only visitor being ‘Jane sheep’ who relieved Alice for a couple of hours and meantime massaged my hands and stretched my arms as usual. Despite the lack of visitors I still seemed seem to be very busy on the computer all day dealing with the blog, various e-mails and general business matters.

The first of my visitors today was my faithful secretary Doreen, on one of our fortnightly visits to sort out my papers and bring some order into my life. Apart from anything else, having been with me over 30 years, between us we both know where to find a particular file or document and therefore where to file incoming papers. I have every intention of working through my several filing cabinets, over the next year or two, file by file, and any papers which had not been referred to in the last 12 months will be shredded. This will be quite a task as some of them go back over 40 years.

Then this afternoon  two of Alice’s long-standing friends dropped in for tea – Beatrice Goldie, an erstwhile lawyer who lives in Saffron Walden and Christine Alexander, married to a retired engineer Jim, who lives just down the road in Wendens Ambo. This tends to be the way that ‘my lovely’ meets most of her friends these days. They come here either for lunch or tea. It makes a lot of sense because although there are in another part of the house I always have my buzzer on my wrist which I can still press with my right thumb, if I need help and need to summon  ‘my lovely’.

Christine told us an extraordinary story about one of her sons who lives in Australia. In fact he lives in Cleveland, near Brisbane, in Queensland where the horrendous flooding and cyclone occurred recently. Apparently the floods reached a short distance of Cleveland from the south and then stopped and the cyclone was just slightly to the north of where they lived and therefore blessedly they  suffered no damage. A miraculous escape from both of these meteorological disasters. Apart from anything else one must remember that people in that part of the world are uninsurable due to these potentially unexpected weather conditions and as such if you lose your home you can lose everything.

Now for something entirely different. Some  early historical videos of Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic which are well worth the effort to watch. Simply open the file and copy htto;//www.airportappraisals.com/ into your server and click on it to see these original photographs and video.