To the super Fiddleteacher. May she have a day in which she doesn't have to yell at the children and in which everyone she meets appreciates her for her marvellous qualities!!!!

I'm so grateful for the advances in surgery over the past three decades or so. My dear sister, Gill, had a new valve put into her heart last week as the old one had sprung several leaks and she could breathe only with difficulty. Now she has a pig's valve instead of her own, and we hope she will be out of hospital on Tuesday. She is still ( Read more... )

is gone! After much heart searching - and about two years too late - I asked the local council for permission to fell the fig tree in the front garden and it was granted - after my submitting a scale plan and my reasons for its removal. So, on Thursday the nice man came with his saw and sledgehammer and did the deed. The roots have broken the ( Read more... )

I do hope that fiddleteacher arrived home without mishap or delay and that she was able to enjoy her "Gu" en route. Rabbaboonie, whom I thought was in the air when I posted yesterday was, in fact delayed at LHR for almost three hours because, notwithstanding the heat and sunshine here in the South, the scheduled pilot for her flight was unable to ( Read more... )

On yet another ridiculously hot day - a mere 89 degrees when yesterday was 97 and Tuesday afternoon registered 106 in my sitting room - I took fiddleteacher to Heathrow along with rabbaboonie (she has yet to begin her Live Journal but xinamarie and off_colatura know her) and as I write both should be being taxied along the runway or already in the ( Read more... )

fiddleteacher arrived safely on a glorious July day and I found my way round the spiffy new car park at Heathrow Terminal 3. Opened only on 6 July so still free from graffitti, skid marks and bump marks caused by drivers whose spacial awareness is not what it might be. So good to see her again! Madam Z acknowledged her as another courtier, and ( Read more... )

Just to let anyone interested in my welfare - and that of other friends in London - know that the four incidents today seem to have been far less serious than those of two weeks ago. Whether they are just someone stupid playing silly b.....s or are more of one of the Western-hating group trying to emulate their four departed "brothers" I don't ( Read more... )

this is simply to note that I am almost back in the land of the living! It seems that an amino acid (methianone) which was meant to do me good was doing precisely the opposite, and, as I stuck at it for almost four months, my boat was getting lower and lower in the water! However, I've not taken the stuff for four weeks now, and I'm beginning ( Read more... )

I've just returned after a lovely weekend in Bury St Edmunds, a medieval/Georgian town with bits from every age, once the capital of East Anglia and one of the most important places in England. My niece was married there on Saturday - an absolutely glorious day - and everyone had a great time. After murky weather last week, the sun came out on ( Read more... )

Yesterday was successful in terms of hatbox hunting - I bought two big enough to take my trade-mark large summer hats - and a visit to a small, but upmarket, Farmers' Market in Orange Square, Pimlico (where Mozart lived for a few weeks in his youth) which yielded excellent bottled fruit juices and a truly scrumptious, moreish wheat-and-dairy-free ( Read more... )