I am starting to think ahead to my forthcoming trip to Yorkshire and all my train tickets and hotel reservations are in place. On the day that I arrive, my niece is coming to see me for a cup of tea in the late afternoon and the following day her husband is due to shepherd me around. I recently received a text as well from another nephew and he has invited me round for a meal on the Thursday. I had not fully realised, and neither had he, that one of the best photographs taken of Meg and which we had cropped to form the principal photograph on the ‘Order of Service’ was actually taken in our lounge when he and his wife, plus son, came to visit us years ago. The night before I had pinged several texts with my friend, an Asian lady who used to just live down the road but has now moved to Droitwich. We have kept in touch during the depths of the winter both not liking the intense cold we experienced in the depths of the winter. When I looked back over the texts we had exchanged over the years, I found a photo taken of us four years ago and on the photo was my friend and her aunt in the foreground but myself and Meg in the background. This photo had been sent to us but had never been added to our main collection and so was a pleasant surprise. We intend to meet up for a good ‘catch up’ session when I get back from Yorkshire because we have both had a lot happening in our lives and she, in particular, had had to fly back to South Africa during the winter to arrange some packages of care for her mother.
Later in the morning, I was picked up by my University of Birmingham friend together with Seasoned World Traveller (all partakers of coffee in Wetherspoons) and we were transported to Cleveden which is a delightful Victorian resort south of Bristol and overlooking the Bristol Channel. When we got there at 11.00am our favourite coffee place was absolutely teeming and we had to wait for several minutes before we could get a coffee. After our refreshment, we had a stroll along the very well preserved pier (said by the poet John Betjeman to be ‘the loveliest pier in England’) In order to finance its upkeep and maintenance, the pier authorities will sell you a variety of brass plaques and this is then affixed to various parts of the pier as a memorial to a loved one. I have decided to have a plate engraved for Meg and affixed to the Pier Head but I will wait until I return from Yorkshire to get this organised and paid for. I bought a membership ticket which will last for 12 months and, no doubt, I will visit the pier several times (as will my son and daughter-in-law who have just discovered Cleveden). Then we returned to our favourite cafe for a superb lunch and lots of good conversation before it was time to return home. No sooner had I got through the door when my phone rang and it was of the Waitrose partners who I know very well and who had come to the funeral last Wednesday. Knowing that I was to make a train journey on Monday, my friend and I had agreed that he should take possession of some Waitrose sandwiches which had reached the end of their shelf life and would have been thrown away. So I was the grateful recipient of five different sorts of sandwiches which will easily be sufficient both for the journey tomorrow and also to provide an evening repast once I have had tea with my niece in the late afternoon. The next task is to pack suitcase for myself but I am determined to travel light and not to burden myself with unnecessary baggage and so a travelling kettle will not be packed because I am pretty sure that one will be provided in the hotel bedroom. It is a long time since I packed an overnight bag for myself but when I was travelling all over the place to attend conferences at which I was delivering a paper (to form part of my PhD), this was a routine occurrence for me so I am sure I can do it again with the barest of essentials. When I return from Yorkshire, I may have quite a busy social life. There are two couples from different walks off life who I intend to invite around to share a meal with me so I need to think what else to cook as well as a proverbial fish pie and I have a potential meeting for coffee lined up as well. At this rate, I may need to pace myself to make sure that I do not get over-enthusiastic with the issuing of invitations. In the meantime, I am continuing to receive messages of condolence and support from a variety of people to whom I have sent a copy of the eulogy delivered for Meg for those who could not attend the service. This was largely a ‘paste’ job as I sent the same link to a variety of people in the ‘Contacts’ section of my iphone. Even so, there are people like the elderly Irish couple who are friends of friends and who we used to see in the park but the message has only just reached them. But after five weeks, I am pretty sure that everyone who needs to know has been informed by one means or another.
Apart from the hot shooting war between Israel and Iran, the news of the political assassinations in the United States is genuinely shocking The Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in the attack at their property by a man posing as a police officer and he was equipped with a car with flashing lights as if a genuine police car and the assassin also carried a police badge and a taser. State senator John Hoffman and his wife were also shot in their home but are expected to survive. The senator, according to officials, is in a stable condition after emergency surgery. What is particularly ironic about the dead representative is that she had recently voted with Republicans to deny health care benefits to some groups of immigrants in order that legislation should be passed,