The evening before yesterday, I made the journey out to my friend’s house in Droitwich where we were going to cook together. The traffic around Droitwich was a nightmare and it took me ages even to leave my own drive and immediately surrounding streets but I managed to arrive at my friend’s house without mishap. As I was evidently driving there and back, I took with a bottle containing some dregs of red wine (approximately half a glass) and took with me some tonic water. I was amazed what a pleasant drink this made and it lasted me the whole of the evening giving me as much pleasure as a full bodied red wine might have done so this is a good tip for the future. My Droitwich friend started to prepare a fish curry and I helped with the preparations. for this – she used a tin of South African pilchards but I think I will substitute a tin of mackerel which is more readily available. A my friend is such a good cook and has a huge range of spices, this was evidently delicious but I have subsequently consulted a YouTube video which takes you through everything stage by stage, So we had a delicious meal and afterwards my friend showed me her Christmas decorations that she had been putting up with the assistance of her sons. Then she gave me a tour of the rest of the house into which she had only moved late last February and is subsequently remodelling bit by bit to sit her tastes and life style. Although my friend knew the features of my house (because I had given her a guided tour in the past) we had never had the opportunity before to visit hers which had been architect designed and then extended so it was quite extensive.To finish of this domestic evening, I had taken along my aged iPad and on this I showed her again the various series of photos which more or less followed Meg throughout her life. My friend had seen these some some six months ago but I managed to explain to her what each of the groups of friends were in the photos. Then I showed her my pottery-and-chairs website that I have constructed in the past. Some 2-3 years ago, Meg and I decided to move into the lounge vacated by my son and daughter-in-law, the large room was completely devoid of furniture apart from one or two bookcases that had been left behind. So we started to slowly populate the room with some good pieces of furniture, starting off with a ‘captain’s chair’ which I acquired either through eBay auctions or from our local Age Concern shop which stocked second hand furniture. As I acquired each piece, I restored it to a nearly pristine condition with a range of specialist oils and then photographed each piece and wrote a paragraph for the website indicated where it was purchased, what I knew of its provenance and its value. The room is now officially ‘full’ and my furniture buying spree has come to a halt, because I literally do not need any more, When I showed my friend the website, I reminded myself that I had spent a total of £425 on some 14 pieces altogether. With a combination of either good luck or a skill at spotting a bargain, I have now acquired some furniture at a fraction of its real value (according to the web) and have generally bought some stuff for about £30 a piece or so which is actually worth about ten times what I paid for it. This did give me a certain amount of pleasure during the buying and restoration process and it certainly helped to make Meg’s last few months a happy and pleasurable one, particularly when I sought her advice as to what to buy and so to some extent we were making joint decisions together whilst she was capable. Looking back on it now, I would do the same thing all over again as well.
In the morning, everything seemed a bit delayed I got up rather late (for me) at 8.00am having woken up early and then promptly turned off the alarm and went back to sleep again. Eventually,I got myself up and breakfasted and then went on a trip along the Bromsgrove High Street. I had the most run of good luck by escaping a parking fine within seconds. Normally, I am assiduous in getting a ticket from the machine as soon as the car has been parked but I decided to sneak into Waitrose to get my daily newspaper. There was only one manned till in operation and I was stuck behind a women who had done a big shop up and who then couldn’t get her phone to work in such way that she could pay for it. So I dived out of that queue and paid for my newspaper with my usual voucher but when I got out into the car park the attendant was hovering over my car. I explained that I was on my way to get a ticket but I don’t think I was believed because the attendant told me that I has just come from the direction of the ticket machine next to the store. I explained that I only used cash in the ticket machines and to use the one at the far end of the car park even though I had a newspaper tucked under my arm and had evidently been into the store. He gave me the benefit of his (considerable) doubt and I ran to the machine, got my ticket and waved it in front of him and, one way or another, managed to make myself legal to his satisfaction. Then I progressed down to my bank which is one of the few remaining on the High street and presented my newly delivered bank card to the in-store ATM which promptly refused to recognise it. By good fortune, I managed to commander an assistant with whom I had had a banking review about a month before hand and explained my dilemma. She took me into her office where the new card was read by her machine (reading the chip) but she thought that the ATM had failed to function because it was reading the magnetic strip. So she ordered me a new card and I went back to the in-store ATM whereupon my old card failed to work (but the new one now did) So I ended up with the two available in-store assistants trying to work out how and why their technology was working or failing to work but at the end of the day I now have some living money out of the ATM and a card that works.