Last night was a much cooler and therefore more pleasant night and I managed to get to sleep fairly quickly with the windows a little ajar to get some fresh air inside the house. Last night, I popped outside the house to survey the weeding work I had undertaken, and my neighbour came out for a little chat. We exchanged news about my son’s health and we agreed some practical arrangements for the car parking arrangements on our two adjacent forecourts before their garden party at the weekend. My neighbour was wondering what I was doing with a measuring tape in my hand but all I was doing was measuring the length of each section of what I now know to call either a ‘Splash strip’ or a ‘Gravel border’. It’s a man thing to be measuring things the whole time but I like to have an idea in my head of how much I have done and how much remains to be done. The roses this year as a result of the weird climatic conditions are blooming in profusion and I know that I am keeping an eye on a bush of deep red roses in our back garden which are just coming into bloom. This rose bush was donated to my daughter-in-law by her grandmother and therefore has a special significance for her. But it also has one for me because I gathered some roses and put them on Meg’s coffin (when it was replete with a wonderful array of roses) with a final message of love from me before her funeral on 11th June last year which will mark another turning point. Now that the summer is upon us, I am planning some day trips out with U3A (to Port Sunlight) and with family and friends (to Severn Valley Railway) but I am aware that I have a special eye on when the children break up from school and whilst not being averse to young children at all, I can do without hordes of badly behaved ones. Looking at the international scene, I have just a Sky News journalist being berated by an Israeli defence spokesman who claimed that the Sky News was being fooled by radical Jihadist terrorists who embedded their fighters into the middle of ambulances (a claim that the film footage of ambulances being blown up by Israeli rockets refutes) One does have to wonder whether Netanyahu wants a state of continuous and active war with its hostile neighbours and this has got to threaten the long term prospects for any truce or what passes for ‘peace’ in the middle East. Meanwhile, the days of May are slipping away and 1st June which is a Monday is rapidly approaching. I am resolved to try and getting my walking distances improved somewhat because I have been making a lot of use of the car in recent months and it will be much better for my overall health to resume my daily walks. But I do find that my walking distances have diminished now that I do not have Meg to push in a wheelchair because this did act as a huge ‘walker’ for me although I did not realise it fully at the time. After my little incident wit losing and then regaining my front door key recently, I have constructed what might be called a ‘thingamabob’ to keep my supermarket trolley access key from entangled with other keys which is what happened a few days ago.
After I had breakfasted, I took the car into town and picked up a copy of my newspaper from the supermarket as well as ensuring that I had availed myself of next week’s living money from the ATM. Then I got to the Methodist Centre, just about at the start of the Ukrainian ‘meal event’ which normally takes place on the last Friday of each month. I ordered some Borscht soup and my American friend was doing some of her volunteering behind the counter serving the meals as we ordered them. I was delighted that two of my Catholic friends from down the Kidderminster turned up together with another parishioner friend and they joined me at my table, so this really was a case of ‘wheels within wheels’ The event was pretty well attended and all of the tables that had been laid out were fairly soon occupied. I followed up my soup with a special honey cake which I shared with my American friend and then I needed to leave to go and visit my son who is not well at the moment. When I returned home late in the afternoon, I resumed my weeding activities on the gravel border to our communal roadway and was delighted to get three more ‘sections’ under my belt, in effect doubling the area that I had got cleared. So now this particular job is about two thirds done before I start on my next venture. My American friend phoned up so that we could mutually discuss the events of the day and she mentioned to me that she would quite like to accompany me on the trip to Port Sunlight in mid July. So I have forwarded on to her, the email I received from the trip organisers so that she can get herself into the system. If accepted,I can show her how the payment system works as I don’t think she has been on one of these trips before but perhaps, like me, she will catch the bug and realise that these are all good and really cost-effective days out by coach. She also mentioned to me again the Severn Valley railway trip and my son seems quite keen on this so perhaps son, daughter-in-law, American friend and I can make up a cosy foursome in the weeks ahead. Looking at the Sky News broadcasts, there was a very interesting analysis under the headline ‘If US and Iran agree deal, will fuel prices come down?’ Even if all goes according to plan, it does look as though Iran, post war is now much more of a global player than hitherto and taking several factors together, it looks as though the rest of the world is going to have to get used to increased oil prices probably for several years to come. So this is an interesting legacy that Trump has left the world – will the American electorate ever get the chance to punish him for it, one wonders.