Yesterday, being the start of the week, I engaged in what is now my new routine of getting up fairly early, writing a little of this blog, doing some exercises, performing my ablutions and then having some breakfast. My son popped around this morning and I was particularly pleased to see him as there were one or two things I wanted to discuss with him. One thing that I showed him was a newspaper article which I had gleaned from the ‘Weekend’ section of Saturday’s ‘Times‘ written by a 61 year old woman who had suffered some spinal problems and decided to turn her life around with a series of diet and life style changes. Her article indicated that she felt fitter now than she did thirty years ago so I thought that there might be lessons to be learned. Having given this article a detailed reading, I think I will put many of its recommendations into effect. One thing of which I am quite conscious is that after pushing Meg around in her wheelchair for so long, I have developed quite a stoop in my own posture (as I leaned forward to propel the wheelchair, particularly up the long hill out of Bromsgrove) I have no doubt that some of the cartilage in my spine is not as elastic as once it was so I have tried to address this by equipping myself with two pairs of shoes, one for indoors and one for outdoors which give my feet much more cushioning. I have also resumed my Pilates classes and I am hoping that these classes plus a modicum of daily exercise will help to straighten my back out somewhat. I also took the opportunity to discuss the hotel prices that I was investigating to plan a visit to my relatives in Yorkshire once we get the funeral out of the way. I may well go the following week and the hotel in which Meg and I used to stay seems to be offering as good a rate as any and an even cheaper rate than the bed and breakfast establishment in which we use to stay and which has now been converted into an ‘apart-hotel’ After breakfast, I walked fairly slowly down the hill to collect my newspaper from Waitrose and also stopped off to have a coffee which is available free to card holders who bring along their own mug. On the way back home, I knocked on the door of my two oldest Catholic friends and I was delighted to see that they had returned from their holiday at Lake Garda, Italy where Meg and I actually spent two pleasant holidays. I think they were very pleased to see me and I was certainly pleased to see them and we exchanged news about Meg’s funeral arrangements and some of the other activities in which I have been engaged recently. I accepted another cup of coffee and they were very solicitous that I should look after myself in this particular period. After I returned home, I seared off some chicken breasts and then baked them in the microwave oven with a mixture of onions, tomatoes and peppers and a jar of sweet and sour sauce. This turned out to be quite big so I only ate one half of it, leaving the remainder for another meal. During the afternoon, I was tempted to watch the Jane Honda/Lee Marvin film of ‘Cat Ballou’ which I first saw in 1965 and thought then it was the amusing film I had ever seen. I don’t think that I would retain that judgement after sixty years but the film had a happy and surprising ending about which I had forgotten. The theme of the film is about a gun slinging rancher who is often hopelessly drunk on whisky but the more he drinks, the better he can shoot. Then in the afternoon, I set about bringing some order to the books that were stored in a large deep shelf which we have on a coffee table in our lounge. This is where we traditionally used to keep brochure and guides to places that we had visited in England – the guide books to foreign cities were housed in another bookcase on our landing. Going through these materials and junking the vast majority of them was quite a painful process because it reminded me of the places that Meg and I had visited together but which I would in all probability visit no more. Still, I managed to throw away a lot of out of date material and to only retain what I thought would still be really useful to me.

Today, the major political event has been the Prime Minister announcing the findings of a Strategic Defence Review in which there will be a policy of rearmament not dissimilar to the 1930’s when we faced the threat of Hitler. But there has been a dramatic development in the war in the Ukraine which illustrates very dramatically the changing nature of modern warfare. The Ukrainians had manage to smuggle several lorries into the proximity of air force bases, some deep inside Russia. Then the coverings of the containers were rolled back, one presumes in response to a radio signal and a total 117 drones were released which managed to destroy about one third of the entire Russian bomber aircraft fleet which were strategic cruise missile carriers. This was a daring and audacious attack which had been planned for about 18 months according to accounts. So when Donald Trump informed the Ukrainian president that he ‘had no cards to play’ in the by now, notorious, dressing down in the Oval Office. Donald Trump underestimate the ingenuity of the Ukrainian military and their desire to defend their homeland at all costs. One used to think of warfare as consisting of boots on the ground supported by long range artillery and tank advances but the relative cheapness of drones means that modern wars will be fought in a very different way. The interesting thing about this attack is that Jo Biden would not have sanctioned it but given the Trump policy of relative disengagement from the Ukrainians, they presumably feel more free to launch attacks deep inside Russia whatever the Americans might think.

Although feeling a little fragile, emotionally, I walked down the hill calling in at my Italian friend whose knee was troubling her more than a little. We made an appointment to have coffee with each other on Wednesday morning when we are both free. After I had picked up my newspaper in Waitrose, I treated myself to a coffee which is free to card holders. As I was drinking my coffee, an acquaintance approached us who knew of Meg’s passing but, as it turned out, knew our ex-neighbours particularly well having baby sat for them in the past and we had a bit of a chat. Then I made my way to our ‘usual’ park bench and although I did not know the group occupying the next bench, I nonetheless got into conversation with the male parent. On my way home, I reflected upon the fact when you are a couple, you form a little ‘bubble’ against the world but when you are single you are much more outward rather than inward looking. For this very reason, the great travel writer Wilfred Thessiger always to travel alone as this way you are forced to problem solve by yourself and to interact with the culture whereas if you in a pair, you are cocooned, as it were, from the rest of the world. After a conventional lunch, I quickly took the opportunity to mow the back lawn. As you might expect, ‘Sod’s Law’ came not operation because there a few spots of rain (which I mowed through) only to be greeted with rays of brilliant late afternoon sunshine the minute I had finished and was cleaning up the mower afterwards. After the obligatory cup of tea, I started to think about a few days away in Yorkshire once the funeral is over in about ten days time. I have in mind to stay away about four days in total and my first port of call was to get a price on the website for the favourite hotel in which Meg and I used to stay which is called ‘The Crown’. The point about this hotel is that I know its systems well, there is a paper shop which sells basic provisions quite nearby and quite a few coffee shops and places where you can have a quick cafe-type meal. I was offered a price of less than £70 a night and then looked around at alternatives, including the B&B in which I used to stay and I do not think this price can be bettered, even including the B&B in which we used to stay and is now converted, since the owner whom we knew well and featured us in his book, sold up an the B&B is now styled an ‘Apart-hotel’ I have not come to a final decision just yet but made a quick call to my niece to make sure that she (and other family members) would not be away for the week after the funeral which is when I intend to go. I spent the rest of the early evening watching a ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ programme which was relatively interesting followed by one of those out-take programmes in which TV bloomers are committed. All in all, I think yesterday was fairly successfully navigated as my first Sunday completely alone.

I am very conscious of the fact that I have to devote energies to looking after my own health which has rather been neglected for about a year and a half now. Saturday’s edition of ‘The Times’ often contains life style articles and a couple ere published that are well worth a detailed view. One was by a woman who in her 60’s sustained a spinal injury which forced a re-evaluation of her life style and we are not just talking about diet here and she reckoned that after committing herself to a regime of life style changes, she was fitter now in her 60’s than she was in her 30’s.I am going to study this article and follow a lot of the advice it contains, but I have already made a start. Pilates classes have resumed on Tuesdays and I have bought some good footwear for both inside and outside the house as I need to compensate for the fact that the cartilage in my spine must inevitably have lost of its compressibility and elasticity and shows that have a degree of ‘bounce’ in them must be a good pace in which to start. I am also cutting down radically on carbs and concentrating on eating protein and eating green vegetables whenever I can.

I have seen and read a couple of things that have given me pause for thought and made me count my blessings. One of these was a report that indicated how often patients with dementia were often subject to processes of neglect in both residential homes and in hospitals and I rejoice in the fact that Meg died at home but, in statistical terms, was only a part of the 8% (1 in 12 dementia patients) who actually die in their own homes. The other program which I forced myself to watch, against my better judgement, was one of a series on the operation of the coroners’ courts entitled ‘Causes of Death’ The episode I watched was that of a dementia patient who was attacked by another dementia patient in a residential home and died shortly afterwards. The question posed by the programme was whether this attack contributed to her death or not? The programme concluded that it did not which I thought was an incredibly convenient solution because suddenly the police, the care home and the NHS were all left ‘off the hook’ and the relatives could be consoled. To my quite informed mind, there were quite a few questions and lines of enquiry that were not pursued and I suspect that all of the agencies concerned, perhaps subconsciously, were working on a mindset which indicated that the cause of death was the disease progression of Alzheimer’s and the attack contributed nothing. But, even if nothing else, this was another bullet that had been dodged and again, for the second time in the space of a few hours, I counted my blessings. As you might expect, I am trying hard to move on and I am pleased that I have just about completed the task of assembling photos of Meg for the websites we have created as these are inevitably a reminder.

Yesterday being a Saturday is the day traditionally when I go down and visit my two friends in Wetherspoons which I did ofter several trips around the car park in Waitrose which was absolutely teeming. After the conversation that I had with my niece the evening before, I received a photo of Meg and my great-niece (i.e. the daughter of the niece) who had come to stay with us at the age of about 14. I did not remember much about this visit except the photo was taken on a train and I suspect that we had taken the opportunity to go into Winchester by train and to show my niece sights such as Winchester Cathedral and the site of Jane Austen’s house. Incidentally, here is a stunningly good piece of biography on Jane Austen which is being repeated on BBC2 and which I shall enjoy watching. After I had taken leave of my Saturday morning friends, I struck out for Asda because they had, in the past, stocked a very nice semi seco Cava and the supervisor that I know there had promised me that she would apply some staff discount for me. But my search for semi seco was fruitless and none of the other supervisors claimed to know of a Gloria although I was only speaking to her a couple of days ago. Perhaps she has left Asda and had some kind of loyalty card to discount goods from there. So then I made for Morrisons as our domestic help has said that I had bought her a very nice semi seco from there some time ago. Morrisons had a fair selection of Cavas although there are acres of space devoted to Prosecco at the moment. As I suspected, Prosecco has seen a significant increase in popularity and sales, and it has arguably become a dominant force in the sparkling wine market, particularly in countries like the UK. While it has not necessarily flooded the market by displacing other sparkling wines entirely, it has become the preferred choice for many consumers. After engaging the attention of a supervisor (eventually) I did buy ten bottles of bubbly for our celebrations. They are split into three types – a Freixenet Vintage Rose 2022, a fairly standard Brut Cava and some semi seco of unknown provenance so I hope that I can cater for everybody’s taste. My intention is that about 3.00 in the afternoon, I am going to recount a few amusing anecdotes from Meg’s life, that we can toast her I some Spanish Cava and that anyone else who wishes to say a few words in appreciation of Meg can take the floor. This has to be timed quite carefully because those who have made long journeys will be naturally anxious to hit the trail back home again. Some people will be staying in the hotel in any case so I can join them later and we can polish off any champagne that happens to remain. I do not know whether this is traditional at funerals or not but it seems to me to be entirely appropriate to give Meg the type of send off she would have preferred. After I cooked myself some lunch, it seemed a little dull and although at first I was disinclined (but then the weather brightened) so I made myself cut the front grassed area so as to keep myself on schedule. These days, after the first cut, I make myself a cup of tea and enjoy that sitting on the bench at the front until I can face doing the second, transverse cut which is always quicker. In the morning, my son and daughter-in-law had very kindly called around and whilst I was out (buying champagne) they finished off the cutting of the high hedge around the biodisk which they had half done a couple of weeks ago and now completed for me.

Having lived in Leicester for twenty six years, I still remain interested in events occurring in the city. Leicester was in the news yesterday, the principal one being that in a quiet street adjacent to De Montfort University there had been an altercation during the night and it appears that a motor vehicle has been used as a ‘weapon of attack’ to settle off an argument. There must be a demonstration effect here after the events in Liverpool recently but I fear that it is a trend that may be spreading. The other story relates to the foundation of the Leicester economy which is the fashion industry. There have been many stories about Leicester’s clothing industry in recent years: grim labour conditions, pay below the minimum wage and ‘dark factories’ serving the fast fashion sector. What is less well known is what happened next ,as in short, the industry has been hollowed out. In the wake of the recurrent scandals over sweatshop conditions in Leicester,the majority of major brands have now abandoned the city, triggering an implosion in production in the place that once boasted that it ‘clothed the world’. And now Leicester faces a further existential double-threat: competition from Chinese companies like Shein and Temu, and the impending arrival of cheap imports from India, following the recent trade deal signed with the UK. Many worry it could spell an end for the city’s fashion business altogether. When we first moved to Leicester in 1971, one of our near neighbours was an ex-Mancunian probation officer and we naturally became friendly with him and his two children (and I think the sweet little pre-pubescent daughter we knew shocked her parents by running off to become an ‘exotic dancer’ on a cruise liner) The story our Mancunian friend told us about the inhabitants of Leicester within weeks of our arrival in the city was that the inhabitants of Leicester ‘were so dedicated to making money and with so little sense of history or culture that if they had been present at the Crucifixion, they would have been offering cut-price nails to the Roman soldiers’ Despite this cruel jibe, Leicester did have a small town mentality and I was told more than once that the principal concert hall in the town, the De Montfort Hall ‘had only cost us £14,000 to build in 1919 and we have not spent a penny on it since’ De Monfort University held its Degree and Diploma ceremonies in this hall but things had to rapidly give way to the wrestling which was scheduled for the day afterwards.

Well, yesterday turned out to be one of the most interesting of days because I had been invited down to Reading by one of my close Oxfordshire friends and we had arranged that I should go by train and he would pick me up at Reading railway station. I had decided to go via Warwick Parkway because having trekked along the M42 instead of heading north to Birmingham International one goes south for approximately the same distance. There was one change at Banbury but this is absolutely non-problematic because I alighted from one train and its successor was due along in 15 minutes on the same platform. So my train arrived in Reading and I was on time and met my friend who was waiting for me just beyond the ticket barriers. My friend treat me to a meal in a Toby Carvery which I must say was a pretty good meal – over lunch, I gave my friend a detailed account of Meg’s passing and he mentioned some books he had read that dwelled on this very subject. Then I accompanied my friend on a couple of errands and we ended up in a bijou little coffee shop with an excellent hot cappuccino which I really enjoyed. So my friend was very kindly and supportive and has witnessed Meg’s decline over the months and years and was relieved that Meg’s passing had been so peaceful. So we will be in constant touch with other, as good friends are, in the weeks and months ahead and there are various things which, at the appropriate time, I need to ask his advice upon which is how to dispose of a collection of about 1,000 academic books. One the way out and also on the way back, my attention was divided between reading the Swedish book ‘The Gentle Art of Death Cleaning’ and the Soduku in The Times. The Swedish book is a very gentle read and I am barely half way through it but I not learned anything earth-shattering by reading it. I chose the ‘Fiendish’ version of Soduku and although I have not completed a Soduku puzzle for a couple of years, I was delighted to get the fiendish one solved and managed to come to a final solution when only about a minute away from my final train destination. Getting home was a bit nightmarish at first until (eventually), I got the SatNav to point the car in the right direction and the rest of the journey home was unproblematic.

A couple of nights go, I was rummaging through some old shoe boxes where we store some yet-to-be worn shoes, wondering whether in the past, I had bought a pair of good slippers which I had not yet brought into use. Our chiropodist who called around the other day informed me that I was losing subcutaneous fat from the soles of my feel (part of the ageing process?) so I thought I had better ensure I was better equipped in the footwear department. I did not find any slippers that I may have had in stock but nestling among the shoe boxes were some shoe inserts, one with a gel cushioning and other just being a pure leather ‘Clarks’ insert. When I come to think of it, Meg always used to tell me that the shoes she had tended to wear out from the insides first. Now these two inserts fitted my newly purchased German ‘house shoes’ absolutely perfectly so they must have been exactly the right size in the first place. So now the shoes I am wearing around the house in place of slippers have that extra degree of cushioning which I am really appreciating. I tell myself that if I need extra cushioning when I put on my outdoor shoes, by the same token I probably need some extra cushioning for what I wear inside the house so I have made an absolutely fortuitous discovery of something I have probably had inside the house for a decade and not brought into use before until now.

Last night, after I had returned from my train trip and wonderful day out, I had a little doze followed by the obligatory mug of tea and then decided to have a video chat with my niece in Yorkshire. She, as a teacher, was sitting in front of a huge pile of children’s work books which she had to assess in order to make end-of-year reports and I suspect that she welcomed a break from this fairly thankless task. I remember all too well how my heart used to sink when faced with about 50 student essays, each of which took a minimum of 20-30 minutes and which had to be marked and then returned within about a fortnight. This inevitably meant some late nights spent in marking which I grew to dread as the years passed by. We exchanged news about my preparations for Meg’s funeral which are now largely complete and then about post funeral plans which is to spend a little time in Yorkshire seeing my family for the first time in years. Then when I have recovered from this, I intend to visit Spain perhaps on my own and perhaps with a friend, but we shall see. It is now three weeks ago since Meg died and family and friends have rallied round magnificently bu I suspect that the real psychological ‘low’ may come after all of the activities of the funeral have died down and I am left on my own (and hence my holiday plans). I have to say that I think I am coping pretty well to my ‘post-Meg’ life as we had known each other for 59½ years and practically all of my post adolescent life as we met when Meg was 19 and I was 20. Incidentally, I came across a statistic recently that only 8% of dementia patients die at home, the most typical place being a residential home, a hospital or a hospice. So my experience with Meg dying peacefully at home is only an occurrence of about 1 in 12 which I actually find a great source of comfort as ‘only the best for Meg’ I must say that the prospect of Meg spending her final days anywhere else than at home surrounded by family, friends and a familiar environment was anathema to me so I am more than happy with the way that she actually spent her final time on this Earth.

The day before yesterday, just after lunch, my son called around and he is much more familiar than am I with a piece of photo manipulation software which goes by the unfortunate name of ‘SmugMug’ but which is actually excellent and we both have a subscription to it. My son is much more familiar with it but he achieved a degree of presentation with it which is much more professional than my efforts in HTML and which can be easily augmented and reorganised as new photos come to light, which they are doing. Yesterday evening, I continued my trawl through the folders to see if any more relevant photos of Meg came to light. It was the day wen our domestic help calls around and she thought, with a lot of justification, that we should to de-clutter my principal bedroom which of course has not been slept in for practically a year when Meg moved into a hospital bed downstairs and I slept on a camp bed besides her. I must say our domestic help worked like a demon and I worked alongside her. Principally, we managed to get rid of a pile of tights, stocking and socks in great variety and this released some chest-of-drawers in which clothes could be housed. Meg had quite a lot of jewellery and general bric-a-brac which required some careful sorting. Between us, we managed to process one half of the room and the other half will follow next week. Then I had to make a dash to see the undertakers or a chat about the next step forwards.

The visit to the undertakers turned out to be remarkably productive. I had taken the precaution of buying a pack of 5 small capacity USB memory sticks and on one of these was a photo of Meg in our lounge with one of my nieces and her children. It was fortunate to have a clear picture of Meg without an arm around her or a glass of wine in her and and I believed this photo would crop exceptionally well to provide a good photo to mount on the coffin (which I believe is the custom) and also provide the definitive photo for the front cover of the order of service. Then I received a phone call from the undertakers and the very nice lady with whom we are dealing could just fit me in for a quick consultation at 1.00pm. This turned out to be an incredibly useful and productive meeting. I gave her the Order of Service which our Eucharistic Minister had already prepared for us and she was happy with this and was going to send it on to the relevant artwork department. I explained to her how my son and I had been going through collections of old photographs but we had not made a final selection. However, there was one view of Meg which showed her at her best, as it were, but this photo would require some cropping. I explained that our domestic help who had been a professional photographer and still had a lifelong friend who worked in our local ‘Photoshop’ shop on the High Street would do a wonderful job in cropping it and then inserting the photo into a frame to sit atop the coffin during the service. But the lady at the undertakers explained that they could all of that and as I had taken a USB memory stick with that one photo on it, she forwarded it on to the relevant department. The other three or four photos (one for the back, perhaps a couple for the inside) will follow as soon as my son and I have made the relevant selection which we will do later on tomorrow. I then turned my attention to the music tracks which we required and I explained how I had acquired the various .mp3s that were required and I would let the undertakers have them. But it was explained to me that they were already plugged into a system (called ‘Obit’ I think) which accessed a library of thousands of pieces of music. We located the two pieces of music we required for the crematorium committal part of the service (which will be quite attenuated) and the one piece required for the church. So these have already been chosen and plugged into the system ready for us and will be accessible once we get to the crematorium. We have chosen a sad piece of Mozart when entering and a joyous piece when leaving which I think Meg would have really enjoyed. The one piece I was unsure about was the sound system at the church to play the Handel we have chosen upon leaving the church which I have to say is a real ‘weepy’ but I will not divulge just yet. This was no problem for the undertakers because they bring along their own equipment with powerful speakers to fill a church and that takes care of that. I showed the assistant the rolling displays of the photographs of Meg’s life which I and my son had prepared and this was to be played during the ‘tea-fest’ in the afternoon. One very old photograph has come to light of Meg pushing our son around in a little buggy when he was aged between 1-2 years old and we lived in Manchester and this will be included. By an accident of organisation, this photo appeared before the wedding photos in our display but we had a little giggle about this and located it in a correct time sequence immediately after the wedding photos. The final thing that I did was to take along some religious mementos to place inside the coffin. One of these was a little plaster statue of ‘Our Lady of Lourdes’ which Meg had always kept besides her bedside for decades and alongside these we had a little folding tableau devoted to the recent Pope Francis as well as a metallic souvenir of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela which we know so well, having attended multiple pilgrims’ masses there. So these three devotional objects are to be placed within the coffin and I shall not miss them but I am sure that Meg would have appreciated the gesture highly. Then I returned home and spent an hour or so in the afternoon taking some photos in which Meg’s head and shoulders could be usefully ‘cropped’ and I now have a selection of about nine of these, one with our close friend Jo who is no longer with us and one with two of her cousins. The difficulty with cropping is that we typically have arms around each other and one has to be careful when selecting what to crop not to have a disembodied hand resting on a shoulder.

The evening before yesterday brought another pleasant surprise in the form of an email which came to me out of the blue. When Meg and I lived down in Hampshire, we lived in a little town called Hedge End and we had bought a house in a Close where there were several young children. Now about three or four doors down, lived a doctor and his wife who was a midwife and whose motto on her car was ‘We help people out’ and they had two children aged 7 and 4 when we first moved there in 1998. The two children came along and introduced themselves and from that point on, the closest possible bond was forged between Meg and I and the two children. The point was that we were the age that their grandparents would have been but their own grandparents lived a long away down in Devon but we were only three or four doors away. So we saw the children nearly every day or nearly every other day and Meg was always there (and I was often there) when they called around. Now the daughter learned from our brother who wrote to us yesterday about Meg’s passing and wrote the most moving and touching message it was possible to receive. In her email, the daughter had written and I quote ‘Any child who is lucky to have a bond like I had with the two of you, is a very lucky child indeed. I hope that knowing how much of an impact Meg had on people’s lives brings you some form of comfort in this time’. Now the daughter will be in her 30’s and works in London (I think) but is going to move heaven and earth to get to the funeral if she possibly can and she can always stay here with me for the night if that should prove necessary. I do hope that we can see her again soon because these two children were actually the nearest thing to grandchildren of our own that it was possible to have and we had so much mutual love for each other. We still have a photograph of the two of them displayed in our lounge but of course it was taken in their pre-adolescent days and now they are very much grown up. I can remember very vividly our very first encounter with the children because the older brother had brought his younger sister along with him when he came to introduce himself. He told us his name and announced that ‘This is my younger sister, ——‘ The little girl stamped her foot and exclaimed ‘I am not his little sister. I was last year when I was three but now I am four!’ I have replied to her email to me, expressing the hope she can attend the funeral but if she can’t make it she could always perhaps pop along and spent a weekend here when we can exchange pleasant memories. I have asked her permission if, like her brother’s email, I can quote much of it in a Tributes section of the website I am dedicating to Meg. Whilst on the subject of writing a website, I have discovered during the night how I only to have add a two word instruction and a numeric parameter to the CSS in my HTML code, in which the page is written, to turn my navigation buttons into much more aesthetically pleasing buttons with rounded edges which improves their appearance no end. Although I have several books on HTML and CSS, I find I can get the answer more quickly by consulting the web rather than looking for it in a book.

As it turned out, yesterday was a very different type of day. My normal Pilates class was cancelled because the tutor is taking a half-term break and so I knew that I had a lot of the morning free. So I devoted to a lot of time hunting through my hard disk folders to locate photos of Meg which we can use in an ‘Celebration of Life’ presentation. This was quite a challenging and time consuming task if only because I have my photos split over a selection of folders which are named according to the holiday location or the year or the event such as anniversary. Even when I located a photo it was not always suitable if it was taken in a dark restaurant or with a crowd of people where Meg appeared marginal. As it was, the photos that I did find and select always seemed to be with me (as I used to get someone else to take the photo) and generally displayed Meg with a glass of wine in her hand or nearby, so that it appears that we led the most dissolute of lives. Most of the photos I have located are what might be termed ‘holiday snaps’ and I did tend to snap locations rather than people but I did end up with nearly fifty. I chose those photos that showed us at either family events or with our close friends which is fitting, I feel, for a display of this type. Locating the photos is I think one task but getting them into a ‘rolling display’ is another thing. I do have a large A4 book in which I write down computing tips and techniques and was soon able to discover what I had done nearly eight years ago when I had unearthed some software which gave a rolling display of our original wedding photos back in 1967 and which I utilised on the occasion of our 50th anniversary which was nearly eight years ago now. But I did manage to adapt this software as ‘all’ I had to do was to replace the approximately one dozen photos of our wedding with nearly four times that number now. This task absorbed me all of the morning and I worked on it practically non-stop apart from a brief break to go and collect my newspaper. The only way to make sure that everything worked was to play it through which at 5 seconds per photo took four minutes for a complete tun through. Incidentally, I have a huge ‘mp3’ file of all of the wedding music we had played in 1967 and I have this playing in the background. The first track is the well known organ piece by J. S. Bach ‘Wachet Auf’ or ‘Sleepers Awake’ which is highly appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, we chose it as the track to which Meg walked down the aisle (or should it be the knave?) in 1967 and which our Eucharistic minister (and organist) is actually going to play for us when we start off proceedings on June 11th. It is one of our favourite pieces of music and many people will know it as the ‘Lloyds Bank’ music when they used it for the advert featuring a black horse several years ago. The music is not synchronised to the photos but when one accesses the website containing the rolling display and the music, you get the music playing in one tab and start off the display with another tab. Well, all I can say is that it works!

Just after lunch, my son called around and he is much more familiar than am I with a piece of photo manipulation software which goes by the unfortunate name of ‘SmugMug’ but which is actually excellent and we both have a subscription to it. My son is much more familiar with it but he achieved a degree of presentation with it which is much more professional than my efforts in HTML and which can be easily augmented and reorganised as new photos come to light, which they are doing.

Yesterday the day dawned with a brilliant blue sky and sunshine which is unusual because it was a Bank Holiday and one expects the weather to be bad for UK Bank Holidays. The night before, I had gone through many of the contacts in my mobile phone and posted them a simple message containing the link to the website containing the details of Meg’s funeral arrangements. I am really pleased that I took the effort of posting this one page website because in all of the messages, it only takes one click and the all of the details of the church and the post-funeral afternoon tea in the Holiday Inn are revealed and what could be simpler? I must confess that my heart sinks somewhat when I know that a Bank Holiday is in the offing because many of one’s normal routines are disrupted. But the week ahead is going to seem relatively empty as most of the administrative tasks associated with a death have already been undertaken. I am trying to make a best guesstimate of how many will turn up at the church and later the hotel so that we know how many to cater for but I am working on a figure of about 50 at the moment. I need to assemble some photographs and also make sure that I have the relevant music tracks stored on USB memory sticks but this is probably going to be an ‘evening’ type job as I will ensure that I get out and have plenty of fresh air whilst we have a bit of summer to enjoy. A little thing that happened which actually gives me quite a lot of comfort is that when our friends called round who were fellow parishioners and had actually just lost the father to dementia, the daughter of the family who had spent a lot of her life in Mexico was shown the lounge where Meg had slept in the last year of her life. This room is now completely restored back to it status as a lounge but without some clutter that had built up during the years and the daughter remarked ‘What a wonderful peaceful atmosphere there is in this room!’ She reckoned that since her Mexico days she was incredibly sensitive (as are the Mexicans) to the emotional atmosphere within a house and home and whilst there may be nothing in this, there are some people (including many of the young carers for Meg) who would say that they were very much aware of, and sensitive to, the ‘aura’ within a house or room. I did spent a certain amount of time going through some of the email contacts that were not in my mobile phone contacts giving them details of Meg’s funeral just in case, despite the large travel distances involved, anyone else would want to come to the funeral. It is horrible to know about these things after the event which has happened to me once or twice in life.

Yesterday morning, I started to saunter down the hill to collect my daily newspaper but not going at a great pace. I hand delivered eight notifications of Meg’s funeral (five to near neighbours and a further three to more distant ones). I had wondered whether to take any spare copies of me and, of course Sod’s Law came into play because on the way down the hill I bumped into one of my Pilates class mates walking her dogs and another wheelchair-bound resident of the street who always seems to keep cheerful. A soon as I arrived in Waitrose, I treated myself to a coffee and the very kindly Asian partner who looks after me liberated a packet of 4 yum-yums for me (Meg’s favourite confectionary when the cafe was in operation) for me to drink with my coffee. During the course of the day, I received two further messages each heart warning in the extreme. One was from a couple of our De Montfort University colleagues, now married to each other and living in London. They replied to an email of mine saying that having known Meg for 45 and 50 years respectively of course they would attend the funeral. The female colleague was very kindly to Meg when she was suffering so much with a bad back and visited her at our home on several occasions – and we played a massive practical joke on the other that we shall no doubt remind him about when we meet. The other email was from a near neighbour of ours in Hampshire and was only a young lad then but now is ‘grown up’ and studying at Sandhurst. His email detailing the influence that Meg was so revealing that I have asked his permission (very readily given) to be published on a tribute page which I am compiling for Meg from various people. I have asked the two Spanish ex-Erasmus students to do the same as well as the four young carers who had such a deep bond with Meg so when all of the tributes get put together they will be an inspiring read, I am sure.

When I consulted the TV schedules for the evening, there is going to be a biography and an assessment of Jane Austen starting at 9.0pm followed at 10.00 by one of the classic versions of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I think that I may go to bed at 9.00 with a thick blanket around me and watch the highly rated biography in bed and so it will matter if I fall asleep. Meanwhile the film of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ can wait for a catch-up on the BBC iPlayer tomorrow afternoon. I find that I have been so busy in the last week that my TV viewing has been somewhat attenuated. I must admit that I have not had much time for any reading over the last year and a half because a lot of my time has, of necessity, been devoted to Meg and I am extremely pleased to have navigated this part of my life successfully. But I do need to continue with my decluttering activities and one job to be done is to take a pile of books from the shelf of a coffee table and put them in a place where they ought to belong. The first book is a ‘Guardian Stylebook’ which is a guide for writers and this is probably worth a detailed browse. The second book that fell into my hand, as it were, was called ‘The Diet Whisperer’ and seems to be a class apart from the ordinary diet style book. The authors are a couple of doctors for a start and the front cover of the book offers the possibility to ‘supercharge your metabolism, reverse diabetes and harmonise your brain clock’ so it is probably worth a serious and detailed study, particularly as it seems at first glance to be so scientifically grounded.

Just like the day before, yesterday was the second day of what might be termed a ‘normal’ weekend, as I get used to new patterns and rhythms of life. I spent a certain amount of time when I got up just after 6.00am to see if I could stitch in the funeral directions into my blogs so that family and friends who will have to travel a distance to attend Meg’s funeral will have clear instructions to feed into their SatNavs such that they can find St. Peter’s Church, Bromsgrove initially and the Holiday Inn for the post-funeral tea fest. This took a little longer than I thought but I then showered and breakfasted and was looking forward to the rest of the day. My breakfast routine has changed slightly as Meg and I used to have some porridge to start off the day and I followed this up with a slice of toast with Bovril on it. But in a desire to cut down on both carbs and salt, I now prepare myself a couple of rice cakes upon the first of which I spread a little olive oil rather than butter and some Bovril whilst on the other I am putting a smear of an almond butter (advertised as ‘no palm oil’) which I espied in Aldi the other day. I also buy a pack of four little avocados of the ‘Ripen at home’ variety and am then having one of these each morning with a little Thousand Island dressing and the contents scraped straight out of the skin with a spoon. No sooner had I finished breakfast when my very good University of Birmingham friend phoned and he invited me to go and meet him on the park bench that he, I and Meg used to occupy in our COVID and immediately post COVID days. This invitation I readily accepted and when we met up, we were trying to think how long ago it was that we used to sit on this bench together and it must have been the better part of eighteen months ago. In the park, I met four acquaintances well known to me because they generally have a dog which they are exercising and to each of them, as I was evidently without Meg, I imparted the sad news. Two of them that I know better and are also ‘friends of friends’ I invited along to the funeral as I am sure that we will have spaces to spare and having recently posted the website with details of the funeral arrangements, I was able to give them the URL so that they would have a reminder of the due days and the venues involved. One of the acquaintances who has a magnificent labradoodle dog had his wife die last February of cancer but in his case, he was mourning the demise of wife/partner No. 2 or No. 3 I cannot remember which. After a very pleasant stay plus coffee from our own flasks in the park, it was threatening to rain so my fried very kindly gave me a lift home which I really appreciated but not before we had bumped into my Irish friends which is always a pleasant surprise. As soon as I had bid adieu to my friend, I jumped into our own car and went down the hill to pick up a copy of the Sunday newspaper and then had to think about getting some lunch. I had already put some ham in the slow cooker first thing this morning, but to complement this I used some of these ‘steam’ bags of vegetables and then made myself a small portion of mashed potato from some ‘Smash’ that I had in stock. I must say that it was a a bit of an effort to prepare myself a ‘proper’ meal rather than just having a snack but I am pretty determined that I should continue to prepare myself one good meal a day so that I do not slide down the slippery slope of not looking myself and my diet responsibly. Naturally, this was eaten in front of the TV but, of course, there was no Meg with whom to share my meal.

After lunch, I decided to text one of the young male Asian carers for whom Meg and I had a particularly soft spot and in the text gave a link to the recently posted website with the funeral details. He had immediately sent this around the entire group of cares in the company (using their sort of ‘Group chat’ facility) and this was marvellous because with one click the carers, have all of the details of dates, times and venues. He told me that he and one of the female carers in his little circle of young carers were talking the other day about coming to visit me but he himself had just experienced his first car crash and his car was off the road until it was repaired. Having seen carers four times a day for a year, their absence is starting to be felt, although I have been very busy in the last week. Then I made a video call to my sister and we shared the latest news. I think she was a little ‘down’ for quite understandable reasons as the house in which she had lived for the last fifty years had just been sold and this must seem like the last of one’s bridges having been burned. After this, there was a little gardening job to be undertaken although it turned out to be not so little. Before I can mow the back lawn, some large trailing brambles had fallen across it. So I went down the garden, snipped off each of these and then spent some time cutting the brambles into shorter little lengths so that they could be easily accommodated in our garden waste wheelie bin. This little job had to be done as I could now proceed with the weekly cutting of the back lawn (a job for tomorrow) until these brambles had been cleared out of the way. I have a little treat lined up for myself as there is a David Attenborough CGI film on ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ which although a repeat, I feel I will really be able to enjoy.

It is now two weeks since Meg died and yesterday was to be something approaching a ‘normal’ Saturday as last weekend I was sitting in beautiful sunshine in a friend’s house in Hampshire helping to celebrate his 80th birthday and chatting with two of my closest friends from my University of Winchester days. As I walked down the hill towards the centre of town, I cannot fail to notice that I am not walking as well as I used to and my back and hips are feeling the strain. What I think has happened over the past months and probably a year or so is that pushing Meg in a wheelchair – first a simple transit model and then a heavier and more sophisticated model – has meant that I have ‘de facto’ had the assistance of the equivalent of a giant wheeling frame. Strange as it may sound, pushing Meg in her wheelchairs has proved easier than just walking on my own. I think that I may have to severely limit the walking that I do until I built up my strength again as today I did allow myself the luxury of a brief saunter along the High street and the journey back seemed quite a struggle for me and I had to stop a few times to have a rest. I suspect that when pushing Meg a bit of adrenaline rush assisted me but now I am having to do things a lot more carefully. Although I am not a natural ‘pill popper’ I may have to resort to some Ibuprofen first thing every morning until my hips and back are in a better place. My son had arranged to be in the house before he journeys down to Watford to see his in-laws but we discussed the type of footwear that I now probably need to give me some extra cushioning when I walk any distance. I did intend to go to Droitwich to visit a shoe shop I know where the manager really looks after his customers but I have bitten the bullet as they say and ordered two types of footwear, one a trainer recommended by my chiropodist the other day and the other recommended by my son today – they will both take the best part of a week to actually arrive. I cooked myself some lunch finishing off some meat-in-gravy left over from a day or o ago but filling enough, with baked potato and some fine beans.

In the afternoon, I started to watch a film of the opera ‘La Traviata’ but given that the whole opera is based around a heroine who is dying (of consumption) from the very opening of the opera, then this was a decidedly bad choice of viewing. Fortunately, I was saved from myself by the fact that YouTube encounters buffering problems where the whole transmission/down load ‘freezes’ but on this occasion I was not too unhappy. It had been intention to do a mowing of the back lawn but the weather turned a bit rainy and I thought that this could be left for another day. I received a text from my Italian friend from down the road but when I tried to contact her, her landline was engaged and her mobile diverted to a callbox so I felt a little thwarted by this. Yesterday evening, I decided to engage in ‘normal’ living by resuming my attendance at the Saturday evening Mass in my local church. I had not attended during the latter stages of Meg’s illness when she could not be left and I think it is probably fifteen months since I last attended. I was not particularly looking forward to this event but I was greeted very warmly and affectionately by several of the congregation, some of whom had already heard about Meg’s passing. The congregation has more than its fair sprinkling of Irish Catholics, including one sprightly gentleman who was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and was only given three months to live but is still with us at least ten months after this prognosis and was still well enough to read some of the lessons. Last December, he took a photo of us in the Waitrose cafe and forwarded it onto me at the time but said that he would do so again. What a remarkable and inspirational man he has proved to be, ready at any time to meet his Maker but not yet called to join him. So I received quite a degree of emotional warmth and support from the congregation, some of whom I am sure will probably attend the funeral (and I hope the funeral tea) to give Meg a good send-off. The phrase which crosses their lips most frequently about Meg is that she was ‘such a lovely lady’ with which sentiment I naturally agree. After I had returned home and had some soup, I decided to phone my niece and I was glad that I did. She informed me that many of my Yorkshire family were arranging their lives so that they could make the long journey and attend the funeral and anticipating that some might have long journeys, this is why the funeral was timed for 12.00pm midday. Upon hearing this news, I busied myself for the rest of the evening preparing a one page website with directions for the funeral including a link to the church (so that they could recognise it) and a link to the Holiday Inn (which also contains a map). I have put the website URL in various places but I repeat it here so that it can be easily found:

https://meg-funeral.kesland.info

There is actually a way that I can that ‘kesland.info’ is actually me and nobody else but I won’t go in to the explanation at this particular point except to say that my birthday date is encoded into it. Some readers of this blog may be able to work it out for themselves. I have started to think about the numbers of people who are likely to attend the funeral and of course estimating this takes some guess work. But the Holiday Inn have been good about this and I know that if the numbers fall short I will still be charged for the contracted number but if I were to exceed this by even quite a significant amount, they would ignore this. I suppose this must be a common problem that they must meet all the time in arranging funeral teas.

Wednesday, 11th June, 2025

Here is a link to the details of Meg’s Funeral Venues:


Venues