So when I got up yesterday morning, I set to work by amending the underlying HTML code so that the latest ‘classic’ and recently re-discovered photos of Meg now show in the correct sequence. I have not blended them into the main sequence just yet but have them as a separate little series – they were taken before the days of digital photography and therefore had to be scanned into the computer. They tend to be either official staff photos, in one case torn literally from a noticeboard or to be illustrating staff functions (and hence the group photos) but they are interesting because they show Meg at her best when she was climbing mountains during her Easter vacations and not yet assailed by her back problems. I suspect that most of the photos are the very early 1980’s when Meg would have been in her mid-30’s. After this bit of memorabilia, I ran off my etickets for my journey up to Yorkshire and ensured they were easily accessible on my iPhone as well. After I had breakfasted, I walked down the hill but thought I would pop in on my Irish friends who live down the road. The husband had been having an operation on Wednesday and I have been thinking about him a lot and hoping that all went well. He was discharged the following day and was evidently relieved that the operation that had been hanging over him had been performed and he seemed to be well on the road to recovery. We had a lot to talk about and I was delighted to show him and his wife the resurrected ‘classic’ photos of Meg showing her at her best when she was in her early 30’s and not struck down with ailments. Altogether I stayed about an hour and even let myself indulge in some delicious chocolate biscuits to accompany my coffee. Then it was down to Waitrose to pick up my newspaper and enjoy another coffee before I made for home. Then I cooked lunch ensuring that I used up some bits of meat and vegetables from a few days ago. After lunch, I got busy correcting the latest proof of the ‘Order of Service’ and to my frustration, some of the original errors had been corrected but some others seem to have crept in. So now what I hope is a final set of 4 corrections has been sent in and I hope we can now go to a print run of about 100 (half for the church proceedings and the other half to send to people who are away on holiday). I also ensured that the classic photos of Meg had been cropped (as, having been scanned, there was a lot of redundant white space) and tried to resize two or three of the awkward ones. Then in the late afternoon, I felt it was a good idea to go and get a can of ‘good’ petrol for the mower as, amazingly, I have been running on last year’s supply with no problems. So this has been done and the petrol safely in the garage waiting for the next cut. I sat outside on the garden bench, enjoying a cup of tea and listening to the Radio 4 statistical programme ‘More or Less’ that my University of Birmingham friend had mentioned to me.

I have received a couple of emails to which I shall have to give a considered reply. The first of these was from my very good life long friend in La Coruna (Spain) who, as a single daughter, is having all kinds of problems caring for her aged mother who has a flat in Madrid. My friend is going through he process of talking to social services organisations, both public and private, to arrive at what we would call a ‘package of care’ to try to provide for her mother’s medical and associated issues. The trouble is that Madrid is practically 600km from La Coruna and trying to organise at a distance can be a nightmare. As well as this massive problem, one of her best and oldest friend is terminally ill and she is also overwhelmed with masses of examination scripts to be marked. So my good friend is really feeling under the most tremendous strain and, of course, Meg’s death can only intensify these feelings as well. The other email is from a cousin who is wondering whether or not to turn up for the crematorium part of the proceedings next Wednesday but I will write and reassure her that it is absolutely how she feels about the situation. I now reflect that is four weeks since Meg died and I have never known a month pass so very quickly – but after people die, there is a tremendous amount to get done in any case. I am in the process of organising various appointments to look after my own health and I already have an appointment for an eye test and yet another, after a phone call, for a session of physiotherapy to work on my back a little and straighten it out after months of wheelchair pushing. But I am telling myself that once I get Meg’s funeral behind me, I can start to have some more positive thoughts and plans about the future.

On the political front, it seemed evident to most political commentators that it would not take long for the two ‘alpha males’ of Donald Trump (the world’s most powerful man) and Elon Musk (the worlds’s richest man) to massively fall out with each other. But in a strange way, each needs the other (Trump for the money, Musk to protect his business interests) so will some kind of reconciliation be on the cards? I am not sure that Donald Trump was implicated (as Musk claims ) in the Epstein scandal. However, on the balance of probabilities, I suspect that the Russians have incriminating evidence on Donald Trump after his visit(s) to Moscow. His inability to keep his trousers on and his susceptibility to Russian ‘honeypots’ makes it almost certain that the Russians have some secretly recorded video of sexual liaisons. If things got really bad between Putin and Trump, Putin could always threaten to release the video footage. This is all speculation, of course, but it would explain a lot about the relationships between the two men.

Yesterday started off being a cold and miserable day which felt more like an autumn day than a UK summer. I hope this squally weather will soon blow over but it is one of those when one has to reach for an extra jumper to counteract the chill. As soon as I got up and had my obligatory huge mug of tea there were two important emails for me to consider. The first and most important of these was the latest version of the ‘Order of Service’ which now contains all of the words to the hymns for people to sing. I have yet to give this a really detailed scrutiny but at first glance, it is almost exactly what we want. I have passed the complete document over to our organist/Eucharistic minister and she and I will have the final and definitive say but, of course, time is passing. The second item in my email was an historic photograph of Meg surrounded by colleagues from the Business School at De Montfort University. The point about the photo is that Meg is very much ‘centre stage’ and the highlight of this photo which I am pretty sure is a photo of the Business Studies tutorial team c. 1978-1979. Apart from Meg (and myself in a quasi-fashionable light blue denim suit and a pint of beer!) there are the lead Practical Training tutor, two mathematicians, two economists, a lawyer and a psychologist and a final figure I cannot identify or remember. The point about the photo is that was taken at an event before Meg joined the Public Administration team at the Scraptoft campus and Meg would have been about 34 years of age and before she was assailed by a wave of illnesses which came to characterise her later life. Although Meg became to be identified as part of the Public Administration team, she was actually recruited as part of the Business Studies degree team whose students she placed before switching departments. So the photograph actually illustrates an important part of Meg’s career which rather was overshadowed by what she did later on. I can remember that when Meg first joined the Public Administration team of which I was a member, there was a certain atmosphere at a husband-and-wife team being employed in the same department. But this feeling evaporated very quickly when on an important issue in a departmental meeting which went to a vote, I voted one way and Meg voted the other and I think that the rest of our colleagues breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief that we were going to act as independent professionals and would not let our marital status cloud our professional judgements. This would have been assisted, of course, if Meg had used her. maiden name professionally but this never happened largely because Meg’s first boss thought it not to be a good idea (although it was very common in the civil service at the time).

I went shopping to the bigger Aldi store which we have in town and although this had its moments of sadness (passing by items that I would have bought with Meg in mind but now no longer buy) this I managed to negotiate without too much distress. Upon my return home, I unpacked the shopping and then made a phone call to one of my nephews with whom I have not spoken for years but who was on holiday in Portugal and I have to report that the connection was as clear as a bell and as though we were in the next room. We had a long chat for over half an hour and my nephew, fully aware of things that have happened in my life via this blog, was very sympathetic. I am delighted to say that he will be making the journey down from Yorkshire and I will be delighted to see him after so many years. We chatted about the feasibility of making a trip up to Yorkshire the week after the funeral, made somewhat more difficult as our ‘Motability’ car has to be handed back and if I go to Yorkshire, it will by train and I will have to rely upon taxis left, right and centre. This might not be a bad way to do things in any case but it was good to have another family member’s perspective on my travel plans.

After lunch, I decided to make a little venture into town and I visited the opticians. Here I could officially inform them of Meg’s death and ask that she be removed from both their ‘optician’ and their ‘hearing aid’ databases but I also took the opportunity to book myself an eye test for a couple of weeks time. I bought some cosmetics that I needed and the heavens opened so I had to shelter inside the store, but after this I took myself off to Waitrose where I availed myself of a cappuccino (but did not bump into any one I knew – the clientele shifts throughout the day). As soon as I arrived home, the Eucharistic minister to whom I had given a copy of the latest version of the ‘Order of Service’ and I very carefully compiled a lit of the four latest amendments that were needed and have transmitted these on to the undertaker. If these get incorporated successfully we can go to print and I have requested extra copies so that those who could not make the funeral because of holiday commitments can be mailed a copy. So I think we are at the stage where practically everything that needs to be done in preparation for the funeral has actually been accomplished. Then in the late afternoon, I wondered if I had some classic De Montfort University photos of Meg in the days long before we had digital cameras, I managed to locate about ten photos of Meg largely taken from staff notice boards or official ‘functions’ at the Polytechnic as it then was plus the originals of two classic photos of which hitherto I had only got a paper copy. These twelve photos have not been put on a rolling display on my website to be viewed by al the world. Finally, after a brief confirmatory phone call with one of my Yorkshire nieces, I have gone ahead and booked both a hotel room and also the relevant train tickets for a journey up to see my Yorkshire family in the week (Monday to Friday) following the funeral.

Yesterday turned out to be quite a busy day. It was the day when our domestic help calls around and both she, my son and I always have quite a lot to chat about. After I had breakfasted, I sat down with my son and we made some changes to the first draft of the ‘Order of Service’ which had appeared in my email inbox. We swapped some of the photos around and substituted a new one for one of our original selection. This having been done, we emailed a new photo to the undertakers and set off to deliver a printout which incorporated some of my selections. Beforehand, though, we called in at the ‘Holiday Inn‘ where we are to hold the post funeral tea to deliver a duly signed and dated acceptance form that their system required. Then after the two major errands of the morning, my son and I picked up some provisions and I took the opportunity to exchange some reminiscences of Meg with our domestic help. She is very kindly washing and ironing my white shirt so that I will look my best on the day in a week’s time. Then I cooked myself some chicken breasts which I served on some rice but throwing some of the rice away to keep my carbs down. But I received some unpleasant news via my email as our Eucharistic minister who had compiled the first draft of our Order of Service was dismayed, to put it mildly,that the undertakers had taken liberties with some of the document already supplied them and had not included many of the words to the two hymns which meant, as she pointed out, that the congregation would not know what to sing. So I had to compose a fairly long email to the undertakers requesting that the omitted words be inserted and making one or two other textual alterations. This may involve quite a major amendment so trust the undertakers will get on wit it expeditiously.

After I had lunched, I had a ‘coffee’ date with my University of Birmingham friend and we spent well over an hour in a local coffee bar, indulging in some apple pie [i.e. the least fattening of the alternatives) to accompany our coffee. We always have a lot to chat about and today was no exception and as my friend had experienced bereavement with the death of his wife some eight years ago, he could be, and was, a source of some advice for me. When I returned home, I pulled our grey wheelie bin out to the roadway, ready for collection first thing in the morning. I took the opportunity to knock on the door of a near neighbour who we knew had been training in the past for a role in the Church of England as a licensed lay readers, also known as Licensed Lay Ministers (LLMs). These lay people are trained and licensed by their bishop to serve alongside clergy, supporting people in faith and enabling mission. My neighbour invited me in and we spent an hour and half talking over some of the circumstances of Meg’s passing but also including matters theological as well (and there was quite a degree of unanimity between us). Actually, we have not had the chance of an extended chat for a year or so now but she had seen me pushing Meg up and down the hill in the wheelchair and admired the dedication which had been shown. But she was also of the view that this could not be sustained indefinitely and she gave me some very reassuring words (which I have heard echoed elsewhere) that I had done as much as I possibly could to maintain and even improve Meg’s quality of life in her final months. Like me, she expressed some relief that Meg’s final days had been spent in the comfort and reassurance of her own home and, employed in the Health Service itself, she was convinced that Meg’s final days at home could not have been bettered. Our neighbour reminded me of a fact that I had forgotten that she, Meg and our daughter-in-law used to go for little day trips out, probably for lunch, and Meg had shown her great acts of kindness by bringing back some mementos from Santiago de Compostela which she really appreciated at the time. As a consequence, she had only the happiest memories of Meg as she used to be and this was, of course, so nice to hear. Meanwhile, the political world rumbles on. There is now very considerable disquiet on the Labour benches (and other parts of the House of Commons) that the UK may be complicit in assisting Israeli in what many are saying is at the least an ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip. Since 2015, the UK has licensed at least £500 million worth of military exports to Israel From October 2023 to May 2024 and the government issued over 100 new licences allowing UK companies to sell arms to Israel. During this same time, Israel killed thousands of civilians in Gaza indiscriminately. Even though the government has suspended a small number of arms licences, there are still hundreds remaining. In addition, the UK provides approximately 15% of the components in the F-35 fighter jets which are used in airstrikes across the occupied Palestinian territory. There is a certain degree of ‘cloak and dagger’ in all of these reports and obtaining a clear picture is not easy. Nonetheless, it does appear to be the case that whilst direct sales of military equipment to Israel are not allowed, there are a number of indirect ways in which weapons and military supplies, including bullets do find their way to Israel. The UK defence and intelligence industry has many links with their Israeli counterparts and the UK government seems loathe to put these links at risk. Nonetheless, what is unfolding before our eyes in Gaza is so horrific that the government may be forced into a position whereby even the indirect supply of military equipment is terminated. Jeremy Corbin, now an independent MP, has introduced a bill into Parliament to ban all sales of military equipment to Israel while the present conflict continues and whilst this bill has no chance of success, one suspects that the amount of support it receives may be a good indication of the current mood of the House of Commons.

Yesterday was my Pilates day but there were some important tasks hat I wanted to fulfil this morning. One was a telephone call to the Teachers’ Pensions Agency and all I needed to ask them was whether the application form to receive a portion of Meg’s Teachers Pension had been received. I had needed to submit this about ten days ago and included with the application form itself was a death certificate and also a marriage certificate. Even though the query was a simple one I needed to supply about half a dozen bits of information about myself and and another half a dozen bout Meg before I could even put a simple query to them. It seems that the system they have is that documents arrive in the post room and are then opened and the contents scanned before the documents are returned to you. This process takes 5-10 working days but the TPA have already had the documents for about eight working days and I do not know how much longer it will take for a simple acknowledgement to arrive but I quoted the Post Office Tracking number to them supplied as part of of the ‘To be signed for’. process. At the end of the day, I think they have received my completed application form but it was not very clear and the official to whom I was speaking had to rely upon other telephone calls and, even so, she could give no indication how long the applications takes to process. The whole point here is that Meg’s pension payments were stopped immediately but it might take weeks (without an income) for the new arrangements to come into effect. I thought it would be a rather messy and inconclusive telephone call and so it proved to be. Then I popped over the road to the ‘Holiday Inn‘ and paid the invoice for Meg’s funeral tea to be held in just over a week’s time – they required payment in full perhaps because of the short notice. Upon returning home, I received two telephone calls, one of them being from one of Meg’s surviving cousins who are going to be brought to the funeral by yet other cousins. A second telephone call was from the doctor who had signed Meg’s death certificate with whom I needed to get onto contact to clear up one or details about Meg’s medical history. She was able to answer some questions about Meg’s history of hypertension that had been troubling me but that line of enquiry has now come to an end, When I reflect upon the waves of different ailments that Meg experienced, I have concluded in my own mind that her pretty aged parents did not pass on a particularly good set of genes by way of inheritance. I rather shocked myself by making a list of the serious health problems which Meg encountered in the second half of her life as well as several operations- as soon as one problem seemed to abate or burn itself out, it was replaced by another in quick succession. Even as she died, she was afflicted by up to eight conditions which she generally bore without much complaint. But in an earlier life, she had been fit enough to get to the top of some of the UK’s highest mountains such as Skiddaw and Helvellyn in the Lake District and Snowdon in Wales. We used to visit the Lakes each Easter and, together with our son, regularly got snowed off a whilst attempting one peak or another.

Finally, I received a very welcome note and little card from an ex De Montfort University colleague – we were both completing our PhD’s together by written papers and were very helpful to each other, as I recall, as we wrote some joint papers. He had heard about Meg’s demise by reading my blog which was fortuitous because he may have retired from the University and I was going to let him receive the news by ordinary mail. He and his wife were to be on holiday on the day of the funeral but he is scheduled to visit St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna where he said that he would light a candle for Meg. I replied that I am sure it would give Meg a great deal of pleasure that a candle was to be lit for her in such a famous cathedral. I must confess that when I have been on holiday in Spain and visited a cathedral (which was quite a common occurrence) I would light candles for recently departed friends and relatives. But one always wanted to light a ‘genuine’ candle and not just insert a coin to have a little row of electronic candles automatically illuminate which is the practice in some churches eager to avoid a fire hazard. When I think about it, the lighting of a candle must almost be a universal across most of the major world religions (but excluding Islam)

Last night, I started to watch the women’s football (England vs Spain) and England had taken the lead with an opportunistic goal against the run of play in the first half. But then I went off to consult some emails and when I resumed watching the match, Spain hd scored two quick goals and, probably deservedly, won the match. I have received back the first proofs of the Order of Service but already there are some slight changes to be made and I need to consult wit my son over the choice of photos because there is one I am not sure about and I think some of the others need to be re-positioned. But all in all, it is quite a good first draft and should be quite easy to ‘tweak’ I have also received an estimate of the total cost of the funeral so now I just want to get it all over and done with. Looking at masses of photographs of Meg whilst I am fine tuning the rolling display does not help me to move on but in just over week now, I should start to enter what I might call my ‘post-Meg’ life (into which I have been thinking myself for some time now)

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.