{"id":2952,"date":"2021-08-24T19:48:10","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T19:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2952"},"modified":"2021-08-24T22:11:29","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T22:11:29","slug":"tuesday-24th-august-2021-day-526","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/24\/tuesday-24th-august-2021-day-526\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday, 24th August, 2021 [Day 526]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is my Pilates day so we have to organise things a little\u00a0<\/span>differently to\u00a0ensure that we do have a very rushed late morning. We were helped in this\u00a0respect because we had an appointment for a joint GP appointment for both Meg and myself – the telephone\u00a0consultation was due to\u00a0start some time between 8.40 and 8.50 and we did get a telephone call in the middle of this\u00a0time slot. Meg and I had quite a lot to discuss – in Mike’s case it was a more formal advice session after the investigations that were performed on me about three weeks ago whilst in Meg’s case, she has not had any ‘routine’ doctoring for about a year and a half now and almost inevitably for people in\u00a0their 70’s there are some issues that need discussion with a doctor. We felt that we had a pretty good discussion with the GP and we are both having some extra\u00a0blood tests ordered for us.\u00a0However, the news was generally good, or at least reassuring from the GP, so we were left\u00a0with the feeling that we had both had \u00a0quite a satisfactory consultation.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We started walking down to town about half-an-hour earlier than we had thought and ran across our Italian friend who lives\u00a0<\/span>down the road. She had just finished mowing her lawn but had had the misfortune that has happened to all of us at one time or another of severing the electric cable. Armed with a knife, a pair of scissors and some white tape, I managed to\u00a0splice the two ends together to effect a repair. As a teenager, I seemed to be\u00a0forever splicing together sections of cable if only to extend a length of flex in the days before extension flexes were readily available.We checked that the repair was working OK and then resolved that we would have a nice Italian meal together as soon as circumstances allow. Then we progressed on our way but I left Meg in the park whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. In the shop, I was waiting to be served and,\u00a0perhaps for the first time started to observe the kinds of comestibles that the shop sold. In a\u00a0display rack in front of me, there were some different kinds of\u00a0biscuits and as we had run out of\u00a0chocolate\u00a0digestives, I went ahead and bought a packet. This reminded me of the period when Meg and I were university students and in the long vacation in 1966 we were working in adjacent factories. Mike was working in a cardboard box factory with the most casual of\u00a0recruitment\u00a0policies – I just presented myself to their personnel department and said ‘I am a\u00a0mate of Jimmy _____’ and that was enough to land me the job. In the meanwhile, Meg was working in the McVities biscuit factory as part of an ‘industrial’ placement that all social administration students at that stage were\u00a0obliged to\u00a0<\/span>undertake. Meg\u00a0worked on the line that\u00a0produced ‘home wheat’ and also ‘chocolate covered digestives’ . On that line,\u00a0there was also a bevy of youngish female workers who had their eyes set upon one object of desire, who they would have dearly loved to have married, namely a ‘chocolate man’ \u00a0The task of handling large vats of steaming hot chocolate was judged to be work only suitable for a male worker and hence a ‘chocolate man’ The girls on the production line often indicated what they would do if one of the objects of their desire actually cast an eye in their direction and they would chatter what they would do if they got their hands on one. The crowing epithet belonged to the girl who exclaimed ‘if\u00a0I got myself a chocolate man, I \u00a0would lick him all over\u00a0until there was none of him left<\/em>‘ to\u00a0which I think any\u00a0riposte has got to be\u00a0superfluous.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So I joined Meg and in the park and then we made our way home and I prepared most of the lunch so that I could quickly\u00a0get it heated and served once I got home. Meg was able to look at the\u00a0opening ceremony which was being broadcast for the Paralympics whilst I was at\u00a0Pilates – once home, we did a\u00a0<\/span>quick turn around before we had a Skype session\u00a0which had been arranged for one of our Hampshire friends. These calls are always very interesting and\u00a0entertaining – our friend was faced with the problems of an\u00a0incipient planning enquiry which we also experienced\u00a0when we lived in Hampshire and were faced with a firm who wanted to drill for oil underneath our local primary\u00a0school. \u00a0After this call had ended, we had a five minute\u00a0break for a tea break before we FaceTimed<\/em> some of our oldest Waitrose<\/em> friends. Although we FaceTime<\/em> at the same time each week, we\u00a0always seem to have a lot to say to each other,\u00a0particularly as there seems to be an\u00a0intensification of social life as the summer progresses and the pandemic is slowly unwinding.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is my Pilates day so we have to organise things a little\u00a0differently to\u00a0ensure that we do have a very rushed late morning. We were helped in this\u00a0respect because we had an appointment for a joint GP appointment for both Meg and myself – the telephone\u00a0consultation was due to\u00a0start some time between 8.40 and 8.50 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2952"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2958,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952\/revisions\/2958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}