{"id":7424,"date":"2025-06-02T15:06:03","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T15:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=7424"},"modified":"2025-06-02T15:10:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T15:10:59","slug":"monday-2nd-june-2025-day-1904","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2025\/06\/02\/monday-2nd-june-2025-day-1904\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 2nd June, 2025 [Day 1904]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/em>, 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 \u00a370 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/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-7424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7424","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=7424"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7426,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7424\/revisions\/7426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}