One of the unanticipated benefits of my writing a blog like this is that I can use the search facilities and the large composite file to ascertain the dates of what has happened in the past. Whilst doing some tidying up yesterday, I discovered one day’s blog where the events had been quite traumatic so I had printed out this particular record to remind me of when it happened and this was the day when Meg slipped out of her wheelchair onto the pavement (as she was losing all body strength to sit upright) and it took the combined efforts of a passing motorist (who stopped) and another passerby and myself to get Meg back into the wheelchair so that I could get her home. This led me to wonder if I could remember the date when I started to push Meg in a wheelchair as I realised that a long walk down the hill was beyond her and I managed to find the relevant date of when I recorded our very first wheelchair outing which was 13 August, 2023. Now I pushed her out in the wheelchair practically every single day except the period when she had a lung infection (from which she recovered) and she was too poorly to be taken outside. The last time I pushed Meg outside was exactly one week before she died on 10 May 2025 and find that I had noted in my blog that ‘I am conscious of the fact that this may be the very last time this is feasible.’ which proved to be both accurate and prophetic. I got AI to calculate the amount of time that I had pushed Meg out in her wheelchair and the sum total was 1 year and 9 months or 630 days in total. Looking back on it all, I am not quite sure how I managed it all but perhaps in times of crisis we acquire strengths from unknown sources. In retrospect, there were two complete winters in which we had to brave the elements but perhaps it was an exceptionally fortunate twist of fate that we encountered no snow or exceptionally frosty weather that would have rendered such a journey impossible. I did get one of the carers to take a short video clip of myself pushing Meg along one of our access roads in a fruitless campaign to get a pavement put down because, although I wore a High Visibility Vest, perhaps both Meg and myself were at risk when I pushed her in the wheelchair along a road which serves as a ‘de facto’ ring road along the west of Bromsgrove. Now all of this is just a matter of historical record and I do not intend to dwell upon it in a morbid fashion but I was motivated to find some of the exact details before I meet with Meg’s cousins this weekend for a family meal and now they are lodged in my memory (where they will remain). The one remaining thing that I will mention that the sight of a disabled wife being pushed along the Bromsgrove streets and pavements by a man with an Australian bush hat and an HGV is not particularly common and therefore there were scores of people, unknown to me, who witnessed these perambulations and have mentioned to me afterwards if we got into conversation that or identities were not known but the sight of the two of us was lodged in their own memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well the day has turned out to be quite a full one. Mid morning, our domestic help called around and laid out the dining room table ready for the Sunday meal and also loaned me some ranekins for the starter course I am going to prepare as well as some perpetual (i.e. electronic) candles which look amazing realistic. Our domestic help, who is a fantastic cook, took me through the stages of preparing the ‘salmon custard’ starter which is quite easy to prepare \u00a0but which requires to be finished off in a ‘bain marie’ in the oven. Then I went off to a local coffee bar where last Sunday I had arranged to meet three other parishioners to have a ‘Spanish conversation’ session. We all arrived on-time and had a fascinating time. One of parishioners had been married for about the same length of time as had I whilst I discovered that the two other two ladies were an engineer and an artist respectively. We also had a young daughter who came along and as I went to order the coffees I espied a ginger bread man which I bought for her benefit. Like all children, she seemed to enjoy biting the head of first before devouring the rest. Our conversations roamed over topics in science, painting, mathematics and as well as some things religious. Altogether we must have spent a couple of hours in each other’s company before it was time to part to say goodbye. But first of all we have arranged for us to meet in my house next Friday and I have promised them a choice \u00a0of soups to enjoy. After that, we will have some paintings to discuss and there are some interesting things on YouTube which I can show them (perhaps some Jan Baez, a Live Aid concert and much else besides). What was so uplifting about this little meeting of the four of us is that we just ‘seized the moment’ and made the arrangements to meet up with each other. My Spanish seemed to cope quite well under the circumstances but when the ideas became a little \u00a0too complex for us to discuss in Spanish, we just reverted to English to complete the story. \u00a0I suppose that this helps to underline the point that if one makes the effort to cultivate social relationships, then doors will open up which would not unless you had made the effort. After our meeting and before I went home I popped into the ‘Gifts of Love’ charity shop where I have a weekly cup of coffee to demonstrate to them I was still alive. Then there were some last minute things \u00a0that I needed to buy from my local Aldi<\/em> store after which I went on a wild goose chase for my daily copy of ‘The Times<\/em>‘ before tracking down a copy in the third outlet that I tried. By now, it was so late in the afternoon that I took a pie that I was going to have for my lunch and decided to make it into my tea instead. In the evening, my little bit of homework is to ensure that I fully understand how I am going to cook the lamb with some accompanying vegetables so that the main dish for Sunday has been prepared the day before and just needs a little \u00a0heating up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the unanticipated benefits of my writing a blog like this is that I can use the search facilities and the large composite file to ascertain the dates of what has happened in the past. Whilst doing some tidying up yesterday, I discovered one day’s blog where the events had been quite traumatic so […]<\/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-8671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671","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=8671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8672,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8671\/revisions\/8672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}