It was another bitterly cold day, so I spent the morning reading a book of essays about England by Roy Hattersley, taken from his columns for the Guardian and the Daily Mail. Roy Hattersley is deeply attached to England, reveres Shakespeare and George Eliot, likes Trollope without considering him first class, enjoys walking, especially in the northern hills, and looking around churches, so it was all nice, uncontentious stuff and just the thing for someone with a cold.
The post didn't arrive until ten minutes before mid-day, and my National Portrait Gallery and LSO tickets still weren't in it. As I've said, thank goodness I'm not trying to run a business from here. The Systems Administrator counselled patience on the tickets front, saying that they would probably turn up, since the post has been dreadful recently, and a small parcel sent first class took four working days to arrive, and added that if the tickets were genuinely lost then the venues must have procedures to deal with it. I'll be out next Monday and Tuesday, so I do hope they turn up before the middle of next week, otherwise I shall be spending half of Wednesday morning on the phone to the Barbican and Ticket Master. I have disagreeable visions that (if they haven't disappeared into a black hole in the maw of the Mount Pleasant sorting office) they might have been shoved through the letterbox of any one of the several houses around here with the same name as ours, just because I know how often we get other people's mail. But probably I am putting the worst possible gloss on it because I am bored with having a chest cough and a runny nose.
In the afternoon I washed my hands very carefully to get any cold germs off, and went for a long-arranged tea with a couple of local beekeeping friends, conscientiously managing not to cough on them. Tea, cake and gossip is a very good way to pass the afternoon at any time, and especially when it is cold and it wouldn't be sensible to go outside and you don't feel up to it anyway. Starting from whether or not 2011 was a dreadful year for earwigs (it was) we roamed widely, across cats, fleas on cats, nits on children, the price and habits of llamas, the gait and disposition of camels, the dangers of ostriches, the dilemmas of inheritance and the step-family, the necessity of making a will, canal boats, Broads sailing boats, unfinished craft projects (oldest example dating back to 1952), glass engraving, whether you can mend cracks in glass (not easily), RSPB reserves on the river Stour, the pointlessness of Twitchers, the tediousness of housework, feeding candy to bees, the exercise requirements of dalmations (high), the Maidstone bakelite museum, lifeboat launches, the use of air raid sirens to muster firemen before the days of pagers and mobiles, bonfires, thorns and thistle spines in the hand, and how to hem silk without it puckering.
There were probably a lot of other things I've already forgotten, but I know that our spirits were not once raised by considering either the Olympics (which definitely didn't get a mention at all) or the Diamond Jubilee (which only got a mention in the context of how the owner of the partly embroidered table mat started in 1952 might wish to finish it for the Jubilee). At the end of the afternoon we had a very vague agreement in principle to go trekking with llamas, if we could find any not too expensive treks locally, and to go on an RSPB barge trip to look at birds, if we could summon the energy to get up that early in the morning.
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