Yesterday we did a trip to Waitrose with our trolley and did a major shop. This always makes us feel good, though doesn’t stop us from having to pick up items on our way home from our outings. Stephen is very used to this, it’s what he tends to do when we are at home – going over to the shops approximately every second day. I like to take the car and do one big shop for at least a week of supplies, but we don’t have that option here.
We have one trip away planned, Stephen’s cousin Ron is coming to stay next weekend. We will go out to a show together and Melanie and Mark will come back to pick him up and take all of us to Gloucester. Stephen and I will stay overnight, then go from there to Bath for three nights, then come back to stay with Ron for another night. Then catch the bus home again. Apart from that, we plan to just make day trips out.
Tomorrow (Friday 13th) is Mum’s 85th birthday, and I will be the only child not celebrating it with her. Stephen, Matt and I took her out to lunch in the Swan Valley before we left, but it’s not quite the same thing. I will ring her before we go out tomorrow – late in the afternoon for her.
Something I haven’t mentioned is that for about the last month we have had fireworks exploding around us at night. People are allowed to buy their own and it seems that many people want to have a go, no matter how small. From up here we can see for miles and they were mostly happening in the distance until the last few days where they even seem to be happening on our housing estate. I can’t help wondering what it’s like for people coming from war zones to have explosions going on each night – I think it must be pretty horrible. We find it almost annoying since they are pretty unpredictable and sometimes close to our apartment, but not easily visible.
In the afternoon we went to a meeting of the local U3A. They have approximately 650 members with a lot of special interest groups, as someone said to me, there is something for everyone. The meeting was followed by a really interesting talk titled something like “the conjurer in the bottle” and was an extremely interesting look at the early days of cartoon satire in Britain, dating from about the 1750s. Well worth going to, especially as there was no cost beyond a pound for raffle tickets.
No photos from me yesterday, and I haven’t tried to take any fireworks photos because of the unpredictability of when they would happen.
