Tuesday, 31st May, 2022

[Day 806]

Today we are on a half-term week and evidently, the count down to the Jubilee celebrations due to take place from Thursday onwards. Today, although there were quite frequent showers, we decided to go down to the Waitrose café by car because we wanted to bump into some of our pre-pandemic friends. They were a little bit earlier than their normal routine and consequently we were quite fortunate to coincide with them in the foyer of Waitrose just as they were leaving. We had a chat about some matters of mutual interest and promised each other that we would have a longer chat next Tuesday, all being well. The day started off quite well as we received news from one of Meg’s Uncle Ken’s oldest friends that he moved from a care home near to his son-in-law (and incidentally where his sister is a resident) and is now in a care home in Conway where he has a deep association. At one time, Uncle Ken and his wife had been on the management committee when this fairly new care home had been set up by the Methodists and Ken always wanted that home to be his final resting place. Now he seems by all of the news that he is very happy there and many of his former friends and neighbours can now visit him more easily. Now that we have some very good news, Meg and I have got ourselves booked into a hotel that we have stayed in several times before. This particular Holiday Inn is actually very convenient for us as we can make rapid transit along the A55 expressway into Colywn when we wish to visit Uncle Ken and his relatives. In a fortnight’s time. we intend to travel up the day before, have a really good meal in a country club we know well some three miles down the road from the hotel. Then we can see Uncle Ken and some other relatives on the following day and Friday is left free for us to have a day wandering around Chester that we know quite well by now and is on a very compact and ‘human’ scale. So all in all, we will be having a mini-holiday even though we are visiting past haunts – at least the know the good places to eat and drink (and the places to avoid) and we always enjoy a little pilgrimage around the cathedral which is not over-full of the kind of military impedimenta which I think is not always an adornment to Anglican cathedrals.

At midday, I walked down into town where I met with the Health Care assistant who I had seen a few days ago. Although she has indicated on her documentation that one particular blood test had been ordered, this did not appear to have been conducted and so I gave another sample to be sent off so that the Nurse Practitioner would have a full set of results when we come to a review in a couple of week’s time. After I had left the surgery, I went onto the High Street and banked a cheque, being a returned deposit from an Italian holiday that never came off. Then I wandered into one of the many charity shops and bought a shirt which is identical in design and size to a ‘Next‘ shirt I had bought a few weeks previously. Whilst I was at it, I impulse bought a pair of workplace boots to be used as gardening boots. When I got them home, I discovered they were a ‘Screwfix’ line, very well regarded by the online reviews that I had and one seventh of the price that I would have paid if I had bought them brand new. To extend their life, I have given them a cleanup (not that they needed much) and a good reconditioning with some black shoe polish and I will leave them for another day or so for the polish to work its way in before I give them one more treatment and then bring them into use.

The political news is getting more and interesting. The trickle of letters going into the Chairman of the Conservative 1922 committee is still flowing and now we are getting some more heavy weight MP’s showing their hand, such as Andea Leadsom ex-leader of the House of Commons. As some MPs will have submitted letters without announcing the fact, it may well be that we are already near the total of 54 letters needed to trigger an election for Tory leader. Aficionados of political history may well recall that Jeremy Thorpe, an ex-Liberal party leader, was involved in an enormous scandal in which a Great Dane dog called ‘Rinka’ , belonging to his gay lover (Normal Scott) got shot. As there is a precedent for a big dog being shot, and Boris Johnson had called his own operations to save his political skin ‘Operation Save Big Dog‘, then the anti-Johnson MPs are calling their actions ‘Operation Rinka