Random thoughts from the attic.

There has been nothing to write here for a while - that is unless I list all the ailments and woes besetting the family just now, which I might as well do now I’ve brought it up. The most worrying is that my daughter’s partner has to have an operation next week for a disc bulge - very dicey surgery I’m told, so we are sending up invocations. He’s glad that something is happening at last since he has been in terrible pain for over three months and what with the morphine and etc. looks like a ghost. The rest of us are silently terrified for him.

The grandson has had an appalling cough for ten days since he came home from a weekend with his father. The cough was called ‘croupy’ by the doctor - what IS croup? He always comes back from the visits with a cough so I suppose the house is damp and it tickles up his asthma. He spent a couple of days lying on my couch sounding like a manic seal, exhausting himself and driving all those around him (me in this case) mad. Poor kid. He has been shunted off to school this week as the cough isn’t improving and we thought it would take his mind off it, but his confreres are complaining bitterly about him, and no doubt his teacher is loosing hair.

Me - well, I have had more asthma than I like, and this week is full of maintenance appointments. Yesterday the optician ( my eyes are fine, just a bit long-sighted, so he couldn’t sell me any glasses poor chap) and then the hairdressers who is sweet but has cut my fringe too short so that when I wash it myself I shall look like an intense 1920’s blue stocking. To round off the week, Friday I have to go to the dentist. I was long overdue a check-up and almost as I raised the phone to book it two fillings fell out. I blame the healthy corn crisp things I’ve been spreading marmite on recently.
Highlights: A bottle of very good Gerwutztraminer whilst watching ‘Brief Encounter’ which is one of those films I have seen so many extracts from I think I’ve seen it but haven’t. It really is amazingly gripping and moving and good. Pinewood did do some good stuff. We had a discussion afterwards about the impossibility of a film like that these days now that ‘honour and decency and the sanctity of marriage’ have been lost. The modern audience would expect a different ending unless they were separated by war or disaster. Just loyalty and - dare I say - duty wouldn’t cut it nowadays. Or would it?

Apart from all this wild living I have been sorting stock and listing books which isn’t an altogether unpleasant way of spending the time. It becomes a point of honour to list as many as possible in a day and has certainly got the juices flowing again through my Amazon listings so that I am actually getting orders again. Magic.