Today is 1 November.
A day for gifts.
But I haven't bought any.
In fact the last parcel I unwrapped a few days ago was a purchase I made for myself.
A book (of course).
Purchased from the Folio Society.
The 12th in a series.
The first three were purchased for me by Mum.
xxx
Out trip to the Royal Albert Hall today for 'Letters Live'.
We arrived at five, so took the opportunity to have a wander around the Albert Memorial, and a little way into Kensington Gardens (as far as the 'Physical Energy' statue) before heading back and to door 12 and our 5:30 pre-show reservation at the Verdi restaurant for some pasta and tiramisu.
In for the main event, and the line up was pretty impressive, including:
However, the two that particularly stuck in my mind were an open letter written by Ione Wells to her attacker when she was sexually assaulted, and we were honoured to have it read by the author, and secondly a letter from the character Michael Tolliver to his mother, from 'Tales of the City' by Armistead Maupin, again, remarkably, read by the author.
A quick Google search and here are those two letters read at earlier Letters Live events, both times by different readers, the first one by an actress who was in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the second by the always brilliant Ian McKellen.
Nicky posted something to say that we were at the event, and in the interval there was a message from one of her Facebook friends to say that by coincidence they had a reservation for a hotel not too far away that they couldn't use and which wasn't refundable, and so would we like it. As a spur of the moment thing we said yes.
Let's just say, looking back from Sunday, that was one of life's impulsive decisions we probably shouldn't have made!
More boosting today, this time for Anne. And more Friday takeaways, with Izzy's longstanding request for Shozna being upheld. By the time I got home from work the boosting party were back, Jake and Izzy had been dispatched to collect the curry, and soon afterwards the table was groaning with kormas, butter chicken, a variety of naans, samosas, and a whole lot more Indian goodness!
Having worked remotely for Mon-Wed, this was my first trip to Tunbridge Wells of the week. Took the opportunity to pop to the bookshops at lunchtime. Smiths had the half-price offer on the new Grisham, so was the favoured supplier for that one, but also, to my surprise, Waterstones had a few signed (first edition) copies of Thursday Murder Club book 2 out on a table, and I couldn't resist picking one of those up. Now, I can't imagine that Mr Osman has needed to work too hard to shift book 2 after the spectacular success of book 1 (a quick look at my gift hardback copy of book 1 and I see that it is the 23rd printing) but I expect that the publisher still made him sign a few thousand. Still surprising to see signed firsts still the shops when the unsigned ones are up to the 9th printing.
As for Grisham's new book, I am a sucker for buying his books as soon as they come out. Apparently this one is about a judge who turns out to be a serial killer. A little bit worried about the premise if I'm honest - sounds suspiciously like some lazy bandwagon (Patterson anyone?!) writing, but we will see. I remember when Grisham used to write stuff with a message (Chamber). Not sure what the message is going to be here - serial killers are bad people?
Big day today - Izzy was off to 'collect her degree' at her big ceremony, and judging from the pictures, it looks like a good time was had by all, and it all went well.
In other degree-related news, by coincidence Jake's replacement (unbent!) certificate has arrived.
News from the estate today. Our apple harvest seems to be rather late in coming in - despite it being late October most of the fruit seems reluctant to be separated from the trees. However, two were picked today, and they tasted pretty good.
(Note - first photo taken at end August)
I am informed that it is 100 days until our next trip to 'The World', which is pretty exciting news. As always we have some new things to look forward to, and we very much hope some new holiday buddies to look forward to doing things with!
Marking 100 days is a bit of a thing (when we remember) and so I just searched for '100' on the site. To my surprise only one obvious post about a holiday countdown came up, from 2015 here. However, entertainingly, another post that just happened to have '100' in it (referencing the drive to Vero Beach) came up from the previous year with lots of cool castle photos!
We were out at Bluey this evening and ended up at Byron, where discussion turned to the best burgers in Orlando. One of the new things (at least for Nicky and me) to do in February will have to be a trip to D-Luxe - we are reliably informed their their burgers can't be beaten.
Today was booster day, thanks to the 'NJC vaccination clinic'. Nan's appointment was official, but Uncle Martin and I were smuggled in as well at the end of the shift! All home via Papa's for Friday lunchtime fish and chips.
When we were staying in Cranbrook, I realised that I was without book. Not ideal. By happy chance there was an Oxfam store opposite our hotel, and so I popped in and picked one up. The choice was The Wasp Factory, a copy of which was already in the library at home, but for the sake of 99p I didn't mind.
Just finished it, and fair to say that it was a little peculiar, but very Iain Banks from the outset (having only read some of his later books so far). I particularly enjoyed the fact that, in the later edition that I'd picked up, he'd decided to include extracts from some of the initial reviews when it was first published, including lines such as this from The Irish Times: "The majority of the literate public will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it", only to be topped by this from The Times: "Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish."
Monday night is movie night, according to what might be a new tradition. Last week we watched Hunchback of Notre Dame (my choice), and this week we watched Tangled (Izzy's choice). This is one of the growing number of Disney releases that I hadn't seen first time around, and still had never watched the whole way through, so it was good to sit and enjoy it.
However, for me it will always be the song.
And the song will always take me straight to the Magic Kingdom, stood in front of the castle with the one I love, watching the fireworks.
Took the dog for a walk in the woods with Nicky. Seemed like a good idea to get me moving and loosen up some stiff muscles after far too many steps on Saturday. And it was a good idea. The only problem was that within 50 yards of getting to the woods Willow met another dog who was a little boisterous. Between the two of them they managed to trip me up, and I instinctively put my hands out to cushion my fall as I went down. Not great for a frozen shoulder!
Thankfully after a fair amount of cursing, some pain relief and a few minutes of relaxation when back home, we were ready to face the main attraction of the day - a trip to the cinema to see the much-delayed and long-awaited latest Bond movie.
At this point stop reading if you are bothered about spoilers.
Having reflected on things for a few days (this is not being written on Sunday!) my conclusion is that they just can't do that to us! I can't help but wonder whether Daniel Craig (who I think was listed as an assistant producer or something similar in the credits) had too much influence in the decision. Did he say that he wanted to make it categorical that this time around he really meant it - this was to be his last film - no more, no way - and to make it beyond question let's have his version of Bond die at the end of the movie.
However, Daniel Craig is not James Bond. And if my guess is right, someone (Barbara Broccoli, Michael Wilson, someone from the Fleming estate) should have stood up to him and said no, that's not how things are done around here. You are the latest actor to have the privilege to play James Bond, and somebody else will be along for the next film. You are expected to hand him over alive. We all know that Bond is a fiction, a fantasy, and that he really should have died many many times over during his various escapades. But, this is precisely the point, the whole fiction and the whole fantasy relies on Bond being both immortal and invincible. If you chuck that away (and let's be honest in this case you chuck it away to a pretty crappy villain in the shape of Rami Malek) then you've got nothing left.
Frustratingly, we've no idea what any of the critics think about this. They can't possibly comment on this fundamental point in any film reviews at the moment, as to do so would be to give away the last three minutes of the movie, and none of them would dare to do that. Maybe we'll start to hear more opinions once the film has been out for a while and it can be discussed openly.
For me, it's just not Bond. He always triumphs. He always prevails. He always diffuses the bomb, ideally with 0:07 left on the timer.
Exciting news is that the new boiler is up and running in the office. This is a real milestone moment, as the old one was basically in 'running whilst condemned' mode when I joined the company. As we seem to be in test mode we have temporarily gone from too cold to too hot. However, no complaining, this is all very promising.
The kind (for once) people at DVC recognised that lots of people, and in particular their international members, found it difficult, or possibly impossible, to use their points whilst Covid travel restrictions were in place. This was true for us, and having cancelled one or two holidays, we watched as a whole year of points disappeared beyond our grasp, expiring before we were even allowed to travel to WDW. To their credit, DVC stepped up and confirmed that they would credit the points back to us, albeit for a relatively restricted use period.
The points appeared back in our account today, and Nicky had a late night call with the reservations team to shuffle our Jan/Feb booking around. The upshot is that we now have our Saratoga grand villa secured for the first 11 nights of our stay. We are currently on a waitlist for the remaining three nights as they are not all available, but have a 2-bed villa booked for the time being. Fingers crossed that the last three nights come in and we will be able to enjoy a grand villa for the full fortnight!
Day two of a virtual conference today (mornings only), the majority of which was all rather technical, and most definitely not worthy of blogging about.
However, the last session of the conference was given over to thinking more about how we all get along in a busy and stressful work environment, and just for half an hour we had an introduction to mindfulness which was actually rather well done.
Two takeaways:
Gratitude - it is all too easy to dwell on the negatives - the things that haven't gone well, the things that haven't been achieved, the 'constructive' feedback we've received. It is extremely important to focus on what we are grateful for in life, and what is going well. Building up a habit of gratitude can help. We were encouraged to dwell on what some things we were grateful for at that moment, and maybe even write them down. I thought about:
Today was the day for the 'ultrasound guided steroid injection', which went smoothly and painlessly, apart from a couple of moments when the doctor seemed to be applying quite a large amount of pressure to my shoulder. Fairly instant noticeable improvement in pain level, and consequently in range of movement as well, and I was sent away with instructions to keep moving and exercising it, but not to excess. As the evening has worn on, so the shoulder feels a little stiffer and movement is a little harder. Hopefully that is just a combination of anaesthetic wearing off and feeling the short-term effects of the shoulder manipulation. Hopefully will continue to enjoy lack of pain, and improvements in movement from tomorrow ...
We've been for a stroll on the beach today!
That hadn't been part of the plan for this weekend, but having enjoyed our breakfast at The George, and as the skies were blue and pretty cloudless, we decided to head south, and found ourselves in Hastings. We parked up in the seafront carpark, and of course couldn't resist a little dabble in the arcades, although sadly no keyrings from the 2p sliders and no cuddly toys from the grabby machines for us today. We strolled along in the sunshine towards the Jerwood end of town, and it was so bright that Nicky had to buy some emergency seafront sunglasses.
Along the way we had a walk down the pebbles to the water, discussed once again why we don't live by the sea, stopped off to look at a classic car rally, watched the seafront miniature steam trains go by, wandered into the 'old town' to peruse the shops there, although our only purchases were from a rather nice independent bookshop, and generally had a rather pleasant couple of hours.
On the way back we drove up the western side of Alexandra Park, and along Upper Park Road. It was too busy with lots of traffic and parked cars (charity run in the park) to be looking for particular houses, although I don't think I'd know what to look for - too long ago and too young at the time.
So, off to Cranbrook today, and after a bit of shopping in town (most notably at the 'Duck and Dog') we checked in at The George, where we were given room 4 with the 4-poster! Date night dinner (courtesy of Izzy) at the Swan restaurant at Chapel Down, just south of Tenterden, where the food was excellent, and the company even better.
Nicky and Margaret had a day trip to Norfolk today, and it sounds like it was a very worthwhile one too.
Me, my most exciting news of the day is that I have a diagnosis a 'frozen shoulder', and hopefully something getting done about it soon.
For my birthday this year, I of course received some books, and some tokens to be applied to more books. And I am extremely grateful for these gifts, because as everyone knows, I have a bit of a thing about books, and will enjoy both the reading and the choosing. I could happily do another post about forthcoming publications I've got my eye on (the new Stephen King hard case crime paperback is out next week ...).
However, Nicky bought me a couple of rather good gifts.
The first is an electric masher. Yes - weird I know, but I am in charge of mashing, and I like my mash creamy. Enough said.
The second is an Apple Watch, and I am wearing it right now. It seems to think my name is Nicky (a combination of Nicky previously having one and us sharing an Apple account), but that's fine, I don't mind. It's brilliant. It keeps pinging and telling me that I need to stand up, or breathe, or move around a bit. It takes phone calls, it delivers messages. It has all sorts of clever health-related apps, like checking my heart rate, or oxygen levels, or even doing an ECG (particularly useful). It has loads of other apps I haven't figured out and look forward to playing with.
Best of all - every time I look at it to check the time, it shows me a different Toy Story character. I just had Jessie, and right now it's Buzz Lightyear!
What is it with Tiger Woods and cars? As I mentioned in a blog post a month ago, I'd watched the documentary about him, and cars seem to feature at key moments - crashing the car yards from home when all hell was about to let loose about his philandering, being pulled over by the police for being in no fit state to drive a few years back at another low point.
And here we are again, rolled his car, had to be cut out of it by the fire department, have emergency surgery and have pins inserted to repair his feet/legs.
What next for Tiger?
By some happy chance, we have some holiday flights booked on 24 June, and according the the Prime Minister as of yesterday, if all goes well between now and then, all of the remaining lockdown restrictions will be lifted on 21 June.
Now, we need to take all of this news with (phrase of the moment) an abundance of caution, as much can happen over the next four months. Who knows whether the country, and indeed the rest of the world, will continue on the hoped-for pathway, and closer to home, whether vaccines will have been distributed to all those who want/need them before they can travel.
But hey, let's take this as a step in the right direction.
At the start of lockdown number one, which seems like a very long time ago, Nicky made the wise decision of signing us up for a year's subscription to Disney+. I was sceptical about the whole thing, but have most definitely been proved wrong, and will be very happy to pay the renewal when it comes around next month.
It turns out that we are not alone. According to Disney's latest quarterly earnings announcement, which was out a couple of weeks ago, we are one of over 90 million subscribers to the service, providing a bright light in what is otherwise a tough time for a company that relies rather heavily on people being able to gather together (to go to the movies, to go to a theme park, to go to a sports game, or even to put on/make most of these entertainments). And yes, we keep an eye on these things these days because, as of a few weeks back, we are officially Disney shareholders. Well, Nicky is a shareholder - to the princely sum of 16 of them to be exact! And what's more we are up almost 10% since buying them - would be more but for the strength of sterling!
Anyway, we got Disney+ mainly for Disney reasons with a fair amount of Pixar thrown in. But our favourite show in recent weeks has been WandaVision, which is all about Marvel characters. To my even greater surprise, it has turned Nicky into a fan of Marvel superhero films, and under Jake's guidance, we watched the first two Avengers films over the weekend - one each on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and there's every chance we'll be watching some more next weekend (once we've watched the next instalment of WandaVision, just as soon as it 'drops' later this week)!
This year has been a very slow start on the reading front. By this time last year I was storming ahead and had read 16 books, thanks in the main to a combination of work travel and holiday. This year my pathetic total is three, having read Holy Island by LJ Ross in January (Christmas gift from Auntie Frances), and finishing two more in the last couple of days.
Fever Pitch was a good one to have on the go on my Libby library app, and easy to dip in and out of, thanks to the way Hornby organised his thoughts game by game. An excellent choice for a struggling reader at the moment (looking back I'd read 'Just like you' and 'High fidelity' pretty recently), and I must make a point of picking some more of his off the shelves soon.
Surprisingly Bond #5 took longer to get through. Previously I'd zipped through Bond books in a couple of days, but not this one. Might have been me, might have been the book. Clearly Fleming thought that he was well set by book five and could experiment a little, and so Bond doesn't actually show up until half way through the book, having spent the first 100 pages or so learning about the dastardly Russian plot against him. We discovered that Tiffany Case had left him and gone back to America, and that he was office-bound and living what was described as 'the soft life'. The action, such as it was, involved Bond going to Istanbul, waiting to rendezvous with the girl who was going to entrap him, and taking the Orient Express back towards Paris. That's about it. Oh, and he appeared to have been poisoned at the end!
Anyway, my reading slowdown took hold towards the end of 2020. I'd set myself an ambitious target last year, and the slowdown meant that I just missed it. Having started to record progress on Goodreads at the start of 2011, I'd reached a decade at the end of last year, and wanted to have reached 500 books. My slowdown resulted in me missing by an annoying four. Therefore, having read three so far this year, I am on 499.
Looking back at the start of Goodreads, my first book was 'One Day' by David Nicholls (see also this blog post which refers to me waking Nicky up in the middle of the night to talk about it!), so I think it might be fitting if book 500 was also a David Nicholls one ...
It is remarkable to me to think that despite all of the amazing technological strides forward we have made as a civilization over the last 40+ years, no-one has stepped foot on the moon (or indeed further afield) in my lifetime. Despite the great promise of the Apollo programme, it feels as though proper manned space exploration has come to a shuddering halt for almost half a century. I really hope that I get to see it all happen again.
I wonder what it would be like to be old enough to have been alive for every single one of the moon landings?
Whilst I am too young, if only I could think of someone who was significantly older than me, who'd actually been born early enough to be able to say they'd seen it all!
Hmm ... ! :)
In the spirit of making sure that none went to waste, as there were doses left at the end of her shift, Nicky was able to get a jab today.
And on the same day Margaret has received notification of her appointment next week.
Progress.
So, the day after we pass 100,000, and we have another alarming number of deaths, the government wants to tell us about when we might be able to expect schools to be reopening, and when a roadmap towards easing of lockdown will be published.
Bizarre.
And here it is, the grim milestone. Creeping up over the last few weeks, today is the day, with another horrendous daily tally of 1,631 the total goes into six figure to reach 100,162. It has accelerated in the last month - it passed 70,000 on Christmas Day, and here we are, a month and a day later.
Difficult to know what else to say, other than to note this fact and reflect. It is, after all, just a number. It doesn't stop all of the 100,162 people being individuals with their own stories.
All we can do is continue to play our individual parts by respecting the rules and supporting the vital work that is going on. New case numbers appear to be decreasing, and rapidly, which we must take as a sign of hope, alongside the increase in the number of people (now over 6 million) who have received their first vaccination jab.
A milestone day today, and in particular, just before half past nine this evening it was the:
21st minute past the
21st hour of the
21st day of the
21st year of the
21st century.
Just the sort of nonsense I appreciate!
