Photograph Quiz:
Photos no. 73:- Why, when and where were these people walking?
Hippy New Year Blog,
Do you hate those round robins you get from your relatives at this time of year, Blog? Not only can’t they be arsed to make the effort to see you for twelve months at a time, but they can’t even be bothered to put pen to paper when they do trouble to get in touch. I never read them myself; put them straight in the waste bin. If the round robin contained anything of importance, the relative would have let me know at the time it happened. Do you read them Blog? When I retired fifteen years ago, because I knew money was going to be tight, I wrote the enclosed round robin for my relatives and used the firm’s photo copier to run off a couple of thousand. I send the same round robin to everyone every single year. If my relatives do read it, then twelve months later they will have forgotten its content and think they have received a fresh yearly missive from me. And if, like me they never bother to read the round robin I send them, they will think that they have received a fresh missive from me because they didn’t know what the previous year’s round robin contained. Is that clever Blog, or is that clever?? I said I photocopied a couple of thousand on my retirement at my firm’s expense. Well Blog, I only have to live another thirty nine years and I will have used them all up. I suppose I will then have to think how I will be able to afford to run off some more copies. A bit worrying if you think about it. It might make a difference to the number of bottles of wine I order that Christmas. I really should have photocopied five thousand when I had the chance.
Since you only became my dear friend in January, Blog, I feel it incumbent upon me to include you amongst my family and friends at this special time of the year. I therefore enclose a copy of this year’s round robin, as fresh as it was when it was first written fifteen years ago, I kid you not!
Dear all,
Knowing that you look so forward so much to hearing about the family members and our newly found exciting lifestyle, I thought I would pop a few notes down for your perusal. I know it is slightly later than usual, but now that the festive season is drawing to a close, Santa and his little helpers have departed for their eleven month’s vacation on the Costa del Santa and all those bright sparkling decorations have been consigned once more to the dusty loft, I thought it might be appropriate to let you know about the wonderful year that has just ended. And what a wonderful year it was.
Admittedly, it didn’t start on the best of notes. Ann’s broken arm took several weeks to heal after she had fallen off the ladder dismantling the Christmas tree which we have in the garden. I am glad to report that the tree was not damaged and still towers over the house in arboreal splendour. It was unfortunate however that Ann did grab the T.V. aerial as she fell off the roof, causing the aerial to snap off the chimney stack and smash one of the bedroom windows on the way down. The broken pieces of glass caused some nasty cuts on Ann’s legs, which did turn a trifle septic. I am glad to say that she was able to wash the blood away from the front path and sweep up the glass after she had refreshed herself with a cup of tea. It could have been much worse as the path could have been permanently stained. Luckily, with the use of some new crutches Ann was able to continue with her cleaning and cooking chores. It was a couple of weeks however, before she was fit enough to clamber back onto the roof to replace the broken aerial. Having to trail round to my other daughter’s house every time I wanted to watch the TV, did prove an inconvenience and quite tiresome at times, and I did say as much to Ann. I said that if she had been a little more diligent, I would not have been forced to use all that petrol just to watch the television set causing my carbon footprint to be unnecessarily large. She dared to suggest that I had always had big feet anyway. Luckily she said it while I was dosing off after a particularly heavy lunch so I was not one hundred per cent sure that she had said it, or it was the result of me was entering the first stage of the seven stages of unconsciousness. To avoid an uncertain confrontation, I decided to give her the benefit of any doubt.
When Ann fell on the ice in February, she adapted quite quickly to the use of the wheel chair. By June she was up and about again. I do think she quite misses trying to get up the front steps in her wheel chair. During this trying time, she never complained about me insisting that I bring the milk in or collect the post from the front door mat. I did feel that I should take my share of such duties. She didn’t even comment adversely when I had to get out of my easy chair to tell the Jehovah Witnesses that she couldn’t come to the door just then because of her indisposition. They were generous in their understanding of my predicament and promised to come back once she was up and about again. It is nice to see people being kind.
As you might have guessed, my younger daughter continues her lodging arrangements. She has designed some really thoughtful assault courses in her bedroom making it impossible to reach her bed without sustaining some serious form of physical personal damage. In July she achieved the ultimate when against all the odds, she managed to submerge the whole of her room under 3 feet e-bayed camouflage clothing (that is 97 cm if you are familiar with the metric system of measurement which was introduced by the Conservative government around about the year of 1971). At one point however about this time, we became quite concerned when her niece, on visiting my younger daughter in her bedroom, went missing for three days. The rescue services finally located her using a heat sensitive device after the search and rescue Alsatians had refused to go into my younger daughter’s bedroom as their handler had deemed it too dangerous for his dogs to enter such a potential unstable environment. The dogs themselves did bark that they regarded the task as a health and safety issue. The fire service and the mountain rescue people did thank me for allowing them to experience such an unusual rescue; it would have cost the ratepayers considerable expense to have done a mock-up of such a situation for a training exercise. The real thing is always better than simulation, they said.
I am pleased to report that in October I attained my 67th birthday without too much fuss or bother. In fact I think the day passed very quietly without anyone noticing. I think the paucity of presents was a satisfying reflection on my lack of desire for materialistic possessions and was rather joyful that almost everyone I knew was able to restrain themselves from wasting their hard earned money on buying me gifts.
I mentioned earlier about Ann’s total recovery by June and I think it only fair to report that she did a reasonable job of decorating all the downstairs’ rooms but I was slightly worried when she fell off the step ladders before she had quite finished painting the outside. After the episode with the ladder at Christmas, I did feel that I was most responsible in not pointing out to her that she should really have been aware of the inherent dangers involved in the use of such decorating aids. How ever, I must say that, unless you are looking very closely in the exact direction, you can hardly see up that the little bit that she missed by the front apex. On reflection, it would have been better if I had had the fore thought to advise her to have painted the front of the house first which meant that the unpainted part of the property would have been to the rear. As the sun shines strongly in the rear garden, it would have not been quite so irritating for me while I was sun bathing having to look up at the unpainted part.
I can report that Ann was soon out of hospital and tackled the weeks of unwashed crockery, the piles of dirty clothes and the untidy state of the living room with little or no complaint. I did offer to help her to shift all the empty wine bottles to the car to enable her to take them down to the bottle bank, but she had quite completed the task before I had fully woken from my 11 o’clock mid-morning snooze. I do believe that it was the repeated clink of the bottles being moved that woke me. I was not resentful however and showed no displeasure at my early arousal.
I did feel a little aggrieved on the next day, when she asked me none too politely, to move my sun bed so that she could mow the grass where I was sunbathing. I felt her attitude was reflected in the finished job because the edges of the lawn were not quite as straight as I would have liked. Certainly the standard of her weeding left a lot to be desired and was not up to the standard to which I have become accustomed.
I do feel that she is beginning to show her age a little; when the coalman dropped the bags of coal off at the bottom of the driveway, Ann was a great deal slower than usual when she shifted them. She was getting quite red in the face in the hot sun. She might have done a great deal better if she had left shifting the tonne of coal until the evening when it was a lot cooler. With hindsight I should have been far more assertive and insisted that she have a rest after moving all the rockery stones before she started on the coal bags.
As you know, we had a very wet year which fortunately meant that Ann did not need to clean the car more often than is the case normally during the summer months. For this she was most grateful because bending is always difficult with a bad back, but as I said to her, the continual bending would act as a sort of lubricant to aid recovery. Because of the wet weather, Ann had to get up very early to check for flood damage. I must say that I did find the alarm going off at 6am most disturbing and I found that getting back to sleep again a bit difficult. On one occasion I did think that I did detect a murmur of discontent from her when the autumn digging of the garden was interrupted by having to relay the concrete slabs on the driveway which had become uneven in the sudden wet spell towards the end of August. Coincidentally, I do think the timing of that wet spell fully justified my decision to maintain the family tradition on not going on holiday. If we had gone away, Ann would only have worried about the state of the garden, missing the washing and cleaning and all her other jobs. I know she doesn’t like her routine being disturbed.
I do think my younger daughter might have been a little more considerate. I am sure that having her mother washing her new car every day was completely over the top … asking her mother to do it every other day would have shown far more consideration. A daily vacuuming was also unnecessary as it sometime meant that my mid morning coffee arrived as late as 11.15 on some occasions. The hum from the vacuum tended to be quite irritating. I did not hold Ann totally responsible for this situation however. My younger daughter also showed her less considerate side when she purchased that sports car. She did not give any thought about how difficult it would be for me to get in and out of the car. I am sure that Ann finds sitting on the roof rack most uncomfortable, besides me worrying about her having to hold tight onto my kit bag, there being no room inside the car for it. Every journey is a worry in case she drops it and possibly damages my kit.
I think my young daughter showed a streak of envy when she continued to use her crutches far longer than necessary when she saw that I also had to use a set of sticks in September. I think she was most envious at the amount of attention I was receiving from concerned friends and relations .. I do now have to wonder if her injury was quite as serious as she made out at the time. I do hold her responsible for my discomfort following my bicycling accident however. She should have check the brakes with the person from whom the bike was purchased before asking me to pick the bike up.
Replacing the carpet with chip board seems to have proved a boon to Ann; it does not seem to take her quite as long to sweep the boarding as it did to vacuum the carpet. The small reduction in our electrical supply usage has meant a slight saving in our quarterly electric utilities bill. I made it known to Ann that I was most pleased about this and am now considering other ways in which small savings can be made. I did suggest that using her tea bag three times instead of twice would be a small start. I am wondering if using the stream at the bottom of the garden to wash the clothes instead of using the washing machine might prove cost effective, because Ann thinks she will have to use a lot more soap powder to achieve the same fresh, clean clothing. She thinks the slurry tank leakage into the stream from the farm further up the Lane might be detrimental. I said that I didn’t think it would be too much of a problem if she checked the colour of the water a few hours before she intended to do a load of washing
The bird feeders we have got are proving a little trying. I do feel that I should not have to keep on reminding Ann when the feeders are getting low. It is just not fair when the birds are so dependant on them in the cold weather. Ann would not feel the cold each time she fills the feeders if she wore more clothes to keep a little warmer. At this time of year, following the Christmas clear out, there are many bargains to be picked up at the charity shops. And with so much stock, I have told Ann that the shops would probably accept a little less than their asking price. She might even find a few summer clothes at a greatly reduced price, but I have told her that she should think most carefully before spending too much as the weather might be cool again and buying summer clothing in such circumstance this time last year would have proved a false economy. I think she seems to have accepted the reasonableness of my argument but just in case, I shall restrict the amount of unaccounted money she has access to. I shall not demand a fully detailed account of how much she has spent on what items, instead I have told her I will be happy with her giving me a handwritten list rather than the computer printout to which I have become accustomed. Using a pencilled list will, pleasingly, also result in a further small saving in our electrical utilities bill.
I will of course be in touch next year about this time with further news of the hectic life style we live. May I convey good wishes from my wife .. she would have done it herself but I assured her that if she concentrated on my next cup of coffee, you would understand.
The Kirkham Household
Having got soggy feet this morning on my trudge in the mud, I hope my trainers have dried for the New Year Five on January 2nd, organised by Coventry Godiva Harriers otherwise I shall offer to help the race organisers.
Colin
