Wednesday 3 October 2007

Good friends and sad news

2nd & 3rd October

It was a restless night – I kept waking up and listening to hear if the fridge had started, as a clue that the mains circuit was still live. When the fridge starts up, the inverter cooling fan runs for a bit – it was one of the first things to get used to when we moved on board. I could, of course, have just got up and looked at the mains panel in the engine room to see if the light was still on, but that would have been silly.

In the morning I made my dopey way to the surgery for the annual check up. All was well in general, although I got told off for drinking too much (28 units a week is now too much, apparently), and I’ve got a couple more appointments to keep as a result.

We’d planned to do the Willy Walk but not go to the pub, so as to move the boat to Burton in the afternoon, as I had an Out Patients appointment there on Wednesday (i.e. today). However, when Will and Jane heard of this, they suggested that Will needed to go into Burton tomorrow anyway, so could give me a lift.

This meant that we could follow the usual Tuesday Alrewas routine of walk, pub lunch, back to the boat, doze, light evening meal. In the evening, Elanor came to visit with our post. Sheila now has an appointment at Cannock Chase hospital for the 23rd, and we spent some time working out how we could get there. It is truly being a month for health care stuff, but at least it gets it all out of the way.

This morning we moved the boat onto the water point, and by the time we’d filled up, a boat had moved off from the visitor moorings just beyond. We put Sanity on the space thus left, and were soon ready to go to Burton with Will. What a good friend he is.

Burton’s dermatology clinic was very efficiently organised, and I was out not 20 minutes after my official appointment time. My mole is just a mole, seemingly, which is a relief, not that I was worried anyway (much).

When Will picked us up, he gave the shocking news that Mike Stevens, that doyen of waterways knowledge and expertise, and a very decent guy into the bargain, had died. Although no longer in the prime of life, we had no reason to suppose that he’d been ill, so it came as a dreadful surprise.

He and his partner Wendy had not long moved onto their new boat, Felis Catus III. All our thoughts are with Wendy at this sad time. Mike’s absence will take a deal of getting used to.


Phone Connectors again

Just a footnote to my last comment on these. The replacement bits of Velcro have arrived from BPC. They work much better than the originals, and I’ll comment again after trying them out on the phone.

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