Today's Diary

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Today's Diary

Up just after 7 am as I had to be at the church to let the electrician in. It's the start of two days’ work for him to upgrade the downstairs WC with an extractor fan and a quiet, high-speed hand-dryer.

Then home for a quick coffee before we drove off to the gym. Clare had a twenty-five-minute walk around the new estates (benches to sit on!), while I ran through the Tai Chi form, the first four Shotokan Heian katas, the sanbon kumite and the Cheng Man-Ch’ing sword form — about twenty minutes in total. I was on court 3 in the sports hall; courts 1 and 2 had a women's dance class to a thundering techno beat. Concentrate!

Afterwards I sat on the bench outside waiting for Clare in the warm sunshine (it was 17 degrees), watching the contrails of high-flying jets on their way to America. An elderly man said to me, “Sunbathin’? Don’t get sunstroke!” as he walked back towards his home. It's March 2nd today in Somerset.

Back home again we had just time for a quick snack (the salmon whose sell-by date was two days ago — delicious!), and then a call from the men en route to install our new washing machine (recall that the previous one — only eighteen months old — had its internal wire loom gnawed by the rat).

That all went without a hitch and, as I write this, we are already in progress on the third wash; multiple heaps of what they call “soiled clothing” have been accumulating over the last ten days.

During the second wash we drove down to Waitrose for a truncated shop — essentials only (we have an M&S shop in Bristol lined up for later this week) — and then back home again to pack everything away and put out the recycling and the bin.

I've just finished guitar practice (half an hour — twelve-bar blues exercises in G and E) and I'm waiting for the third wash to complete. I think that after that, the day's chores are pretty much done.

I'm pretty tired.

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