Trinity Sunday

I slept fitfully last night - principally because of Sara's snoring! I found myself waking periodically during the night. Eventually, I got up at 8 a.m. but few others stirred. Only Tom and I went to church this morning - an All Age Eucharist service taken by Elizabeth. It was another good service by Elizabeth with her explaining the concept of the Trinity using the three forms of water - ice, representing the cold, awesome, remote concept of the Father; water - representing the cleansing, life giving flowing power of the Son; and steam, the nimble, all pervading yet difficult-to-put-in-a-box concept of the Holy Spirit. The children loved it, especially the ice which some of them ate! Norman T reminded me that he wanted me to speak at Probus in November so I must note it down in my diary - the history of the great transatlantic liners. Klynn came up with a great idea for Sara's party which, because Sara reads this blog, I am unable to disclose. It is likely to cause some mirth at the party. Sara now has a total of 75 adults and 45 children coming - a grand total of 120! I do hope the pig and the chocolate will go round. This afternoon, Tom and I made two trips to the Amesbury Recycling Centre with more garden debris and all the old laminate flooring which we've replaced by floor tiles in the en-suite. As a reward, I took him to the same KFC which Klynn and I had visited yesterday. This afternoon I went round to Richard's to make sure that my laptop and his projector would work together in displaying, on a screen, all the photos of Sara I had scanned from David's slides and old prints. It worked!! We are now set up for the slide show on Saturday. I attended the West Dean BCP Evensong this evening. There were only about a dozen of us with only me and Tania from Winterslow. It was a nice, quite meditative type of service with a sermon from Gill again on the topic of the Trinity. Back home I cleaned my car, both inside and out before Malcolm phoned from Liverpool to ask about arrangements for the next weekend. We had a long chat about many topics but in particular about the lack of frankness of many company's towards their employees at this time of recession. His own company is suspending all employer pension contributions for six-months. I wonder how much longer our final salary scheme will go on for. It is going to be really difficult for Tom's generation. We are probably the last of the lucky ones. I rang Mum tonight. She seemed in fine fettle but has to go to the hospital again on the 22nd for the results of further tests to be explained to her. I finished the day by scanning another couple of photos including our favourite one taken of us all in the Bahamas by a professional photographer. I have now made that my desktop picture. We are so looking forward to being back there - total relaxation.

In an English country garden

A day spent almost entirely in the garden or on gardening related activities. However, I started the morning by cycling to Roger's in Tytherley Road for the monthly Men's Breakfast. We had an excellent full English breakfast again of bacon, sausage, egg, tomatoes and beans with coffee and toast. I gave the presentation this morning choosing as my subject the topic of Stop the Traffik's chocolate campaign. It came as quite a surprise to everybody present that child slave labour is used so prolifically in the harvesting of the cocoa bean. I handed out some of the Fairtrade coupons for them to give out to retailers when they buy Fairtrade chocolate. Back home I had a coffee before tackling the massive job of trimming the hedge around our boundary using a combination of shears and my new tree lopping tool. In the end I had a mass of debris which I needed to dispose of. Sara and Mary were at ballet school and then went to All Saints for a wedding in which Mary was singing in the choir. Afterwards Sara returned home and Mary went off with Sara M and Molly to a birthday bowling party at Strikes. I continued to work on the hedge and Klynn helped me to gather up all the debris into a large tarpaulin which we wrapped up and put in the back of the car to take to the Amesbury Recycling Centre. I had never visited it before and was impressed as to how organised it was with more car parking and a larger selection of different types of materials for recycling than at Salisbury. Our green waste went into a special skip which has a mulching/composting mechanism. They sell the compost resulting from this production. As a treat, and because neither of us had had any lunch, Klynn and I treated ourselves to a KFC Variety Bucket at Solstice Retail Park. Having finished trimming the hedge I then mowed both front and back lawn. They looked really good - neat and tidy. Tonight, after a supper of spaghetti bolognese and red wine, I booked the Comfort Suites for our second week in Nassau although got one of the dates wrong so I'll need to speak to them to make an amendment. At least we will now have accommodation for the full 15 days.

Golf with Mary

Another day in Salisbury with a morning full of meetings. Quite a similar day to last week with a break at lunchtime for the Christian Fellowship meeting. Sara, unfortunately, couldn't join us as she had a meeting which lasted well into the CF meeting and she decided to use the remainder of her lunch hour buying balloons, poppers and bunting for her birthday celebration. I slipped out to the bank but otherwise spent all day inside the office. I joined Vicki H, Sarah C and Vicki's husband for a quick drink in the George & Dragon after work. They serve excellent John Smith's Bitter - beautifully kept and chilled so there is, at least, one pub in Salisbury for David and Andrea to visit. Tonight Mary and I visited Grateley to play golf having found that she needs larger clubs too - so I fitted her out with some of Tom's junior clubs. We played from about 7.30 p.m until 9.00 p.m. and then visited The Plough at Grateley where we sat outside, me with a bitter shandy and Mary with a J2O orange and passion fruit. My golf was slightly better than the other evening when I played with Tom and I went round in 39. Mary found driving difficult and so she was taking quite a few shots. She needs to get some driving practice and learn how to swing a club properly. Nevertheless, she enjoyed her game and remarked that it was good exercise. Unfortunately, she did not win the prize for the best presentation at school today although she was a finalist. Tonight we received an email from Sara's Dad with details of where he is staying near Salisbury. I will pick him and Andrea up next week. A short blog today. I need to skim read Steve Chalke's book on Stop the Traffik as I may be called upon to give a short presentation about the chocolate issue tomorrow at Men's Breakfast.

Removing the plank from the eye!!

My plans to go to Dorking today were shattered when Sara announced, on waking, that she had something in her eye which was scratching her right eyeball badly, that she couldn't see through it, that it was causing her pain and that as she had broken her spectacles she was unable to see anything! Quite a mess! We needed to get Mary and Molly to school and I would have to take Sara into Salisbury, either the optician or the A&E Unit at Salisbury General Hospital. Having dropped off the girls, I drove us into the city. Apparently some friends of ours were very concerned as they had seen me linking arms with Sara at the school and she seemed in a state as she appeared to be crying! We managed to get Sara an immediate appointment with David, the jovial and slightly eccentric optician, who removed a small piece of debris from her eye after checking over her sight and prescribing some long distance vision spectacles. "Cas", our friend who is a technician at the opticians, chose a lovely pair of Karen Millen spectacles which look really good on her. We had to wait one and a half hours for them to be ready so we had a coffee and pastry at the Cathedral Refectory. We also visited Sarum College Bookshop to buy a card for Cynthia on the occasion of her being priested. Once we had picked up Sara's new glasses, I drove us both back home for some lunch before I went back into Salisbury to finish the day in the Salisbury office. Morale was low there as further redundancies were announced in HR. After I had finished work, I stopped off at John H's to deliver some post from United Grand Lodge and pick up some fish and chips from Fry's at the bottom of Devizes Road. It was difficult to park and it seemed to take forever to get served. Eventually I got three haddocks, two chips and a sausage and returned home with them in a box. The house was in turmoil when I got back - the new carpet had been fitted in the lounge and dining room and most of the furniture was on the lawn (ah, memories of the pranks we played at the Halls of Residence in Liverpool when we removed the complete contents of Wayne's room and re-constructed it on the lawn!). We had five for our House Group this evening and managed to get all the furniture back in time for that - including re-connecting the TV and DVD player. We had a very pleasant evening discussing Steve Chalke's The Apprentice and discussing, in particular, the topic of "Belonging". The evening went very quickly indeed. Linda arrived before we started to discuss preferences for Spring Harvest next year. Only another 5 days before the bookings for 2010 open.

Brazil mourns Flight AF447

Awoke at 6.30 a.m. today and hoisted the French flag at half-mast after learning that there was to be a three-day period of mourning in Brazil for the 228 people on board the missing Air France Airbus. It was also announced that wreckage found in the Atlantic had definitely come from an Air France airliner. There is little doubt now that this wreckage is the remains of Flight AF447. After my long trip to Exeter and back, yesterday, it was good to only be in Salisbury today. A full day as usual with a short lunch break in the restaurant with Andy P - roast beef and trimmings. Sara went out to lunch with the rest of the HR Lead Consultants - their very last meeting today before the role is redundant with the termination of most of them - including Sara. The end of an era. I received a phone call from Stop the Traffik relating to a further initiative they have and asking me if I am interested in being involved. I have arranged to see Simon and Ruth on Friday 19 June up at their offices in London following meetings I have there already to discuss this and other issues where I can help. This evening Tom and I went to Grateley to play some golf. Tom hadn't played for quite a while and it was clear that his junior glove and junior clubs were now too small for him and he had to use my second set of adult clubs (those I reserve for visitors) and buy him a new glove from Roger, the Professional. Tom seemed to get the hang of the larger clubs immediately and played some excellent golf. His driving was much better than mine and I had an awful half-round shooting a 46 (it was 36 last time out!) and Tom managed 48 (the first time he has gone under 50). In matchplay terms we drew 4.5 - 4.5. It was a pleasant warm evening and we visited The Plough pub in Grateley afterwards. Tonight I also scanned in a few more photos of Sara. No Desperate Housewives tonight - they have finished for the season - yippeeee!!

A Visit to Devon

I woke this morning to yet another bright and sunny day. After making tea and cooking bacon for Tom and me, I set off for our Exeter office by way of Amesbury where I picked up my colleague, Belinda, who had driven down from Dorking. We made good time at got to Exeter at just before 9.30 a.m. and settled ourselves down in the HR Department there. The office in Exeter was such a contrast to earlier days - only three people in and it resembled at chapel of rest. It was so quiet and sombre. Belinda and I had a full day interviewing witnesses for a tribunal to be held in Exeter in a month's time but did manage to get a short lunch break - I had a quorn chow mein-style noodle dish which filled a hole but had little else to recommend it. It was again hot hot hot - reaching 28.5 degrees Celsius. We completed our work by 4.30 p.m. and returned to Amesbury along the A303. The radio news announced that wreckage had been found in the Atlantic Ocean along the flight path of the Air France Airbus which disappeared on Monday night. The wreckage included what appeared to be airline seats which strongly suggested that Flight AF447 did indeed come down into the ocean. When I got back home I found Sara was out. I made a cup of tea and then spent the evening scanning into my laptop all the dozens of old photographs Sara gave me which depict her first 50 years. When added to the ones I've scanned from slides, we now have a substantial collection for her Party on the 13th . A particular favourite is published here!

Another Atlantic Tragedy

Another very hot day today and another one tinged with sadness and tragedy. I woke up reasonably early and picked Anthony up at Grateley Station on the way in to Dorking. I had hoisted the Union Flag at half-mast in memory of Millvina Dean, who had survived the great Atlantic Titanic tragedy 97 years ago. As I drove up to Surrey, the news of Millvina's death was overtaken by two further news stories - that Susan Boyle the "Britain's Got Talent" runner-up singer had been admitted to the Priory Hospital in London under the Mental Health Act and that an Airbus 330-200 belonging to Air France had disappeared over the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris north west of the Brazilian city of Natal. It was believed that it had been struck by lightning but there was no trace of it and all 228 on board were believed to have perished. It is unusal as most crashes occur over land or near airports. If it has plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean, it will be difficult to recover the flight recorder. There were two further famous deaths today - Danny La Rue the female impersonator and Vincent O'Brien the famous horseracing trainer. I spent the day in our Dorking office catching up on end of month paperwork - mileage returns, monthly reports etc. and a tele-conference with our Indian outsourcers. Lunch was a smoked mackerel salad - quite honestly, there wasn't anything else of merit on the menu except the potato and sweet pepper soup which was surprisingly rather good. I left the office promptly at 5 p.m. and called in at Sainsbury's in Farnham for some shopping including some red roses and gypsophillia for Sara for her kindness and patience towards us all. When I got home Mary had prepared a talk to give to her class on the inportance of Fairtrade products. It was an excellent piece of work and I laminated her talk so it didn't get torn and provided her with a few pages off the Stop the Traffik website so she could give the class some details of what chocolate they could eat and where they can buy it. Tonight we had an Indian ready meal from Sainsbury's and I put together some final questions for Sara's Birthday Quiz.