Goodness me, I seem to have written nothing for months, so I thought I'd spend some time catching up on the 6 or 7 months during which I have not written anything. The long silence has partly been due to the fact that we have been incredibly busy with really boring things, and have been too busy to make any visits anywhere so there are very few photographs.
Once we were back in England, I had an appointment with a cardiologist to try and determine the cause of my breathlessness, and he decided I needed an angiogram. We had an odd conversation really - he gave me the choice of a non-invasive investigation, i.e. a scan, or an invasive one, an angiogram. The angiogram involves putting a long, thin, flexible tube called a catheter into a blood vessel in your groin. The catheter is then guided to your heart and a special dye is injected through the catheter, so that X-ray images show your heart and coronary arteries more clearly. I thought this all sounded rather ghastly, so naturally, I chose the non-invasive scan, whereupon the doctor told me that scans were useless as they didn't show much, which meant I would probably need an angiogram after the scan, so I might as well skip the scan and go straight for the angiogram! I did wonder what was the point of offering such a choice, then telling me it was a stupid choice and I shouldn't have chosen it. Anyway, I agreed to the angiogram.
At the weekend, we made a visit to Nymans Gardens, the first since last autumn. We were fortunate to find Sunday 16th March was a lovely sunny day.
The views, as usual, were superb.
As you can see, it was too early for there to be leaves on the trees.
We caught all of the spring flowers. Some areas were just a sea of daffodils.
The magnolias quite took my breath away. I can't recall many magnolias this size, but I suppose these ones are very old.
There were amazing displays of heathers, which for some reason I had always thought were best in autumn - clearly not.
The camellias too were absolutely beautiful, and because there hadn't been rain for a while, the blooms had remained prefect.
Of course, the early rhododendrons had also started along with the azaleas, reminding me that ours would soon be out too.
After that reasonably quiet first week, life became much more complicated. M, the daughter-in-law who lives in Manchester, applied for a job at Oxted school - which she didn't get, to her great relief, she didn't like the school when she got there and my son would have had to start looking for a new job down here as well. The interview was originally to be on Monday March 24th, which dismayed my son who had taken the whole of that week off for DIY in his house and now seemed to have the prospect of spending part of it down here instead. But on Monday 17th the school called her and changed the interview date to Wednesday 19th. So M and my grandson caught the train down on Tuesday 18th, had the interview on Wednesday, and went back on the train to Manchester, with Paul, on Friday 21st. Paul and my son planned to carry out major renovations on the basement of the house over the following week. I couldn't go up immediately, as I had some work to do on Monday 24th, so I planned to go up later on Monday.
We still own our London apartment which is on a development of 130 other apartments; I am one of the Directors of the Residents Association which is responsible for running the development. Our Estate Manager left just after I got back from skiing, so I was trying to do some of the work he used to do. There seemed to be many things left undone while he was working his notice, and sorting things out took me some time. I was helping with the finances as well as some of the day-to-day stuff, and trying to find my way round the files and systems previous managers had left. The next Manager would not arrive until April 14th, so I only had 4 and a bit weeks to cover - though I though it would also take me several days to hand over to the new man and teach him how to run the payroll by the extremely antiquated method we use. And later I also had to cover a 2 week holiday for him - we were honouring a holiday he had already booked.
So on Monday 24th I had to be up before 6, to catch a 7.15 train so as to be in London early to make a start on this work. In the afternoon, I caught a train to Manchester where I spent a week on childcare duties, shopping and cooking while the men slaved downstairs renovating the basement.
The following Monday (31st) I travelled back down again to London for more Estate management. Paul remained up in Manchester for more DIY. Heaven knows how we ever had time to go to work!
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