On March 31st I travelled back down from Manchester to London in the early morning and spent the rest of the day fulfilling administrative duties in the London development where we have our apartment.
There were signs of spring in our garden in Oxted.
This is one of our magnolias - not a patch on those we saw a couple of weeks before at Nymans. Ours also didn't bloom as early; perhaps it's a different type, or perhaps we are just a bit more exposed up here on the Downs and spring comes later.
Paul, as I said, had originally stayed up in Manchester to finish some of the DIY, but he had to return here on Tuesday April 1st at my request because I had such a bad night with such severe kidney pain I thought I was going to have to ring 999 and send for the ambulance. My son thought kidney stones were at least a possibility, so I had to make an appointment to see the doctor the following week.
Also on Tuesday, our other daughter-in-law got sick and so did our second grandson so, as Paul wasn't home yet, I had to catch 2 trains and a bus to their house to give them a hand. Once Paul was back, we started driving over to Blackheath daily to look after them and I was also trying to do the London apartment work as well.
I did try to work at home, but kept finding there was just one little bit of information I had forgotten to look up in the paper files. One of my tasks was completing all the requests for information from solicitors representing owners who were selling their apartments. As London prices had risen very steeply recently, 4 owners were doing so and there were 4 long forms to complete, all with about 100 tedious questions, not all of which I could understand - cue desperate emails to our company solicitor, asking 'what on earth is a Certificate of Compliance and do I have one?'
It would have helped if all 4 forms hadn't been completely different - or if at least one of them had been sent in electronic format. Scanning them in to the PC didn't help, as there was no OCR software, so I was reduced to typing them out again. Unfortunately, no examples of previous forms had been kept, only the answers, in the form '2a No, 2b Yes', which wasn't at all helpful when you don't know the question.
To add to the length of my working day, it usually took me a minimum of 90 mins to travel up there and sometimes longer to get home; one night it took me two and a half hours! This was mostly because London Bridge station was in complete chaos since it is being re-built, and East Croydon is also being re-built so wasn't much better - and the occasional signal problem or power failure also conspired against me.
Even without the solicitor's forms, just dealing with the daily bills and phone messages took a lot of time - and I didn't have to do it all; one of the other directors dealt with the emails and much of the bill paying. She lives in France, but used to be the Chairman of the Board of Directors; she came over from France twice, and otherwise I had to scan and email her the bills that could be paid on-line. I had to write cheques for the other bills and have them signed by the current Chairman, and keep running totals of money in and out. The Head Porter was kept busy dealing with complaints and repairs and things.
Although the new Estate Manager started work on April 14th, it took me some time to do the handover, and of course there were lots of questions to answer, some of which needed a visit to the Estate office.
My life was further complicated by the fact that my cleaner had to return to Romania to help nurse her sick grandmother, so I was desperately trying to do all my housework as well - not terribly successfully! I managed to keep up with the washing, but I'm afraid doing the ironing as well after a long day in London was completely beyond me and we either wore crumpled clothes or we just kept re-washing and re-wearing the non-iron stuff!
We made a quick visit up to Manchester for Easter, as it was also my grandson's 3rd birthday. The plan was for my son and Paul to spend part of the holiday finishing off (hopefully) the DIY, while M and I did the child care. Not as much DIY as planned took place, but we managed some visits to parks and playgrounds, and there was a small birthday party for a few friends. But the undoubted highlight of the birthday weekend was the visit to the Thomas the Tank Engine Park at Drayton Manor. My grandson is completely devoted to Thomas the Tank Engine; his entire playroom is devoted to Thomas, and it is hardly worth buying him any other present than an engine or something else to enhance his layout. Having no other playmates most of the time, he spends his day chattering to all the trains and making up little stories for them to act out, so the Thomas Park visit was eagerly awaited and greatly enjoyed.
This is the roundabout with all the engines. There is considerable competition to sit in the engines rather than one of the carriages!
The Harold the Helicopter ride was also very popular. You can see the Fat Controller's car in the background. Unfortunately, the latter was a very short ride, for which the queue was very long indeed.
Although I do have lots more photos, I won't post them here as they're full of children, both my grandson and the two little friends we met there. Suffice it to say that everything was a huge success, and nobody small was terribly interested in the animals in the zoo area because they just wanted to go on the rides. The one difficulty of the afternoon was queuing for ages to have a ride in the little train only to find that, as there were two trains running alternately, the train we would get on when it was our turn would not be pulled by Thomas. Screams of rage and disappointed sobs meant we had to endure another wait until we could ride in Thomas' train.
We came back on the Tuesday 22nd, the day after Easter Monday, and I was back at work in London on Wednesday. That visit was to finalise the payroll by telephoning the individual payments to the bank. The whole procedure is manual and quite complicated, so it was better to have two of us to ensure against mistakes. I still had more things to do during the following two weeks, as the new Manager left on April 28th for his previously booked 2 weeks holiday.
Just to add to the muddle in April, I needed to see the doctor and the nurse to arrange blood tests and have an ultrasound scan to see whether or not I had kidney stones. It turned out that none were seen, though as I seemed to have slightly raised levels of urea in my blood 10 days after the pain episode on March 31st, I might have passed one. We also got involved with helping our eldest son as he and his wife hoped to be moving to Basingstoke and needed help with clearing out and taking stuff to the tip, charity shops etc. I don't think I stopped running all month.
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