Sunday 12th November 2017

It is half six in the morning, the quiet mewing of one of the cats downstairs brings me round. Dawn is creeping over the horizon outside, and I am still home alone and have survived.

I get up then switching the heating on, feed the cats and make the first coffee of the day. I guess I have about three hours before Jools comes home, and I mess around doing stuff, making the house look presentable. Not that I had a party or anything, but, mop the kitchen floor, clean some windows and so on.

Things is when there is no league football on, so nothing to listen to on the radio for four or five hours a day, is that there is so much time to do other stuff. Walks, cleaning, scanning, cooking and so on and on. And with the radio on in the background meaning there is nothing to catch up on, and by lunchtime I had run out of stuff to listen to.

Jools comes home at quarter to eleven, just too late to go into town for the remembrance service at the town hall. We stop and are silent at eleven, but then have a coffee, and as I am hungry, make an early lunch. Jools is tired, but I get an accurate report on how Mum is, and so we can plan accordingly. In short she is no better than the week before; still have the infection and is the isolation ward. And the wound in her leg is still wide open and not healing. Worse of all is that she is in a trough of despair again, not seeing the end of it, and having so few visitors as I had had to tell them the week before to stay away if they were worried about contracting the infection. Because, like all of us, her friends are aging as quickly as she is.

Not much we can really do to be honest, but just be there one day a week and make sure the banks and credit companies are not chasing her. Jools deals with Mum’s mail, and finds the last of Mum’s secrets. All is now in the open, so more of the untruth she said in recent years are proved. It is frustrating, but hardly surprising, and Jools’ recollection of the things Mum said over the years was the same as me, so I’m not going mad.

After lunch we go to visit Jen; Mike is there too, so we talk about things and plans for a holiday next year, which might not happen, but a holiday on the Broads does sound good, as it would mean Jools and I on a boat made for two, and meeting up with the other cruisers each evening at a pub for drinks and dinner. Sounds dandy to me.

Jen is OK, as is Mike. Things are returning to normal, as normal as they can be after Tony has gone, but there are smiles and laughs still.

We go to into Town to call in at the Rack, in case business was slow. As it turned out we could barely get in the door, but stay long enough for a beer, a chat as the ex-servicemen were well into their forth hour of boozing. They are all in blazers, wearing medals. I am not, just have a small poppy, and so am ignored. We don’t all have to wear our medals to be proud or respect those who gave their lives.

We are back home at four, and after feeding the cats we have cheese and crackers for dinner, after which most of the day has slipped by, and I had to pack, have a shower and then find it time to go to bed, as the alarm would be going off at half four in the morning. Which is still night, technically.