Tuesday 12th May 2020

My was the month of birthdays. Mum, Dad, Granddad, 2nd wife, stepson all had birthdays in May.

All bar stepson are gone now, and he has not made contact with me, nor me with him.

Life is complicated, and best not complicate it more.

He was born in 1988, making him, er, 32? It was twenty years ago I last saw on, on his borthday when he Mother, my 2nd wife, had told him he wasn't allowed to call me Dad any more, nor tell me he loved me.

At that point I gave up with them. I was not going to use a child, stepchild, as a weapon in our split, even if she was.

I moved on.

And in due course, I got posted, made new friends, a new life, leaf the RAF, got a cat, went to sea, moved to Kent, got married, worked in the wind industry. Got happy.

So all is good.

So, to Tuesday.

Market Day in Kings Lynn, though probably not at the moment.

With it being light now before five, I am awake before the alarm goes off, listening to the birds, so happy with their and full of the joys of, well, spring.

We get up, and once I had supped the first coffee of the day, I went up to the cross trainer and Jools went for a walk.

And as usual, the morning carries on. I make more coffee, have breakfast and am all ready for the morning meeting. And once again we are all well and in good spirits.

And then for my main task of the day: setting up my new work laptop.

First of all I have to back up my files, both on an external drive and again on onedrive.

That took three hours.

I switch the laptop off for the last time, pack it away in the box the new one came in. And for the first time I have an actual new laptop, straight from the makers.

I switch it on.

It starts up and charges the battery. I try to log on.

It rejected my company initials and password.

I tried again with my company e mail and password.

It rejected that.

There was a piece of paper saying what to do. I read that. Seems I had to be logged onto the company intranet first.

And oddly, I was able to connect to our wifi and as if by magic, on the third attempt I managed to log on and the computer fired up and I had the main desktop.

And then the downloads started.

I followed the instructions, managed to get a new password for Skype, then download my e mail inbox.

And that took 5 hours. Do I really need to save a decade of mails? I don't know. You can be sure as soon as you delete something, you'd want it!

As you can see, most of the day passes with me just getting my computer ready, downloading the saved files as well. And once all the downloads had finished, I could call people, though in Denmark they had finished for the day.

So, I would be ready for work in the morning.

I take off in the car to Folkestone, as I had a feeling that one of the country's rarest orchids would be in flower.

I could get to the site in 15 minutes from home, along the Alkham Valley, and then parking beside the road. There was just one other car and two dumped leather armchairs, so once I got out and walked along the path I met no one.

Just along is the orchid site, not fenced off at all, and looking in good condition.

I just had to look.

Look hard.

I found one rosette, just putting up a spike.

And then just a couple of feet further along I see an orchid.

In flower.

A Late Spider. The very first one of the season, the first of a few spikes, and I had found it. I could say there was no other flowering spike in the country.

Quite remarkable, really.

I snap it from all angles.

I was very happy indeed, that's what we call fieldcraft!

I go home happy, time to do some phys then think about doing dinner.

Although, Jools had a yoga class, so it was all about preparation, so when Jools came back, we have a coffee and she gets ready for her Zoom yoga class.

So, I stay in the kitchen, look out of the window at the birds feeding in the garden and fighting and so on. Then at six start cooking the brown rice, as half six neared, I cooked the frozen peas and corn, then fried, gently, two salmon fillets, and i turned the rice into my own recipe, curried rice. And it all fitted together very well.

And so b y eight we had eaten, cleared up and Jools had made her lunch for Wednesday.

Where did the time go. Time to listen to the radio and then to bed. Another day gone.

Somehow.