Thursday 1st October 2026

Thursday again.

And October. So Autumn. Again.

And up now well before the larks to sort the cats out and have coffee before going to the gym.

Once again my brain and body had me awake before five, so I get up ten minutes early, so am ahead of the curve so to be out by ten to six.

The rain from Wednesday had cleared, and it looked like it was going to be a fine day, once dawn arrived that is.

We do our fifty minutes, and although there is a temptation for breakfast, we go home to have either fruit of muesli and a fresh brew.

IN order to save more cash over Christmas, I go to Preston to buy one of the currently very cheap turkey crown joints for twenty five quid, thus saving something like seventy five in December.

Our freezer is full, so after driving back on the Sandwich and Eastry bypasses, I turn into Whitfield to drop it off at Jen's, and to see how she is.

I stay half an hour, but pass on a brew, then am back home for half eleven and thoughts turn to lunch, which was a Sussex pasty each liberated from the butcher. And so much better than Ginsters too.

The afternoon was spent sitting in the garden, reading and bird watching, as ell as moving the large storage box thus giving us double the space again on the top patio.

After dinner, and the evening round of sorting the cats out, there was football on the tellybox: Wales v Norway . Wales went on to stage a 2-1 win after falling a goal behind early on.

A very watchable game.

Wednesday 30th September 2026

Ten years ago to the day we received fibre-optic broadband, increasing our download speed from 0.5MB/sec to 38.5, two people came with a cherry picker to install a box on the pole and another on our house ready for the switch to "unlimited" broadband.

As the guy went up in the bucket, Poppy, having been woken by him drilling in the wall of the house, supervised from the middle of the living room.

All went well, other than BT had not connected the box on the pole, so the signal couldn't be tested, though a work order was raised to fix that before 9th October when its all due to go live.

Before then there was, well, not much.

Up at half five, drinking coffee and waiting for dawn to break. It's still dark until just before six, then sunrise at seven, if its not cloudy, so we need to have lights on first thing.

Jools went to her class at half seven, leaving me and the cats to the house.

There are podcasts, stuff on YouTube to entertain me, breakfast to eat, tea to drink. And in that way the morning slips by.

How I ever squeezed work in to my packed days is a mystery.

Jools gets pasties for lunch, bought on her way home from a new knitting group she has joined, also calling in for some sour cream due to the spicy chilli I made the other day, just in case it needed cooling down.

Rain fell for most of the day, on and off, getting more persistent as the day grew old, turning late afternoon into night just after five.

The cats complained, but accepted dinner.

We had the chilli, not as hot as expected, but the new coffee nitro stout I opened to go with it was perfect.

No football for the evening, so we went to bed at eight, and asleep soon after.