It is Half Term week and my usual activities are all on hold. No music group today, no Nibbles and Scribbles at Hove museum, no lovely choir,  so I am sitting making a list of Useful Things to Do, like  cleaning the oven, getting the car tyres checked before my outing to Rye with daughter J on Wednesday (a late birthday treat) and I am also making chutney.   I bought a huge pumpkin and scraped it out to make a lantern.    I am using the innards for chutney, so it smells vinegary and spicy indoors, but it looks a bit fibrous and stringy so perhaps those Halloween pumpkins are not meant to be eaten?    I was feeling so pleased with my resourcefulness too, but anyway, grand daughter T will like having a lantern outside next Saturday.

I am very anxious today about the refugees in Calais. I hope it all goes peacefully. It must be the end of their hopes when they get carted off to holding centres in other parts of France. My memories of those places in Hampshire when I was involved with asylum seekers some years ago was of prison-like institutions.    I just hope that the ones that do achieve their dream of coming to the UK will find places to live and work or get an education for a better life.

I went to the  Annual Village Quiz on Friday night and our team came last but we had such a good time: lovely food and wine and nibbles, its the sort of thing that is so splendid in this village.  Since so sadly losing Bradley Wiggins, I don`t get out and about so much in Ditchling.  I miss the dog walking. I wish I could find someone to do a dog share with me,  as it is a problem when you live alone and there are so many places where dogs are not allowed.   I am still trying to make up my mind about a cat, I keep being offered them, mostly feral cats who may not be home loving and cuddly enough for me.

I seem to spend a lot of time at the Brighton Eye Hospital these days.  I am getting wonderful treatment both for the cataracts and wet n dry macular whatsit, but it is a depressing place. There are rows and rows of dejected looking patients and I long to get them all to play a game or sing a song or do a bit of improv.but they are all completely silent and gloomy.   As we all have drops put in our eyes, our vision is blurry and when our names are called we shuffle along, dropping our sticks with a clatter. There are long corridors with nameless doors, I keep thinking of Room 101 in 1984. Until my second cataract is done, I can`t get any new specs, so small print is difficult and my cello playing is very hit and miss.    In the meantime, I go for monthly injections in my eyeball (totally painless)  

I am enjoying Alan Bennett`s diaries being read every morning on Radio 4 . the title too, Keeping On, Keeping On.    A good title for this blog, I wish I had thought of it..  

Older but no wiser...

Yesterday was my birthday. Eighty six years is a long time to have been on this earth. A ninety five year old friend who phoned me yesterday said `every day is a gift` and I wholeheartedly agree.  I tend to live vicariously through the lives of my children and grandchildren who do interesting and challenging things, like running marathons, and going off to far flung spots: Grandson R has just gone to Indonesia to work for a charity called Smile which helps babies born with cleft palates and harelips (he says it is lovely there but there is a bit of a worry about dog stew) and another granddaughter is spending a year working in France as part of her degree, others have worked in China, Uganda and Ghana.  I never did anything like that.    So I enjoy hearing of their adventures.
Anyway I had a lovely birthday with grandson M and partner L coming for the night and cooking a slap up breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on toast. What a treat. And there were other splendid family get togethers in Mdhurst and Brighton.

I tried to pay my car tax on the phone and inadvertently pressed the wrong button, and what a palaver!   I signed the car off the road and as I was only dealing with robot voices I couldn`t undo it. So I was terrified I would be arrested for not paying the tax over the weekend.   Eventually the human being in the Post Office managed to sort it out. She said it was always happening, and not just to daft old women like me.

I am trying to organise an Open Day at  Ditchling Meeting House for Quaker Week next Saturday which is also hoping to raise money for unaccompanied  refugee children in Calais  but I am full of gloom as I fear that no one will turn up. I wish now I had advertised it as an Indulgent Breakfast or a Cream Tea like the ones we used to have in Winchester at the Meeting House as that would have lured them in.   I have visions of sitting there with a pile of cakes and scones and no villagers to eat them.