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..