Following on from Blog 32, here are some quotations from my diary for the first quarter of 2022.
Saturday, 1st January – Between 1970 and 2018 my weight varied from 10 stone 6 pounds to 13 stone 9 pounds. Since 2018 it has remained between 9 stone 13 pounds and 10 stone 4 pounds because I have stopped eating biscuits and restricted the amount of sugar I have eaten.
Tuesday, 4th January – Transfered all my savings to my current account because the interest rate of my deposit account has gone down from 2.8% to 0.01% in the past twenty years.
Friday, 7th January – Listened to a radio programme about an experiment that showed that trees can communicate with each other using fungal hyphae in the soil.
Friday, 14th January – Went for a walk in Maude’s Meadow, where a lot of trees had been blown down, although I didn’t see any on Castle Howe, which I would have thought was just as exposed. Chris called with a chapter of his book for me to check and a photograph of myself on the disused road that was so big it filled a page of my scrap book
Saturday, 15th January – Sent an email to Chris suggesting various changes to his book.
Wednesday, 19th January – Watched the film The Chiltern Hundreds. There was an old man played by A.E. Mathews with whom I could identify, just as I identified with Tom Good in The Good Life when I was younger. There was one scene that was different from how I remember it, which suggests that I may have got it wrong when I remember incidents from real life.
Tuesday, 1st February – Received the copy of In Search of the Perfect House that I had ordered. It seems to me that I can get more pleasure from owning photographs of five hundred country houses than I could by living in one of them.
Sunday, 6th February – Looked for the sheadings of the Isle of Man in the maps that I recently uploaded and couldn’t find them, but I found them on a map in the internet that showed that South Barrule is in Rushen, Slieau Ruy is in Glenfaba, Garraghan is in Middle, Snaefell is in Ayre and North Barrule is in Garff. This means that if sheadings are treated as counties the number of old counties visible from Snowdon is 33, and that the number I have seen is 32.
Tuesday, 15th February – Looked up ‘anchorite’ in the dictionary and found that one of the words used in the definition was ‘recluse’. This makes it appropriate that I should live in Anchorite Place, as I rarely go out except to the shops
Thursday, 17th February – Watched an atmospheric film called ‘The Lost Moment’ that reminded me of my time in the Grange.
Friday, 25th February – Received an email to say that the two pairs of headphones that I had ordered would be delivered between 12.18 and 1.18 pm. Within that hour I received not only the headphones, but also a phone call from the Domestic Appliance Centre to say that my bathroom heater will be delivered on Monday, a letter to say that my pension credit is going up from £35 a week to £114 a week and the twenty copies of Happy Memories that I had ordered. That these things should all happen on the same day is unlikely enough, but that they should all happen within an hour is a thousand times as unlikely as that. It is also remarkable that I should know the timing because of the email.
Sunday, 27th February – Read that the French names for the days of the week are derived from the names of the planets: Mardi from Mars, Mercredi from Mercury, Jeudi from Jupiter and Vendredi from Venus, just as Saturday, Sunday and Monday are named after heavenly bodies in English.
Saturday, 5th March – I am still noticing things for the first time on my way to and from the shops. Today I noticed the words ‘formerly Poorhouse Lane’ below the nameplate for Anchorite Place.
Wednesday, 9th March – Read in the Wainwright Society magazine of a walk in the Arnside area that I can reach by bus and train. Received a copy of the magazine Great Hallingbury Highlights, including my article. The additions that I sent later were missing, although there was plenty of room for them, and one of the sentences has become misleading because of the removal of a comma. [Great Hallingbury is the village where I lived for the first eight years of my life.]
Thursday, 10th March – Saw a volume consisting of the four Winnie-the-Pooh books in a shop window and bought it. Many of the poems in it are unfamiliar. Went to Edmondson’s to buy a bookcase, but I couldn’t find one, and I ended up buying two fairly small chests of drawers.
Sunday, 13th March – Read in the internet that the highest tide of the month is expected at Arnside an hour and three quarters after our walk starts on Saturday.
Monday, 14th March – Ordered a bookcase from Amazon.
Tuesday, 15th March – Looked up the Merrick in the internet and found that it mentioned that the line of sight from there to Snowdon was the longest in the British Isles. Bought a digital camera wth a powerful zoom lens at Wilkinson’s.
Wednesday, 16th March – My new camera is much easier to use than the one in my iPhone. Using the book of instructions I was able to take a photograph of a small round window on the other side of the river that almost filled the picture, and I had no difficulty in finding it again after I had taken it.
Thursday, 17th March – The two chests of drawers arrived.
Saturday, 19th March – Caught a bus from Kendal to Carnforth for the train to Arnside, which, according to the internet, left at 9.27, but it didn’t come. Somebody got out a timetable and said that there was one at 10.23, but that didn’t come either. By the time I reached Arnside I was over an hour late for meeting members of the Wainwright Society at 10.0. I thought that I might find them on the top of Arnside Knott, and I was there from 12.20 until 1.0, but there was no sign of them. All the same, I had a lovely walk in perfect weather. It’s a pity I didn’t have a mobile phone. I found the Camel Tree on Arnside Knott, and from the train I saw egrets for the first time in Britain. Somebody recognised me in Arnside. As well as being wrong about the train the internet was wrong about the tide, which was not unusually high.
Tuesday, 22nd March – Finished searching my diary for books to look for in the internet. Asked Chris to reduce the price of my book to £5.
Wednesday, 23rd March – Bought a large painting of Swaledale from a shop in Kendal.
Thursday, 24th March – Received a complimentary copy of the latest re-print of Walks on the Howgill Fells from the Wainwright Society. I am pleased that they remembered to remove the paragraph asking people to tell me about any errors they find.
Friday, 25th March – Ordered seven of my favourite books from the internet at a cost of £38. It was all quite straightforward.
Saturday, 26th March – Went for a walk round the back of Castle Hill and photographed somebody on the top of the castle ruins.
Monday 28th March – Received copies of The Architecture of Britain by Doreen Yarwood and A Zoo in my Luggage by Gerald Durrell, which I had ordered through the internet. Chris called and I lent him my book about Westmorland farmhouses. He got my emails working and showed me things that I could do with my camera that I didn’t know about.
Wednesday, 30th March – Received the Collins Complete Guide to British Wildlife and The Yards of Kendal, which I had ordered through the internet. Later I received a very heavy parcel that seems to be the wrong shape for a bookcase.
Identified the house in the film There was a Young Lady as Ockwells Manor in Berkshire.
Thursday, 31st March – Opened the parcel and found that was a bookcase, but it came in the form of a large number of parts that I was unable to join together.