Walking, walking

We went for a walk along to the gallery the other day and treated ourselves to coffee in the cafe, where I was slightly pained by the nicely written, but not so nicely spelt, notice. Ah well. 

Then we walked home along the river. It's been very mild this winter, but recently rather dull. 

Choir is once again on Zoom. I'm in the top row, second from the left. 

Today we went to the Oxfam bookshop to take in some books that we won’t read again. The trouble of course is that we also bought books, so our cunning plan of making some space on the bookshelves didn’t work terribly well – as it never does. One of the books I bought is the first unexpurgated volume of the diaries of Chips Channon, which is over 1000 pages long.  This takes the diaries from 1918 up to 1938 so there’s a lot more to come - he lived till 1958. I hope the editor is making good progress with 1938-58 or I may not live to find out what happened next. It won’t be very good for reading in the bath (which I normally do) because it’s very heavy. Or even in bed, really for the same reason. So it’ll take me a while, I think.

Then we went for a bit of a walk. It occurred to me only on the way back that I should have bought the heavy books after the walk rather than carrying them around on the walk. However, they were in my rucksack, which made it easier, and Mr L kindly carried it on the way back.

We walked up a different part of the river this time, to Stockbridge, 

past this yellow house, which (as I've posted before) always intrigues me, because you can see that the original door is now blocked up, presumably because the road resurfacing eventually became higher than the bottom of the door. It has an inscription over the door, which seems to read, “God bless ?? of Edinbrugh hu built this house 16?5”.

On the way back we looked at one of the Anthony Gormley statues in the river. It was also being looked at by a heron – on the left. Not a very brilliant photo… .

Excitingly (for us), Littlest Granddaughter's nursery in London had a routine inspection by Environmental Health (or someone) on Wednesday, late afternoon. They found evidence of mice, so the nursery was immediately closed down - on Wednesday evening.

 This must have been a terrible pain for the staff, who had to arrange for alternative accommodation for the nursery children by the following day! Fortunately the nursery is part of a chain so there was some flexibility. Littlest’s class all had to go to Chingford, which is some distance from home, so this was slightly difficult – Daughter 2 cycled, with Littlest on the back of the bike. However, next week the nursery can find accommodation only for the children of key workers, so they're coming up here so that I can look after Littlest while Daughter 2 works at home. Good news for us, if not for the nursery! They arrive on Sunday, for a week, so I’m really looking forward to seeing them.

Thank you so much for the nice comments from people I don't know. So interesting. I wish you all had blogs! My lovely friend isn't doing terribly well, I don't think - she's been moved to the stroke ward and has started physiotherapy, but says that her left arm and leg are "useless", which must be so horrible and frightening. I feel so lucky in comparison. Hopefully she'll make progress, though.