First stroll

I have been on my own for much of today, my wife and daughter having gone some miles for my wife to buy a second-hand bike she had seen advertised in the local paper. It is now sitting in our kitchen, there being no room in the garage until our son takes his own bike to his new home. It is a bargain, having belonged to a teenage girl whose interests had moved on from cycling (after not very long, it would seem). My wife lost her last bike to a nasty opportunist in the time it took her to walk through the house to unlock the garage doors. The thing that still grates is that I saw the weasel wobbling his way up our road as I walked home. Perhaps this new addition to our inventory, in its pleasant shades of grey and lilac blue, will exorcise the sense of violation. Melodramatic? No: theft is vile.

I have mostly let the world go sunnily by today, our shaded front room coming into its own as a cool haven on warm days like this. I did stretch myself a bit by learning some more about the software application, Scrivener, which I intend to use for larger writing projects (you read that here first).

The other task of today was to stroll (struggle, more like, so depleted is my energy) into Twickenham to take my computer for repair. There have been some changes at the repairers: not a baggy beanie in sight and the helpful young man I spoke to did not come across like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

After a brief sojourn in Waitrose to buy bread flour and fume inwardly at a young woman who blithely joined the "six items or less" (shouldn't that be "fewer"?) queue with a basket overflowing with at least a dozen articles, we made slow progress back home. I have to remind myself that this is only my second full day out of hospital.

Supper of jacket potato with various fillings proved restorative, as did the hot garlic pickle dolloped on the side of my plate. This was from a jar given to me by my mother-in-law, who knows my weakness for such piquant treats.