Explanatory Note

I am having some website issues and I am not sure if you will get this.

If you expect these pages to be offline for a few weeks you will not be disappointed, I am going to try and change the internet hosting chap. He is called, rather bizarrely and mildly uncomfortably, Go Daddy, and I think I need to sign up with one of his competitors.

It appears that the site is running at 240% of its capacity and I have been told that I can’t put anything else on it, so you might or might not get this. I have tried deleting photographs which has just upset me and probably made the whole site look a bit tragic.

I am not going to be downhearted. It appears that for a mere thousand pounds I can get loads of online storage, and keep it for five years. Mark thought that was unreasonably costly just for five years of wittering, and indeed, it looks as though other website providers might well be considerably cheaper. Mark thinks that the whole thing is a lot of uncomfortable relying on other people who are after all only in business to rake in colossal profits,  and has suggested that we just purchase a server, which will have the added advantage of keeping the office warm as well.

I do not quite understand what a server is, despite having had it explained, but both Oliver and Mark seemed to understand, and so I am going to investigate.

In the meantime I am not going to spend hours and hours writing diary entries that might or might not be accepted by the website, and might not be visible anyway, and so until I have sorted it all out you might be wise to expect some long silences.

Don’t forget about me in the meantime. I am still here.

However, despite this small setback, we have been having a truly brilliant weekend. I have been busily constructing the arches in the garden, which regrettably has left me looking like a teenage self-harmer after an exceptionally rubbish set of GCSE results and her boyfriend announcing that she is too fat.

Of course the moss is held into place with chicken wire, which has dug itself into my arms as I have wrestled it into place, and then the whole scratchy problem was compounded by my being allergic to the nickel which seems to have been an added ingredient in the manufacture of all metallic things. Hence my arms are now looking rather like bright red scabby sausages.

I don’t care. The arches are going to look truly amazing.

We had a madly busy night at work on Saturday, of course, because of the sunshine, and finally crept wearily into bed at half past six in the morning, just before Oliver crawled out of his bed to go and stand guard on one of the car parks. He worked in the nightclub until three, and by the time the weekend was over he was completely exhausted, although considerably wealthier.

We had had enough by Sunday, and decided to celebrate, and this was brilliant.

We went up to High Dam to spend the afternoon swimming with Number One Daughter and her family. Everybody was there, including Ritalin Boy’s Other Grandma and his Identical Twin Cousin, who isn’t very identical any more. Ritalin Boy is beginning to grow a moustache.

I have got a grandchild with a moustache. This is the sort of thing that happens to you when you are sixty.

It was a glorious, wonderful swim. The water was warm, mostly, apart from some terribly chilly patches where it had been churned up, probably by Ritalin Boy and Number One Son-In-Law playing at Jaws. We swam and sunbathed and threw pine cones at Ritalin Boy, and then ambled back down the hill to go out for dinner.

We went to the bistro opposite our house, where we ate so much it was a jolly good job that I was wearing dungarees, because otherwise I would have had to do that surreptitious trouser-unfastening thing under the table. I had a mango flavoured cocktail and fizzy wine and pizza and chicken and followed it all with honeycomb cheesecake.

As if all of that wasn’t enough we staggered back home and drank Bailey’s until I was light-headed and giggly.

There can be few happier ways of spending an evening.

I don’t know if you will be able to see this, but I am going to send it anyway. I couldn’t get anything to upload yesterday, hopefully today I will be a bit more successful, but please do not assume that I have had some kind of misfortune if these pages should be depressingly blank for a while.

I will probably just be saving up