Hello Everyone
I have just spoken to
Margaret and she has some positive news which she would like to let you know
herself. As her phone has been a bit problematic, she doesn't have an email
with all our addresses, so I think by sending this one, she should be able to
'Reply All'. I have also added Pat and Janet. There may be a much
easier way to do this, but it is all my brain can come up with in the heat!!
Hope everyone is keeping
well and as cheerful as possible. Love, Angela
Margaret 20 May 2020
After nearly 4 months in
St Luke's I am preparing to go home on Monday 1st June. It will need a bit of
an adjustment but I am to have a live- in carer for the first few weeks.
The Occupational therapist is doing a wonderful job preparing the house and my aching limbs for the new life. So here,s hoping!
The Occupational therapist is doing a wonderful job preparing the house and my aching limbs for the new life. So here,s hoping!
Cheers! Margaret
Angela 20 May 2020
Hello Margaret and
Everyone
I am so pleased to hear
that you are finally on your way home, even if it is for quite worrying
reasons. I did wonder about the possibility of adapting your ground floor
until you are ready to move ' upwards and onwards'.! I am sure it will
involve a lot of very hard work on your part , both physically and mentally but
as a number of us have already said you are a great fighter and are made
if stern stuff so I am sure you will get through brilliantly.
Love to you and
everyone. Angela
Sylvia 20 May 2020
That’s the news I’ve
been hoping for! I’m sure your recovery will progress by leaps and bounds once
you’re back on home turf, even if it will seem strange being confined to the
ground floor. I trust you’ll be able to use your computer there and will feel
much happier with communicating through that. I’ve marked June 1st in
my diary and will look forward to speaking to you once you’re home. As you say “Cheers!”
Hope everyone else is
well, Sylvia
Jane 20 May 2020
Dear Margaret,
It must be wonderful to
have something to look forward to! Do hope all goes well.
I had a non-grumpy day
when I turned 75 ten days ago! It was annoying not to be able to celebrate with
the family as originally intended. But elder son and his wife organised a
hamper from the local posh farm shop, and a chocolate birthday cake from the
posh baker in town, and there was a case of red wine from younger son - so we
are well set up for a week or so.
Grumpiness returned when
we discovered a week ago that students returned to the cottage nextdoor which
had been empty since the end of last semester just before lockdown. I have
every sympathy with the 1000+ students who could not get home then. But these
two came from the south, London and Yorkshire , to be specific, and have been having friends
round for barbecues in the garden. They apparently plan to stay until the end
of the month -'to clear the cottage'. Perhaps Our Nicola will give us
permission tomorrow to meet friends, but until then David and I will sit
in our garden and give the students Hard Paddington Stares.
Otherwise we potter on,
David with his research on Ancestry and mine on the British Newspaper Archive
for rum-running, with a daily walk round town avoiding joggers and cyclists.
There is more traffic in town but still the roads are empty so the two chaps
who rode past us on the pavement this morning got a polite earful from me.
David pretended he was not with me and I got a volley from the cyclists!
Love to all, Jane
Janet 20 May 2020
Dear Margaret
That is wonderful news.
You have probably been a lot better off cocooned at St Luke's whilst all the
shut-downs have made being cared for at home more problematic than normal but
no doubt you have wished more than once you could be back in your own home and
once more mistress of all you survey. You will be glad of your live-in
carer though - it's bound to take time for you to make the transition back to
independence. Could be months before you are fully back to strength. But you
will find it wonderful just to be able to set your own agenda - from when to
get up to when and what to eat or to have on TV.
Jane, many congratulations on
your 75th birthday. It sounds like you were able to celebrate in some style.
Lovely to hear everyone's
news. Mine is that i have so far managed to make 3 washable face masks - 2 for
John and 1 for me - and they have taken me several hours each, not the 5 to 15
minutes suggested by the on-line video instructions! I plan to make us a dozen
each but that is clearly going to take some time - especially as the current
good weather means indoor tasks have to be put on hold whilst gardening
continues. We had our first home-grown lettuce with our lunch today - we had
decided a while back that we had better sow some seeds as we like to have a
salad at lunch-time and there was a risk there might be a shortage later this
year.
News from Switzerland
Meanwhile, John and I are
quite happy pottering, doing on-line quizzes with U3A, emailing, Skyping and
generally spending more time keeping in touch with people than we would
normally do. Sadly, two of our (somewhat distant) neighbours contracted Covid
19. The husband recovered but the wife died, so that was quite sobering. Just
hope they find a way of re-starting the economy without many more people going
under.
Best wishes to all, Janet.
Ian 22 May
2020
I make it ten weeks since Sue sent the message from NZ which started our exchange of
emails. And I note that it is almost a month since I prepared my last round-up
of the messages for Peter Miles and to put on the Supsliska blog. Peter will
have quite a sheaf of letters. Here are the weekly pages I have posted today. I
hope I haven't missed anything significant:
So, you can safely clear
your email box, Anne. [Hotmail has annoyingly just started to prompt me by
underlining phrases with comments such as "a comma between clauses is
better here" or "words expressing uncertainty lessen your
impact" - grumpiness is setting in south of the border]. Compiling the
pages, I set out to discover the origin of the brilliant shelves of books. Who
had been able to assemble a library with such a meta-story? It was not a
librarian but an artist and printmaker Phil Shaw. There are various other links about him. I forwarded the image to
non-Supsliskan library friends across the UK and Europe who greatly appreciated
it.
I have been following
everyone's lives with great interest and was especially pleased that Margaret
will soon be home after almost four months of lock-down with a very positive
attitude towards re-joining our arms-length world. Welcome back, Margaret.
My silence stems from two
causes: firstly that not much has changed in our daily routine and secondly
that I have been much pre-occupied with matters bibliographical. The Devon
History Society is launching a ten-year long project "Devon in the 1920s"
and I have been extracting 1920s publications for them from the Devon bibliography. That has unearthed a local IT guru
who is enthusiastically employing his time in lock-down searching for a way of
getting the data onto an on-line searchable database rather than the simple
listings that I employ at the moment. Already he has contacted JISC and
BNB negotiating downloads of data and taxing my very rusty knowledge of record
structures and data exchange protocols. So, the Devon
bibliography project that I was hoping to get shot of will be haunting me for a
while yet, much to Jill's chagrin, who finds that I spend far too much time in
front of the computer screen and not enough in the garden, or keeping the house
clean and sanitised. I have also become involved with a cousin who is tracing
my mother's side of the family. Despite my strewing red herrings across his
path, he seems to have got back to the 16th century. No rum-running though, so
it's rather boring.
Still, we do spend a great
deal of time in the garden which looks very tidy, but too dry. We cannot
emulate the lettuces and potatoes that are being harvested by others. So far,
our only horticultural output is a few minuscule radishes and some onion tops
left over from last year. Our bike rides to Topsham continue, this past week
with a sticky chocolate cake in our rucksack, supplemented en route by
sandwiches from Aldi, just beneath the motorway bridge, with which we
celebrated Julie's birthday (73rd, not 75th - congratulations,
Jane, I'll soon be catching up with you) at a suitably distanced lunch in her
back garden. We do not wear masks when out and about [an overused expression
which lessens the impact of my writing, I'm afraid], but put them on once
inside shops. Jill has made a very stylish matching pair of masks from some old
socks.
Also during the week Kate
came round with the grandchildren (6 and 4) for a physically distanced picnic
on the bottom lawn, which is probably not strictly allowed, but we did stay
alert, despite the fact that the grandchildren were anxious to show us up close
and personal the worms, slugs and creepy-crawlies they had unearthed beneath
flagstones. Kate is very torn about their returning to school, but her life is
very fraught at present, juggling home schooling with housework and telephone
counselling work involving domestic abuse.
Things do seem to be
further ahead in Switzerland ,
Germany , New Zealand Sark you seem to be following guidelines on general
alertness, Howard. We are following with interest the developments with the
Barclay twins and their children - it all sounds more like Ghormenghast than Mr
Pye.
Otherwise we do little of
any cultural merit - no virtual art groups or opera streaming for us - but life
passes agreeably enough. An Exeter Devon .
As for resuming our trips to France
Stay safe everyone, Ian
Sylvia 23
May 2020
Thank you, Ian, for keeping the record of our
communications. As ever, you are the one who licks us into shape!
A propos of part of your narrative, I thought, if you
haven't already seen this video, it might produce a giggle.
How I envy you, Sue. You have a sane, down to
earth PM who must have given everyone so much confidence , even during the
worst time. No further comment!
Stay well, everyone. With love and best wishes, Sylvia
Anne
23 May 2020
What has also cheered me the last couple of days have
been 2 local online concerts. Friday evening for 3 and a half hours there was a
non-stop,perfectly organised concert from Ingolstadt by all kinds of local
groups, soloists, orchestras, music ranging from pop, jazz, folk to classical,
one after the other performing from 3 separate locations for no other reason
than that they were so happy to be able to use their talents to cheer others
up. Of course it was possible to make a donation as most of them haven't been
earning anything for 3 months Then this evening something similar. One of the
actresses from the Ingolstadt
What has definitely not cheered me up have been
reports of covid-19 breaking out among workers in several slaughter houses in
different locations in Germany
Am I also getting grumpy? I guess it does no harm to
let off steam occasionally.
Take care everyone, Anne
Jane 24 May 2020
So, Val, did you see DC in
Barnard Castle Durham School Durham
Our ice cream shop
re-opened yesterday so there is now a big tub of vanilla in the freezer.
Otherwise little changed as Our Nicola keeps us firmly at home. A friend who
had fallen off a borrowed bicycle (but was uninjured fortunately - just his
pride and a torn shirt) came in for a cup of tea on Thursday and we sat in
different corners of the drying green (daisies and buttercups, but none of last
year's clover, so not a lawn) and it was good to catch up with his news.
David continues to try and
connect all St Andrews families, past and present, and even some to my family,
while I am steeped in whisky-running, with occasional forays into our
garden and the one nextdoor now connected to the Preservation Trust
Museum
Our cruise down the Rhone at the end of August has obviously been cancelled,
and we are offered 110% credit valid until 2023. I shall fight for a refund -
we have already booked a cruise to Canada
Hope everyone continues
well and cheerful.. Love, Jane
Val
24 May 2020
Ha, Ha, no I didn’t! But then I
haven’t left the house or garden for 9 weeks! Interesting that he was at
Durham School
Another personal note is that
this retired Chemistry teacher, Mr Lees, who allegedly saw DC in Barney taught
Roger & Charlotte Chemistry at school, Victoria escaped him! He was always odd actually & apparently
photographed DC’s number plate. Why on earth would DC be coming here anyway.
We are fine & enjoying lots of video
calls. We have done two one day stints of virtual babysitting too which
has gone well. Victoria
Amelie & Harriet did Joe Wicks & then
Facetimed us & then did all their work on the laptop & on the Chrome
Book supplied by school to all the pupils. Whilst we watch & help from the
propped up iPad!! It’s great as we help them & lots of
chat. My goodness, the maths is done in all sorts of weird &
wonderful ways differently from how we did it! They are 9 & 7 by the way & Daddy is
in the study but on the phone from 7am till late all week & weekend.
Handset on his desk which we ring if there’s an emergency.
They have work set every day in all subjects
& feedback on it, this in an ordinary City of York primary school &
runs contrary to what you may read in the papers about the great divide between
state & independent They are doing their best & the girls
actually enjoy getting on without any disruption. It is beginning to pall a bit though &
despite zoom with friends, they will be pleased to go back……hopefully! Unfortunately, the school hear nothing from
many of the pupils despite phone calls. The school can only facilitate so much. Now the headmistress is having to second guess
what is going to happen & to write & re write risk assessments every
day as well as get the school ready for action, hopefully next Monday.
Roger says there has actually been not a huge
amount of social distancing obvious in London
Kieron continues to work from home although he
is going to Bristol to the MOD tomorrow for a few days (He is in the Royal
Navy) The MOD introduced hot desking last year so most of them now have to work
from home because of it! He’s got to spend lots of time with Charlotte &
Hermione though who is now nearly walking. Just hope we can get there to
see them soon.
Chris is working with clients remotely & I
heard spoken Georgian for the first time last Friday on a conference call he
had to Tbilisi
I, like most of you have been
gardening….lots!! Gale force winds & rain the last couple of
days have intervened.
It’s very interesting to hear from you all
& we all seem to be behaving in a similar way! And being very good &
law abiding! So pleased to hear you’re on your way home,
Margaret, & hope it all goes well tomorrow. It’ll be lovely to be
home.
Sorry to have bored you all with family stuff! Keep well all of you & now Barney has had
its 15 minutes of fame!
Love to all, Val
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