Floods

 I had a gentle start to the day, wandering downstairs for a coffee at 7:30 and settling down with the overnight news. Outside, the weather was dry but very grey and dull. I thought about ordering some tickets to go and watch Bognor Regis FC play during the afternoon but found that they were away from home this weekend.

I had my usual call with the Empson cousins. This was dominated by Simon turning up with an eye patch. It turned out that he was suffering from blurred vision and floaters, so went to the optician. The optician diagnosed a partially detached retina and sent him to the hospital. It was treated as an emergency, and that same afternoon he was operated on. The following morning he was back home.

I spent part of the morning back at the computer editing some more of last year's blog. I am now well into December and will probably finish the first pass in the next few days.

I have mentioned before that our car has a SIM which allows it to communicate directly with Skoda and also provide internet (and calls) to the car. I had noticed that the connection to Skoda didn't seem to be working, so spent some time removing and reseating the SIM. I am pretty sure the problem lies elsewhere, as the SIM is providing internet connectivity - so it is clearly working. I will have to investigate further.

After a bite of lunch, I headed out for a walk. I said earlier that it was very grey - it was also quite cold and it took a few minutes for me to start to warm up. I stuck to one of my usual routes, adding a little diversion to the start and end. I was out for about 75 minutes, but thoroughly enjoyed it.

Back home, we settled in the lounge with our Kindles. from there, we could see that our next-door neighbours, who were trying to sell their house, had a viewing. This seemed to last quite a while, so I hope, for their sake, that it was successful.

After dinner, I noticed an early evening documentary about the floods in 1968. Diane and I looked at each other and said "What floods?". We settled down to watch the programme which recounted the story of a summer deluge across the south-west which devasted villages in Somerset. Neither of us had any recollection of this. My excuse is that I was in Rhode Island by then, but I had never heard about it in the years since. It was a very interesting programme and I'm glad we watched it.

Saturday night is "catch-up" night on the TV. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, worth watching on TV on Saturday evenings, so we use it to catch up on programmes we have recorded.