Forced change & anxieties

It’s been an odd few days. Our world seems to be changing at the edges.

I suppose it started on Thursday when we went down to our new butcher. After the demise of the farmers’ market we had started to buy most of our meat from this butcher in Morecambe. We were pleased with the general standard of the meat. We seem to be having a fishy week or two so hadn’t been along for a while. Imagine our surprise to find the place well & truly shut up. There was absolutely no sign of life. It looked as though it had been lying derelict for months. Once more we seek that rare breed, a decent butcher with good quality meat at a fair price.

Then on Friday we were told of Fran’s upset. Fran is in her 80s & not in the best of health. She’d received a letter in her previous name. It purported to come from a lawyer in China, concerning some money left by some distant unknown relative. We all assured her it was a scam. Sooner or later a letter will come asking her for some money before the thousands of US dollars could be released to her. She naïvely is upset as there is no address to reply to & she feels she should reply if only to be courteous. She is also anxious about the fortune that she thinks is coming her way. The fact that the letter does not have a Chinese stamp on it, or that she’s been found purely because she has the same surname as the “deceased”( which would not be a legal basis for inheritance, especially as the surname used is that of her first husband, not her own) is passing her by. She’s just getting in a state of over-anxiety & despondency over the whole business – not what she needs when her own health is not at its best.

On the way home on Friday we stopped at a clock shop to find it displaying a contact number. We duly rang it. Now our kitchen clock has gone off to the repairer. The wall looks very bare without it. The silence without its regular tick is deafening.

So yesterday we got down to our village pub. Howie, who I only mentioned in my blog last week, came in. He seemed casually dressed, rather than in his usual work clothes. It seems he’s had a couple of close shaves with death, resulting in ambulances, resuscitation & days in the Intensive Care Unit. He’s now in the process of selling his business & going into forced retirement. It is clearly a shock for him. He is still a relatively young man, just in his early 60s. At present he’s finding the forced idleness very stressful. He’s very much a doer, rather than a man who can relax & enjoy watching life go by. We hope all goes well for him.

As for us, we continue to dream of our future garden. We have some clarification in our ideas but still nothing is fixed. At the rate it’s going we can see it will be next year before anything gets done.

Meanwhile we dream of our next holiday, next month, when we’re off to southern France for a couple of weeks. We’re starting to get quite excited about the prospect. We’ve started getting organised by buying a new suitcase which will be hopefully easier for me to pull along while the Fox pushes me in my wheelchair. Our old one has a tendency to tip over on its wheels, making even a short journey seem very long.