Eat well

 Hi, it is that time of year when it is difficult to know what day of the week it is.  I can confirm that it is Saturday and the date is 27th December.   

I enjoyed yesterday because I had human contact when Sue came round and we enjoyed a glass of sherry and a chat.  Much as I was happy on my own on Christmas Day (I didn't post that day deliberately because I didn't want to fret that I had no mates) I did relish her visit and sitting by the fire with some normality with another human in the room to have conversation with.  Sue used to live in this house but moved to the barn next door some years back.  I didn't buy the house off her because she had sold to an airline pilot who used to commute to Heathrow and did long-haul and worked three days a week which was enough to earn a good living.  He was actually hardly ever here and had a girlfriend who was probably here on her own a lot of the time.  Then he got a new girlfriend and she didn't want to live here because he had lived here with another girl so they moved and sold it and I was the buyer.  In between time the house stood empty.  It stood empty for two years because nobody wanted it until I arrived one Sunday afternoon with Peter who knew it was for sale and we looked at it from the outside (empty) and then arranged a viewing. I fell in love with the peaceful garden.    I  secretly viewed it three times and then made an offer which was accepted.  It will be a hard house to sell and I was mad to buy it however such is life and I am probably stuck with it.  My mother, had she been alive when I bought it, would have told me not to.  It is claylump, a non-standard material although common around here, and as far as mortgage companies go they don't like lending on them.  It is listed and 16th century.  I have spent nothing on it, apart from endless maintenance, and the interior is as it was when I moved in including all the carpets that the airline pilot left, Sue's kitchen that is 40 years old put in by her father, and the curtains the airline pilot brought back from India.   The only thing I changed in the house was the stairs by getting my builder to replace the uneven steps,  which incidentally revealed themselves to be made from a mixture of orange boxes and wood offcuts when we removed the carpet covering them, with an even set of steps in a kind of pine which I painted in bright colours.  Sue admired them yesterday because she hadn't noticed the paint before although I am sure she has seen them.  She and her husband brought up their family here and they did the restoration and then restored the barn that they moved into.  I like Sue, she is independent and doesn't care that I am the only person in the road who still speaks to her.  This is due to her trying for planning permission to build a house in her yard last year.  The people all got very stroppy about this and now she and her husband are excluded from everything in the village with a great deal of hostility.  Odd how people can be especially when hunting in packs.  I have managed to  remain friends with all of them and Sue and people accept it but their minds are not for turning and they continue to ignore her.  Sue is not bothered by any of this.  Her husband continues in his garden and doing his own thing.  She had left him yesterday watching Norwich City on the tv when she came to see me.  Norwich have now managed to string together three home wins under the new manager so there is some hope that they may escape the drop.  It is a strange world how humans are with each other I find.  I have no difficulty in remaining friends with everyone here and Sue and I think it rather funny and the people she has known for years and years suddenly not talking to her because she wanted to build a house.  She knows that I also objected to her house building plan but even there we are able to remain friends about it.  I did not send in any objection to the Planning Authority however and those that did find their letters, of course, all published on the local authority website.   The cake is very nice and moist as usual and as good as my mother used to make.  She is off to Tenerife in a couple of weeks time to get some sun.   She was in a bad road accident near here a couple of years ago when a local woman went straight over a crossroad and knocked Sue into a ditch. She was airlifted to hospital.   She lived but the result is she now has a bad back.  I suggested massage and exercise.  We went through what I am doing and I directed her to You Tube.  The doctor has put her on a physio waiting list but they take months before you see anyone.  I am surprised at the attitude of some to massage, Sue didn't seem keen,  and I suppose I am just the freaky one who swears by it for health.  Not that it has done a great deal for me in that I still need to exercise to get up off the ground and I still find illness can creep in like in October but taking care not to drink alcohol (I don't count a glass of sherry - a drink to be sociable I will still do) and not to miss out on greens must help.  The state of the nation's health has deteriorated so much and the consumption of vegetables is about a third of what it was when we were growing up in the '50s.  I mean you never see a Master Chef cutting into a cabbage do you?  Eat your greens.