27 April 2012

My dear boy, Smiler’s birthday. We spoke on the phone and I shall see him at the weekend. I forget what he and Kimberly were going to do to celebrate but when he told me that all sounded very interesting.

As result of the uncomfortable night that I had spent with my painful heels,’ my lovely’ used her usual ingenuity and made some heel protectors from some material she used to use on the donkey’s fetlocks!. These were pretty good as only one heel started to be painful an hour or so before I got up. Amazingly, the sheepskin heel protectors that I ordered yesterday afternoon, on eBay, arrived first post this morning. So I shall give them a run and hope they are as good as they claim

Yesterday afternoon a huge bouquet of flowers arrived . We had no inkling of what celebration or anniversary it was, or why they had been sent to us, and then read the card, which was from a university friend of Chloe’s who she had just been to stay with, who sent be flowers out of the kindness of her heart. What lovely girl and how very generous of her. I suppose dear Chloe had mentioned we were having a reasonably rough time and that dear girl, Rhian had decided that a bunch of flowers would cheer us up. Truly, an act of human kindness.

On the economic front, the news is not good it was announced a couple of days ago that UK Ltd is now officially in recession. It had a negative growth of 0.2% of GDP for this last quarter, compared with a positive 0.1% in the previous quarter. This, then according to the pundits, is known as a double dip recession. To me it means we’re bumbling along the bottom and hopefully will bounce back in this current quarter. We have to face it, most of Europe, with the exception of Germany, and the USA are having a real struggle to grow their way out of threatening recession. We have all had too good for too long and now the chips are down and we have to pay the cost. For how long is anybody’s guess, but I would say that we are certainly in for a rough ride for at least two or three years, if not longer.

‘ Paul the computer’ came for three hours as afternoon and we continue to work on the camera eye project, basically testing and adjusting the settings. We are nearly there and when we believe we have got it right. I shall try to spend a whole day, dealing with my blog , e-mails etc, trying not touching the computer and will report back as I am sure that such a facility would be very useful for other patients.

For another piece of ingenuity I thought you might be interested in these European shopping bags. Click here to see them.