23 September 2011
The great excitement today was lunch with the Curtis’s, in their new home opposite the village green. The other’ old faithfuls’ -the William – Powllett’s and the Simpsons s were also invited. The four families which comprise’the old faithfuls’ all arrived in the village around the same time, the best part of half-century ago. The Curtis’s were the first to break ranks and downsize . They have in fact only moved a few hundred yards but the new house has worked perfectly for them, particularly having converted one of the outbuildings into splendid office for David and an adjacent artist’s studio for Jane.
I drove down the road in my electric wheelchair with Jill (Simpson) driving behind with her emergency lights flashing with good old Alan (Simpson) riding shotgun (walking alongside) whilst I negotiated the 300 yards or so to the Curtis’house. We were blessed with a lovely day, warm sunshine and only a slight breeze. We had lunch outside on the terrace which was one of those rare occasions this year when we were able to eat outside and I was able to smoke to my hearts content. David (Curtis) produced some nice champagne to start with and then some splendid claret and Cotes du Rhône, not to mention a delicious pudding wine with the raspberry tart. Jane had excelled herself with a smoked salmon starter and a delicious main course. A spledid lunch.
Barton (W-P) saw me using my smoking stick, which he had made for me following my basic design (See illustration attached to 13 August entry) and realising that it needed modifying, unbeknownst to me, went into town after lunch, bought a couple of rubber feet and then called in and fitted them, there and then. What a great friend.
Whilst I was absent from the house Paul kindly copied and pasted the 21 pages of my blog diary which I had lost a couple of days ago. I couldn’t believe it at the time and went into every possible way of recovering these lost pages myself. Unlike previous programme XP professional, automatically saved up to 5 copies every 5 min or so, so it was not possible to lose more than a few lines or so. This does not seem to be the case with Windows 7 so I shall have to set up some external backup file on one of my stand-alone hard disks to avoid such a nightmare happening again. I know exactly what happened somehow these 21 pages had become highlighted and as one of them was not visible on the screen the next key I pressed deleted the highlighted pages, unbeknownst to me. Once I had then saved the document, without realising the loss, it was too late to recover them.