Here's hoping for a restful few days!

The last four days have been a bit busy with lots of non-wargaming activity, but with a bit of luck I hope that the next few days will be a little less hectic.

On Sunday Sue and I spent the morning at the Bluewater Shopping Centre, where I had an eye test. The results were encouraging (my eyesight has not degenerated very much over the past ten years) but I did end up buying two new pairs of glasses; one for normal every-day wear and one for close work such as reading and painting toy soldiers.

On Monday morning we went looking new sofa for our conservatory. Our search involved a visit to Orpinton in Kent which proved to be fruitless. After lunch I then went up to Freemasons Hall in Central London to attend a meeting of the London Lodge of which I am a member. This started at 4.00pm and ended at just after 6.00pm, which gave us plenty of time to get to the Kingsway Hall Hotel for a pre-dinner drink. The after meeting dinner ended by 9.00pm, and after an uneventful journey I was home at 10.00pm.

The hunt for a new sofa continued on Tuesday morning. We began by visiting a couple of furniture stores in Chatham, Kent, but yet again our efforts went unrewarded. After lunch we concentrated our search in Charlton in South East London where we finally found what we were looking for. I just about managed to load the new sofa into the back of my car to get it home, and had managed to unload it by the time I had to leave to go to Cheshunt for a Lodge Committee Meeting followed by a Lodge of Instruction meeting.

By early on Wednesday morning the new sofa was in its place in our conservatory, and well before midday Sue and I were in a supermarket in Welling, Kent, buying some much-needed food supplies. We had eaten lunch at home by 1.30pm, and an hour or so later I was on my way to North Greenwich underground station to pick up an old friend and fellow Freemason prior to us going to a Lodge Meeting in Cheshunt. We were held up by a combination of bad weather, heavy traffic and vehicle breakdowns, and we did not arrive at the Halsey Masonic Centre until 4.35pm ... only to find that quite a few other attendees had also been delayed.

The meeting was an Installation, and I did my small part in helping to place another old friend into the Chair of my Mother Lodge. There was a special surprise for me towards the end of the meeting when the current Provincial Grand Orator presented me with the dress and undress aprons he has worn for the past eight years. I will therefore be able to wear them with pride when I am formally invested as his replacement in September.

The journey home from Cheshunt was somewhat less fraught than the journey there, and my guest and I reached home not long after 10.30pm. We then spent the next hour having a relaxing chat and a drink, but by midnight we were all feeling very tired, and not long afterwards everyone was in bed and asleep. We were all awake by 8.00am, and by 9.30pm we had all eaten a very pleasant cooked breakfast. Our guest took his leave just after 11.00am, and I drove him to North Greenwich underground station via the Falconwood Transport & Military Bookshop, where we stopped for a spell of retail therapy. I was back home by just after 12.30am, and after a short break for a drink, Sue and I went out into our garden to fix one of the bird feeder stations which had fallen over during a rainstorm.

With a bit of luck we should now be able to relax a bit for a day or so, and I may even manage to do some more work on my DEVELOPING THE PORTABLE WARGAME book.