Running to catch up with myself!

After Monday’s day of ‘excitement’, I had hoped that by today life would have settled down to a somewhat more pedestrian pace … but that was not to be!

The courier delivering the fridge was supposed to phone us thirty minutes before he was going to arrive, but the first we knew that he had arrived was a heavy knocking on our front door. (For some reason, he ignored the doorbell.) He deposited it in the kitchen and left me to unpack it and dispose of the packing material.

I had just done this when the front doorbell rang, and our regular postman was there with a pile of post to hand over to me. As I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks, I asked him if he had been on holiday … and it turned out that he’d been in hospital for two weeks with a serious chest infection. Apparently, he had suffered intense chest pain and been ‘blue-lighted’ to the local hospital with a suspected heart attack. His heart rate had been over 200, but once they had stabilised him, they discovered that it was being caused by a serious chest infection.

(Our postman is a real character who collects American Civil War memorabilia and books, and we often have a chat about nineteenth century military history. During one of these I discovered that one of his relatives had served with the Berkshire Regiment at the Battle of Maiwand.)

Whilst I was conversing with the postman, our cleaner – whose great uncle was Colour Sergeant (later Lieutenant Colonel) Frank Bourne of Rorke’s Drift fame – arrived, closely followed by one of my regular blog readers, Carl Luxford from Whitby! He is currently visiting relatives in Plumstead and took the opportunity to pop round to drop off a very nice gift for me ... which I hope to write about tomorrow.

Once the fridge was plugged in and working, Sue and I refilled it with the food we had been storing on cool bags. We then paid a hurried visit to Dartford to collect some things that we had ordered and to have a snack lunch.

We got back at 1.30pm ... and I had just enough time for a quick drink and a rest before I got changed and set off to drive to Cheshunt for a meeting of my Masonic Mother Lodge.

My journey to Cheshunt should have taken about an hour, but actually took nearly two thanks to roadworks in the Blackwall Tunnel approach road. I finally got to Cheshunt at 5.15pm, got changed into my regalia, and entered the Temple at 5.25pm. Luckily, I had not missed much, and was able to spend the next ninety minutes watching a candidate Passed to the Second Degree.

After the meeting, we had a drink in the Masonic centre's bar before we went into the dining room to eat our after-meeting meal (which we call the Festive Boad). That finished at 9.00pm, and after saying goodbye to the other attendees, I drove home.

I was home by 10.00pm … and then sat down and wrote this blog post.