Cold Snap

The week starts very cold. We even have a very brief snow shower, Wollaton Park lake ices over and the birds are going through the bird seed and fat balls like it's going out of fashion. 

The morning walk is a bit fresh but maybe the cold has stopped the washer leaking. Perhaps something has frozen as there’s usually a mini stream going out under the door.

It’s also very cold at the 70’s gym where there are lots of people working out in puffa jackets and presumably L had her usual three jumpers on when she went earlier but there were also still plenty of people in next to nothing. Tattoos do after all have to flaunted.

We have a spot of traffic chaos with Derby Road outbound closed for 12 weeks due to them upgrading pre-World War Two gas pipes. The detours, the official one and the unofficial one, get very snarled up.

My Dad now seems to be back to normal after his own dice with Covid and he feels up to a trip to the pub. L offers to come over and do his cleaning for him but I’m sure she’s got better things to do. She says she’ll probably just end up going to bed to read, which she says is her favourite place. At least when I'm not there to disturb her. In the end she opts for online yoga while the Lad isn’t there to interfere. Meanwhile we’re in the pub, my Dad’s favourite place and probably mine too, and the Lad’s on the crisps. Not missing his yoga.

I've been chasing his X-ray result that he had done before New Year which obviously involves waiting a long time queuing on the phone each time I ring, only to be told they’ll ring me back when they know something.

Then they surprise me and ring back on Thursday to say he has arthritis, fluid and loose bone fragments in his knee. They refer him to a specialist who will get back to us before the end of the year, probably.

Also on Thursday I also have an Openreach engineer over to upgrade us to full fibre broadband which means I get to spend the whole evening and most of Friday reconfiguring all our wi-fi devices to work on the new system.

On Saturday L makes her Parkrun return at Wollaton and then the Lad snaps his haltie on his evening walk with L while I am at the match with my Dad. I order him a new one, can’t have a halite less dog.

In the meantime he has to make do with an older, very frayed one that could snap at any minute as we support L in her race at Sherwood Pines on Sunday which due to her Covid enforced training break she’s opted for a speedy 5k rather than the slower grind of the 10k.

(Sunday 22^nd January)