Monday. 7.30 a.m. It's still and calms on the weather front. It's not particularly warm, but there's no wind blowing, as is it was this time last week. I am going back to IKEA to get a second recycling bin to match the one I purchased yesterday and will be to separate glass for recycling. At least I can get rid of the horrible old cardboard box which served as my recycling bin. Not exactly the best thing for the job and now gone.
Yes, things can only great better, especially now we don't have to endure endless days of lockdown, but now we have to contend with Vladimir Putin's sabre-rattling in Ukraine. Let's just hope and pray that it doesn't escalate into something worse.
12.45 p.m. I've been back to IKEA and bought a second recycling bin, which is for glass. I have seen some LED strip lighting, which I think I'll buy at some point in the future. It can be stuck on surfaces, and I'm sure it would add a certain bit of style to an otherwise rather boring room. Also, some really brilliant hanging lights remind me of the Death Star in Star Wars (Darth Vader's hideout.). They have pull cords that you pull (now, there's a surprise!) and the sections open out. I'm not sure if I got one, it would work in this flat as you really need high ceilings. Whatever the height of the ceilings, I just love them and are so imaginative.
I'm watching a documentary on Channel Five about the winter of 1962-63 which I remember well. I would have been about 12 in 1963, the year I had my appendix out and spent a lot of time in what was the children's ward of Bedford Hospital. I was supposed to have been operated on around Christmas that year but somehow or other it was bought forward, so I could be home for the festive season, thankfully. The surgeon who did the operation was Peter Lacey, who was a shooting friend of my father, so perhaps that was how the date was changed. Quite handy when you have the surgeon as a family friend. I know he used to come for tea and other meals, and I think one of his sons went to my school. The actual scar in my abdomen is very small (no, I have absolutely no intention of showing it off, thank you very much.) only a couple of inches, and it's very neat, compared with those of other people I've seen with them. It just shows what a good surgeon he was. I don't remember much about it, other than I was in that hospital ward for a few days and then was sent home.
As for the 'Big Freeze', it caused a lot of problems on the farm, and we had to feed the cattle out in the fields which were covered in snow, taking bales of hay out to them and, because my father grew Brussell sprouts on the farm, having to keep pigeons off them in the fields. I feel sorry for the pickers who had to work in really awful conditions to have bags of them ready to take to Smithfield market to be sold, going on a lorry which came each evening from a company called Bennett and Hawes.
At school, the playground was covered with snow which froze and thawed as the winter progressed. We had to clear this snow, as it was difficult to walk across easily. The shovelled snow and ice was heaped at one end of the playground against a wall, which made the wall lean dangerously as the freeze continued. I cannot imagine today's schoolchildren even being ALLOWED to help with such jobs as shovelling snow. They would moan about being made to work or claim it was against their 'human rights.' Also, there would be something mentioned about our dear old friend 'health and safety.'
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