Fish and chips by candle light

Candlelit supper with friends

The ice cream van no longer sits in Clare park, a sure indication of summer's end. Yesterday, an autumnal gale swept Hundon, dislodging branches and carpeting the road and lawn with an early fall of green leaves. Miles away, a falling tree brought down a power line, leaving Hundon and many other villages without power for twelve hours; normally a small problem, but tonight we had invited our friends Malcolm and Rae to a meal and video. Happily, our local pub, the Rose and Crown, now does meals to take out, so we were able to have a candle-lit supper of fish and chips for them, and mushroom stroganof for us, helped along by copious wine. We were able to make coffee with a portable gas stove, but we have no portable heater and the room grew steadily colder, falling to below 15 degrees, leaving us wrapped in coats and blankets by the time we went to bed. The power came on again about 2 a.m., waking me with the television coming back on and the door bell chiming.

I am tortured by three demons who straddle my body each night. The first strikes when I go to bed, with pruritis moving as ball lightning across my body; first the neck then the arms, migrating to the back which I can't scratch, like a plague of red ants digging in with pneumatic excavators, leaving vivid red spots to mark their passage and each bite. I take ibuprofen and plaster various creams and lotions to the points I can reach. An hour or so after getting to sleep, I awaken with the pain in my arm where I fell (see: A touch of sun in darkening days). I take co-codamol and go down stairs to make a cup of tea and lie in my chair where it gradually eases and I can return to bed. Then an hour later the third devil strikes, bringing cramps to both legs. I take a quinine tablet and hobble round the bathroom on blended knees massaging my legs till it eases. Then in another hour, the arm pain returns. Ann has propped a pillow under it to see if soft support helps, then generously gets up to see to the dogs giving me another precious hour to try and sleep.