Celebrations and consternations

Ann on the roof terrace of the Thames House

 Again, we oscillate between good news and bad. Dan and Faye have looked after a house on the Thames during the owners' absence, and on Thursday they invited us to stay for a night. Cardinals Wharf on Bankside sits between the new Globe theatre and the Tate Modern. It is a house of three stories plus a basement and a roof top terrace, where we enjoyed tea in the sun overlooking the Millenium Bridge and St Pauls Cathedral, while watching curious passers-by walking along the embankment. The house is very old, and has survived the blitz and massive redevelopment over the centuries across the rest of London. The basement is on the site of an old inn where it is said that Shakespeare may have trod the same flagstones after his stints treading the boards of the original Globe.

Welcoming the grandchildren

Then on Saturday we welcomed a good crowd of thirty plus to our "Heave awa'" party, celebrating my survival twelve months after the oncologists pronounced that I only had a year to live. Mind you, sometimes it has seemed touch and go, especially with the pains I now get, possibly from gall bladder inflammation, but they're controlled with good pain killers. Ann too continues to get breathless and coughs badly with her heart failure, but we're hopeful that it will be controlled once she gets some treatment. The doctors' repeated strikes do not help.

Today, Bronte is ill. She has a massive swelling in her abdomen about which the vets can do little, and she too is on Metacom, the canine equivalent of ibuprofen. She has had periodic diarrhoea and incontinence for some time, but today she has lost her appetite and been repeatedly sick. We will take her to the vets again tomorrow and let them decide her fate. Then, to add to our problems, both cars have developed a fault in sympathy with each other. The windscreen wipers on Ann's car have become erratic, stopping mid-wipe and leaving us blinded by the rain and wondering when they will restart, so I dare not risk a dirty motorway journey with them. And today, a warning light has come on in the Teguan, which our garage man diagnoses as a glow plug failure; these are things that pre-heat the fuel before the engine will start, so as we don't want to end up stranded miles from anywhere, I may need to get it fixed urgently.