Going out

Kew Gardens, October 2022

Mum celebrated her 91st birthday without incident. There was no cake! and no presents! but we were there and she enjoyed it, except for the bit when dad outlined his demands of the hoist manufacturer. To be fair, I didn't enjoy that bit either so mum and I retired to the kitchen while Lola II and Sister D had a good time with him and the hoist.

I've been going out locally a bit more than usual, with two local comedy nights and Mozart's Requiem (plus three settings of the Miserere) in the Parish Church. I even went with other people on two of the three outings (badminton/Buddhist friends). Unusually, I didn't enjoy the comedy all that much. Reginald D. Hunter didn't seem to have his heart in it and Bridget Christie did a lot of material about older women (work, representation on screen, menopause), but I didn't altogether agree with her point of view.

My Monday Buddhism class has had a short break for our teacher's holiday to Cornwall, which allowed me to go to Monday badminton as well as Thursday, and I've had two matches as well, and fallen over twice (clumsily tripping over my own feet). I conclude that I'm quite good at landing because I've escaped with mild bruising, but it's only a matter of time before my post-menopausal bones crumble away and I end up with something worse. It's worth it though.

In the headlines for my teeth there was a visit to the orthodontist where I was scheduled for 'slenderising', which means shaving bits off the tooth enamel to make everything more perfect. After quite a long conversation with the orthodontist we agreed that since my aims for the treatment do not include the perfect smile, tooth enamel is far too valuable to shave bits off just so that I don't have gaps at the gum line. At the dentist this week my hygienist was very pleased with progress and thinks that the aligners have made a big difference.

And I went to a meeting held by the committee of the Warwick Folk Festival. The Team Leader for Communications (where I was a volunteer) is hoping to step away from the role, and they are trying to interest a few of us volunteers in taking it on. Two of us were there and neither of us wants the role, although we don't mind doing a bit more next year. We'll see where that goes. The venue was terrible for the meeting (background noise, poor projection of Zoom and inadequate microphone and speakers) but lunch was excellent, so hooray for priorities.

As I write it is Remembrance Sunday. I'm having a difficult time with the news, and I really need to start avoiding it more completely. UJ is still in Kyiv - I read today that the conflict there has pretty much reached a stalemate, but Zelensky won't negotiate and will certainly run out of resources before Putin does. Politicians in the UK continue to be contemptible, the situation in Gaza is more than I can bear, many African states are enduring civil war, and the thought of Trump winning the election based on current polling feels very much like the beginning of the end of the world.