Now I am 60

Then I was 8

My significant birthday has been and gone with very little fuss. It was hot, I went for a walk but spent the day mostly at home. The next day I went to visit mum to get some more of the admin done, but first we had to get her to a clinic appointment and then took advantage of the proximity to Lidl to give her the opportunity to do some shopping in person. As dad had acquired lactose intolerance in the last few years, mum has been enjoying the opportunity to indulge in dairy produce again and we came home with three kinds of cheese.

The admin seems to grow each time I look at it. Unfortunately, as I pick up the different strands we seem to uncover conflict each time - in addition to the fight with Thames Water about their overcharging for the period when we had a leak, we're in conflict with an investment company and now possibly also the Burial Society that arranged dad's funeral. Then there's the routine stuff that just comes around every year - household insurance, a new gas and electricity contract, broadband, servicing the stairlift, the Lifeline pendant for communicating in an emergency, and on and on. I am starting to recognise where I need to pass things over where before I imagined I would be doing it all.

After visiting mum I went on to pick up Lola II and Mr M and bring them to Leamington for a few days. Mr M had to work for some of the time, but he joined us for meals. Lola II and I went for a lovely walk with friends, and then an organ concert in the local church with a student organist who looked much too young to be out on his own. Then I had to get home for a couple of phone calls, one of which was with Mr MXF who has kindly passed on one of his old phones but needed to help me to unlock it.

I needed a newer phone because various apps had started telling me that they would no longer run on my old one. The transfer process wasn't too bad except that at one point I lost concentration and all of my past WhatsApp messages disappeared. Luckily this isn't a disaster, in fact it's barely an inconvenience. Given the state of the old phone's screen protector, an early priority is to get similar protection for the new one.

At the weekend, the Art in the Park festival was taking place in town. I'm sure this event has happened for many years, but somehow I've never been - it's huge, and full of all kinds of artistry from photography to an art-producing bicycle via jewellery, spray paint, oil, watercolour, collage and almost everything you can think of. We saw about half of it, and I was going to go back for the second day but had too much to do at home.

One of the reasons for Lola II's visit was to help me get some jobs done that are difficult to start on my own - they just need a bit of encouragement, or go easier with two of us working together. We started with my old iPod, which used to mean more to me than it does now - it has become redundant since Audible discontinued the app that allowed me to download podcasts onto it.* It will eventually go onto ebay but I need a period of 10 days when I'm at home so I can manage bids and postage and that isn't happening until September. While I was grappling with that, Lola II cleaned my windows!

[* Since then I've started using Spotify for both podcasts and books and cancelled my Audible subscription altogether, so who's the loser?]

And finally I had a non-birthday treat which ended up feeling like a birthday treat because sisters and friends came with me for lunch at my favourite Café Soya in Birmingham followed by a performance of the musical 'Hamilton'. It was quite a spectacle, which was lucky because there are a lot of words and it was quite difficult to follow the plot. Some of our party had seen it before and others had done some homework, but I now feel the need to go and listen while reading the lyrics to catch up on the bits I might have missed.