Downs and ups and downs

Lord Leycester Hospital, Warwick, March 2025

At mum's house she has discovered that water is leaking under the kitchen floor. We've noticed for some time that the paint on one of the walls kept mysteriously bubbling, and various other leaks have come about and been addressed over the years. This may be a new leak or a continuation of a previous one, but now we have started the process of investigation. It is proceeding much more slowly than is ideal, but there's a lot of waiting for people to respond.

My concert went off with the impossible saxophone part and the clarinet solo going as well as can be hoped for. It's been a while since I've needed to try particularly hard on the clarinet, and it really reminded me of the joy of making it sound as good as possible. I have added another item to one of my lists - I'd like to raise my game and play music at a higher standard than I can in the current group. This cannot happen until I give up something else, and given everything that's going on this may be some way off...

...because I'm still doing too much, and this week it caught up with me and started to actually make me feel unwell, to the extent that I took a Covid test just in case. It was negative, but that just confirmed that this situation isn't arising from external factors but from my own choices. I talked this over with two different groups of close friends, and thankfully one of these discussions allowed me to give away one of my commitments: someone else volunteered to support our introductory course on Meditation and Buddhism in my place. The following morning my head felt fresher and my aches and pains had disappeared. Perhaps I have learned my lesson. Until the next time.

My recovery in mood was short-lived because the people who rent us the hall for our group notified us that not only had we managed to leave the back door wide open, but also the key was now missing. At the time of writing it has not yet been found.