Visiting and being visited

Lola Towers, January 2026

It's been very cold indeed. Lola II and I forgot that she really shouldn't visit Lola Towers during the winter, so she enjoyed my new heated blanket while also serving as encouragement to my ongoing efforts at shedding surplus stuff. With her help I took down quite a few items from the loft, but the most excellent service she provided was to thread the lace back into the cuff of my Wellington boot, which took a very long time. She also modelled various items that I was offering to particular people, sang songs in the car with me when we were held up on the motorway for an hour, made tea, and was generally in charge of Morale.

I continued to attempt to give away my huge bookcase, with several enquiries leading to nothing, but finally someone who was serious took it away. I was expecting its removal to reveal horrors in the wall behind it but nothing horrific emerged, so that's one bullet dodged. I imagine that many people are not looking to spend much money in January, so I'll be trying to sell the few items of value that I have in February or March.

Trips I have made - one to the north where we ate pizza and congratulated one another on progress made in various aspects of life; one to mum where I feel I was helpful by way of Organising; one to Oxford with Sister D which was quite cold, drizzly, then rainy but the Weston Library was as good as ever and we had lots of time to talk. A more local trip took me to badminton at the height of the snowfall. "This is crazy," I was thinking as I drove at 15mph, slowing down for junctions, trying not to use the brakes and turning corners very carefully. But I needed to play badminton after more than two weeks off, and there wasn't anything like the amount of snow that was forecast, and by the end of the evening it was already sleet and slush.

Cousin M and her son visited from Seattle en route to Spain, and we all met at Maternal Manor and caught up with family history and current goings on, followed by an excellent trip to the Royal Academy of Music in London for a student performance of Trial by Jury. My enlightened music teacher at junior school was quite a character, completely indifferent to the musical limitations of under-11's. He encouraged composition, percussion and harp players (as well as your traditional instruments) and we even had a school orchestra. Together with one of the other teachers he also staged productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. I still remember them - Pirates of Penzance was one, and Trial by Jury was another, where I was chosen as understudy for the part of the Usher. It's now FIFTY years later but some of it was spookily familiar. Anyway, I enjoyed it a great deal.

The official process of moving on from Lola Towers has started with a visit from a representative of an Estate Agent. She found the property bigger than she expected, called the garden 'generous' (which it has never been to me), and showed me comparisons with other local properties that she could find. We agreed on the ballpark figure that might be asked, and the next stage will be a similar visit from a second Estate Agent representative.

What I've been reading

Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science
by Stuart Ritchie

"Bias, careless mistakes and even outright forgery influence everything from austerity economics to the anti-vaccination movement. There are disturbing flaws in today's science that undermine our understanding of the world and threaten human lives."

Very interesting, if a little depressing to think that how many current scientific ideas may be built on sand. He does have some great ideas for how the situation might be improved towards the end of the book, but I'm not sure whether scientists and their publications are actually looking for something to increase the reliability of their results.

Thinking in Numbers: How Maths Illuminates Our Lives
by Daniel Tammet

"In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes and everyday examples, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions and equations underpin all our lives."

He writes very well, and introduces numbers in a more sophisticated way into lived examples. For example, working through his particular mental process of finding factors of a number - not that I would or could do it that way, but it's fascinating to imagine. But it's not all numbers - there's poetry, history and more.

Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle
by Manda Scott

narrated by Philip Stevens, Jerome Flynn, Liza Goddard

"In AD 60, Boudica, war leader of the Eceni, led her people in a final bloody revolt against the occupying armies of Rome. It was the culmination of nearly twenty years of resistance against an occupying force that sought to crush a vibrant, complex civilization and replace it with the laws, taxes and slavery of the Roman Empire."

A very long book, but well narrated and went along at the right pace. A good sign was the fact that I could (mostly) tell all the characters apart, although hearing their strange ancient British names meant that I didn't have the same recall as I would if I saw them written down. I think there are more in the series; if they weren't so long I might read another.

After the festivities, retreat

Wales, September 2025

Another year gone by, and for me the overall flavour is that it was a good one. This was helped, no doubt about it, by my withdrawal from accessing any form of news except local news and other specific topics - assisted dying and films being the main ones. 

My book log for the year says I read 66 books, of which 19 were audio books. Only 8 of them gained my top rating, and 3 of those were books I'd read before. This is probably because I'm still obsessively churning through the list of literary classics like a gambler hoping for a big win, because very occasionally I've come across an absolute masterpiece which raises my hopes that it will happen again.

Volunteering went well last year - the international badminton, several Buddhist roles and the Warwick Folk Festival. After a difficult period where I recognised I'd overcommitted my time, I have been much more diligent about not doing too much, and it's paying off with more time to focus on important stuff and generally ending up in a much better mental state.

After the quiet Christmas I embarked on a home online retreat led by good friends, which extended over New Year. I don't find it easy to set up retreat conditions at home - I have to use the laptop to access the retreat so it can't be put in a cupboard and forgotten. Nor, on this occasion, could I turn off the phone. An interesting point to note was that the WiFi signal kept dropping out despite the router being in the room next door. I managed to resolve this by opening the wardrobe door... This morning when the retreat had ended I realised quite how much I had benefitted from pausing most everyday activities. 

So all is well at Lola Towers, and the flavour of coming year is set to be the taste of potential: big changes that are just peeking over the horizon.