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.