Golden Moments

We will be celebrating another Golden Wedding at the weekend. (You might remember that Harry and I celebrated ours early last December, when he narrowly missed it through collapsing and being taken to hospital). He was sent home the day before but was too ill to attend any kind of *do*.

This time it will be his twin brother and wife who will be celebrating. They got married three months after we did and I can still remember at their wedding, overhearing my newly acquired mother in law telling everyone that she had lost two sons within three months.

Not a brilliant way to start off a relationship.

Still it's all water under the bridge now.

The four of us are hoping to have a quiet meal together in a restaurant in town. We won't risk going too far because neither of the twins is particularly well and we will be relying on public transport to get there and back. So nothing too complicated was arranged and we are hoping that there'll be no snags this time.

Harry is not walking very well at all right now but I do go out with him once a day for him to get some exercise and to give him something outside the home environment to think about afterwards. However, it is very slow progress and we manage to do very short walks and allow plenty of time to complete them with the aid of a stick, which he hates to use.

He was such an active man and very strong and it does make me sad to see the way he is being so limited by ill health. However we still have much to be thankful for.

The weather has gone very cold again but it is officially Spring now and all the bulbs have been flowering away in the tubs in my garden and in the parks that I visit and now there are trees  blossoming too........ cherry, magnolia, forsythia to name a few. The clocks will go forward one hour at the weekend and the evenings will get lighter. Definitely my favourite time of the year.

Bungee Jumping In The Sun

We've had a week of warmer, Springlike weather and that certainly makes me feel more cheerful

I've been dusting and gardening quite happily.

I've been walking when I can. There is a lovely place of natural beauty in Bristol that is called The Downs and stretches for a long way and everyone can walk there. It's a very popular place to go. I'm not sure that the word, Downs is a good name to call this place as there are certainly many hills to climb to get there. However, The Ups doesn't sound right, does it?

To walk to The Downs from our house would be about a mile and a half each way and then there could easily be a couple of miles of walking once there.

One Saturday quite recently, I walked to The Downs and sat on a little bench in the sun watching people walking by, families playing ball, while mentally noting which buses came by on the busy road nearby and how often. Well, none of them go in my home direction. So after I had finished sitting in the sun, I decided to get a bus to the city centre and stop off by the harbour waterfront. It was still sunny and I noticed that a lady near to me suddenly gasped and everyone was looking in a certain direction. I noticed a huge pole with a lift going up to it, some distance away and a bungee jumper had just leapt off the pole and was swinging away over the water, upside down.

Well, I was far enough away for the jumper not to look like a human being at all, with feelings and personality, but rather like a slender sack swinging about till it was drawn up by the lift and taken slowly down to safety.

I stopped to watch several others jump off the very high pole from the lift but they all looked alike, swinging and indistinguishable as humans though my imagination was making me wonder what it must be like to be make that jump.  I couldn't see whether the jumpers were men or women because I was too far away but they seemed to be very brave to me.

I doubt whether I'd ever have had the nerve to do that at any stage of my life. Now, I think it would finish my poor old back off for good. I suppose there must be an upper age limit for this kind of sport/activity.

I wonder if any of my readers has ever bungee jumped in their lifetime?

Guilty Or Not Guilty?

Photo Copyright: Maggie May

Last Tuesday, Harry had to attend the local Oncology hospital for his 6 weekly check up and as he had caught the bus and walked the short distance at the other end many times by himself and had assured me that he didn't want me to go with him, I decided to go to my Silver Screen film of the week, *One Chance.* It was about a man, Paul Potts, who wanted to be an opera singer since he was a young lad and the film portrayed all the difficulties that he faced because of his background and circumstances holding him back. It was based on a true story and I like that kind of film. As the story transported me to another plane, was a bit funny in places and had a happy ending, I came home in a happy frame of mind, ready to tell Harry all about it. That is until I got home and found he had been brought back in a Police car because he had collapsed on his way home from his check up. Thankfully there are many kind people about and three different individuals stopped to help him and called a paramedic, who gave him the once over and it was decided that his legs just gave out and that he hadn't lost consciousness. As Harry refused to go to A and E, the Police decided to give him a lift home, much to his indignation. The hospital had told him he has Shingles in a band round one side of his chest and prescribed some medication for this. He had no idea that he had it and I wonder if that had made him feel unwell. 

Now why didn't I have any idea that he had Shingles let alone a rash? Do I have to examine him all over every night? And........ does this mean that I'm a horrible, neglectful wife to leave him to his own devices? Even had I been with him, I'd  have been unable to do much more than the people who helped him while he was on his own as I have no car. If I'm not, then why do I feel so guilty and feel now that I shouldn't go out and leave him?