So farewell then, 20 Ridgway

Don't know how to describe my feelings right now, if I'm honest, except "weird." The house I lived in for the first 21 years of my life (I officially moved out three days after my 21st birthday), which has been in my family since 1953, and which has always been there in my mind as a place of refuge in the bad times, solace in the sad times and celebration in the glad times, as of today belongs to someone else.

By the time we left it for the last time - last Saturday afternoon - it did feel more like "just a house" than it has ever felt. No longer a home. And truth be told it hasn't been my home for all of those 30+ years since I moved out, except in the sense of "going home" to visit Mum, as we often did. After 8 months of intermittent trips to throw away old things, collect treasured things and rearrange remaining things to present the house at its best for the purposes of sale, it looked and felt like an empty shell. Only faint echoes lingered of the happy times spent there. Lifetimes. I learned to walk there. I learned to ride a bike there. I learned to drive there. I read my 'O' and 'A' Level results over breakfast there. I found out I'd got into university there. I had my first sex there. And my first broken heart, stood by the sideboard reading that letter. My Dad died there. My Mum turned into an old lady there.

And now someone else will build memories there and put down roots - perhaps even 60 years deep like our family did. They'll put their own stamp on the place until almost every trace of the planning and saving and working and painting and tiling and building my Mum & Dad did is erased; replaced with something newer, bigger, brighter and not ours.

Well... not quite erased. It will still be there in my memory. My old family home. And that's why I'll never drive down to Ridgway Close again. Or at least, never intend to. I want that house - that home - to stay as it is in my memory. The happy, sunny, carefree home of my childhood.

How not to invest £6000

So*, we were at my Mum's** the other weekend and I decided to tackle the stair lift.

This'll be the stair lift she had installed in 2007, used approximately three times and then decided she'd move a bed downstairs and not bother going up there at all. We came across the bill for it shortly after she moved into the care home. £6000. I researched the company that installed it, hoping that they'd have a scheme for buying them back. Yep, you guessed it. A flock of pigs just flew past.

Worse than expected, not only did the company no longer exist, they'd been the subject of a BBC Watchdog investigation into the shady practice of selling stair lifts for way more than they were worth to vulnerable elderly people, often with dementia. Disgusting. As my Nan used to say: "their hands should drop off." Another brief stint of Internet research suggested she'd been overcharged roughly double what it should have been.

Back in June I was reluctant to write off such a massive amount of money. Surely someone could make use of what was effectively a brand new machine? OK four years old, but hardly used at all and still in perfect condition. Three mobility companies were advertising in the local paper. Two of them didn't return my calls, one said they were only interested if it was a straight staircase. Well, it isn't.

It turns right 180° at the bottom, and again 90° at the second kite wind further up. I found an Internet stair lift trading site, snappily titled stair lift trader dot com, and posted this photo there. I received two phishing replies within a couple of weeks, then nothing.

There was a brief flurry of excitement in September when someone telephoned to ask about the stair lift, but it was just one turn too short. The guy's upper landing was another three stairs and a final right turn away from Mum's, so no go.

By the time the end of November was upon us, I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to write-off the majority of the cost of this damned device. But getting rid of it was another conundrum altogether. Professionals would charge for removal which was like throwing good money after bad. I decided to do it myself, so this particular weekend we arrived in Nottingham armed with a set of Allen keys, an adjustable wrench, Mole wrench and anything else I could think of that might help get it apart.

I'll spare you the details. It took me about six hours to get it down, starting on Friday afternoon and finishing on Saturday morning. The tricky bits turned out to be the "hidden" Allen bolt that held the rail sections together (one more bolt that the other 5 that had visible heads), and working out how the heck the seat/battery pack/motor/gear assembly was connected to the rail. But eventually it was a pile of (very heavy) bits. Nikki wondered whether there was a local scrap merchant who might be interested. At least we'd make SOME money back. Good idea! One Google search, one phone call and one short drive later and we were unloading the bits into a skip.

Skip was duly weighed, and the scrap man handed over our dosh. 102kgs of mild steel at £100 a tonne: the princely sum of £10.20.

*All the best posts, and replies to questions, begin with "So" these days. Just ask the Today programme. They've debated the phenomenon several times already. Usually followed by a package in which the interviewee begins all his or her replies with "So." So I'm only keeping abreast of the trend, before you start. What's that? You weren't going to start. I'm sorry. It must be the way you're sitting.

**Strictly speaking it's not my Mum's any more, of course. It's mine. But it still feels disrespectful to even think of it that way, so I think it'll be "my Mum's" for a while yet. Probably until it's sold and we don't have to refer to it at all.

Stags and Hens

I thought my days of attending stag dos were long behind me, but then I also thought that pretty much everyone whose stag do I might attend was either already married, or unlikely to go that way in the foreseeable. How little I know. The weddings aren't over quite yet and neither, therefore, are the stag dos. Or the hen dos for that matter.

So last night, we enjoyed both. Stags for me, Hens for Nikki, and an amalgamation of both at the beginning and end of the night, since we all got together for pre-do drinkies at Ian and Gill's, and then met up again in time for last orders (just!) at the Test Match.

In between times it was another delightful curry for the lads at the Bombay Bridgford, which equalled its last effort (let's face it, it was never going to surpass it), followed by copious quantities of quaffage on the meandering path back to the TM, via the Larwood and the Pet Shop. Lovely.

Having sunk our last pints at the TM (after somehow managing to convince them to serve us even though the towels had been on the pumps for five minutes before we showed up - the benefits of being regulars :o)) we repaired back to Ian & Gill's to round the night off in similar style.

In fact the whole weekend, despite being Ritchie & Helena's respective dos, had a bit of an "Ian & Gill's" theme to it, as we were back there for breakfast this morning. Much appreciated. Next get together: The Actual Wedding.

Not bad, as funerals go

Kind of ironic, having a funeral on "the glorious twelfth," but knowing both my parents' sense of humour I'm sure they will have appreciated it.

Yes, I have the tense of that sentence correct. Sitting up there, on their cloud (or whatever imagery you prefer), they are still present, and have a future, both in grammatical and spiritual terms.

It was a very nice service, even though the lady who took it was in (or near to) tears for most of the time. She knew Mum very well. Let no-one ever try to tell me there’s nothing “in” Spiritualism. When we originally met with the funeral director, he asked if Mum belonged to any particular religious denomination, and naturally I told him she was a Spiritualist. This didn’t faze him in the slightest. He told us he had several contacts from that neck of the ecclesiastical woods who might be prepared to hold the service, and called me the next day to say he’d found someone and she would be phoning me shortly to go over what we wanted in the service, gather some anecdotes etc to mention in the address – the usual sort of thing.

Anyway this lady called me the next day when we were back at home. She was the first name on his list (of five) that the funeral director had called. When he told her who the service was for, she said she got chills down her back. Because Mum had asked her FOUR YEARS AGO if she would give the eulogy. And they’d sat down for half an hour with a tape recorder running, discussing all the memories and music she wanted at the service.

Some people would no doubt say “coincidence.” I think different.

I have that tape albeit with nothing to play it on. I'll be arranging to have it transferred onto CD soon. So thanks for asking how I am, but really... I’m fine. I’ve been fine all along. My Dad’s passing back in 1993 was a shock – unexpected, and traumatic because it separated him and my Mum. Mum’s passing was not unexpected. More: it was wished for (by her). They are reunited now, and happy. I have nothing to be sad about...

Since the "family seat" had been tarnished by years of living downstairs - bed in the dining room, clothes, pharmaceutical supplies and medical notes everywhere, etc - it wasn't really suitable for "keeping up" the funeral, so we repaired to the Test Match where the new landlord laid on a fine buffet lunch for the 20 of us and we sat and chatted and reminisced in the usual way of these things. No-one stayed much past 3pm, which suited us as it meant we could hit the road back to Manchester before the Friday afternoon rush started. Something else Mum would have approved of :o)

For once, I have no clever title

Woke at 1.01am for yet another nocturnal "visit" and, still wide awake more than an hour later, I finally decided I might as well get up. The clock check was 2.22. I experience a lot of these nicely patterned times, especially at night (I've written several times about them before under the 'spookiness' tag) and I have no idea why. Maybe seeing patterns in things is a sign of mental illness. But there again, being able to wonder if it is is probably a sign that I'm alright. :o) But this post isn't about spooky patterns on the clock, or insomnia.

My Mum died on Sunday night.

Didn't get much sleep that night either, but more a case of never getting to sleep in the first place. At least, not until after 3.30. And then I was up again two hours later. Last night was a bit better (being knackered helps) but tonight it looks like I'm back on the merry-go-round of thinking of everything I need to do, and things I already did. Things I didn't do that maybe I should have.

I've been telling people it wasn't unexpected, and it wasn't. She had COPD, and everyone knows that's a one-way street, but more than that - after the events of recent weeks we would have to have been abnormally ostrich-like not to expect "the worst." But can you ever be prepared for it? Maybe on an intellectual level. Perhaps that intellectual preparation allows you to skip the traditional first stage of grief - i.e. denial. Although, you know, the irony of denying that I'm in denial is not lost on me. I seem to be missing out on the 'anger' part as well. Who would I be angry with? Mum? It's hardly her fault (apart from the smoking of course, but it feels like it's always been decades too late to do anything about that). The care home? They did what they could. God? Let's not even go there. And what would I be angry about? That she's free from pain? No longer has to fight to get every breath? That - the next few weeks of estate management aside - I'm absolved from the duty of those five-hour round trips to visit someone who had become unrecognisable as the woman most often referred to as "awesome" by my friends, old and new, and those of my in-laws that met her. Whose failing memory left her incapable of remembering conversations we'd repeated four times since our arrival not half an hour earlier? And, perhaps more significantly, of remembering that we had visited at all. Or telephoned, on the weeks we couldn't visit.

I'd rather friends remembered her as the vibrant capable welcoming whirlwind who cooked up a full fried English breakfast for eight when we dropped in unannounced one Bank Holiday Monday morning after an all-night party. That breakfast is still fondly remembered more than thirty years later by all who partook.

There's a lot more to say, but I have that happy memory in my mind so I'll stop for now.

A Grizzly tale

Just back from another get-together with mates in Nottingham, where as usual a good time was had by all.

The festivities were not dampened at all by the weather, or my discovery a few minutes after arrival of another slow leak in one of my tyres, and were only slightly blunted by the absence of one of the couples.

This time round we enjoyed the hospitality of someone who hasn't hosted before (personal reasons that it would be inappropriate to bore you with) and who did an excellent job of not allowing his self-confessed lack of culinary accomplishment get in the way of a good party. He proved perfectly capable of (a) preparing enough garlic bread to sink the Bismarck, and (b) assembling a fine selection of takeaway flyers that empowered us to choose some of the most intensely cheesy pizza I have ever feasted on. Way to go, Griz.

Curreh!

Travelling to experience the delights of eastern cuisine is nothing new for us. When I first came to Manchester as a student we'd think nothing of piling six of us in a car and driving from Nottingham to Manchester for a curry, and then driving home again.

Last night, we made the pilgrimage in the reverse direction, the only concession to age being that we stayed over for the night rather than driving back in the same evening. These days, a whistle stop in Bridgford has the added bonus that we can, as I put it, "reset the visit flag" with mother without spending too much time trying to think of news to tell her that she'll forget again five minutes after we've related it, or insisting for the fifth time in half an hour that we don't want a coffee, thanks.

The restaurant of choice this time, at Ian's suggestion, was the Bombay Bridgford, just opposite the cricket ground. Traditional décor and seating, but those were the only aspects of this venue that could be considered run-of-the-mill. We enjoyed a much warmer than usual welcome from the smiling greeter, and the interesting and eclectic menu mixed some exciting specials among the more usual fare of kormas and jalfrezis. Having insisted before we set out that I wouldn't just go for the hottest thing on the menu, in the end I plumped for the chicken Jai Puri; the... er... hottest thing on the menu. So hot, in fact, that it came with a health warning.

"Have you had a Jai Puri here before?" asked the waitress.
"No," I smiled back, "but I have thirty years' experience eating very hot curries."

As it turned out, I needed every year of that experience to weather the waves of extreme chilli in this dish. Every mouthful tasted like boiling water on the tongue, among the more subtle flavours of coriander, cinnamon, vinegar, lemon and so on that make very hot curries such an irresistible choice for me. Absolutely delicious, and I made sure the owners knew how much I enjoyed their hospitality. Even the Peshwari nan was above average.

We don't eat out in Bridgford very often these days but it's a sure bet that we'll be returning to this place.

First BBQ of the season

We drove all ni-i-i-ight to get to you. Well, maybe not ALL night. We got an early pass and set off shortly after 4pm. We were there just after 6. And maybe not to YOU. Unless you're one of those we were barbecuing with on Friday night...

On the available evidence, of two days, we'd chosen by far the better of the bank holiday evenings for dinner al fresco. Perfect fluffy clouds slowly giving way to crystal blue sky as we sat sipping our various beverages on the patio, cordially greeting each new arrival, sharing the latest craic and the pre-dinner nibbles before moving on to the more serious business of burgers, sausages, chicken (piri-piri, honeyed and on the bone), prawns, shashlik and kebabs.  Salad, buns, french stick. Roulade, raspberry tart, chocolate fudge pudding and barbecued bananas with choc chip surprise.

And a 1am finish. Superb.

The expansive hospitality of our guests didn't end there though. Full cooked breakfast and more excellent banter before doing the farewells, a quick dip of the toe in the cold waters of Mummy before high-tailing it off to MacArthur Glen in search of an elusive tea-pot, dinner on the road at the Ol' Mustard Pot and home in time for Eurovision. Just call us masters of timing!

Beware the camcorder

We never need much of an excuse for a get-together with mates, but when there's a holiday in the offing then there's also the obligatory "planning" meeting, which duly took place yesterday. The actual planning part didn't take much more than ten minutes - where and when are we going to meet up for lunch on the way there; who's cooking what meals on what nights; a grocery list for the initial shop (mainly breakfast items and snacks); and are we all having the same bedrooms as last time; and we're done.

So when we started in on the wine at shortly after 4 in the afternoon, I should have known the direction the rest of the evening was going to take. Wine, especially Zinfandel (or rosé of any kind, tbh), is just too easy to drink. Before you know it, your glass is empty and, with excellent hosts like Ian & Gill, it's mostly refilled again without you even asking. Or noticing.

Which makes it incredibly easy to lose track. That's my excuse anyway. Not to mention that we popped around the corner for short pub session before the main meal.

From what I remember of the rest of the evening, we all had a fabulous time. We proved beyond doubt that Ian & Gill's table will seat eight, and I proved that if you sit me in front of a cheeseboard for long enough then eventually there'll be nothing left of it except a few crumbs. I'm not going to write in adolescent fashion about how drunk I got. Certainly drunker than I've been this year. If I'm being honest, drunker than I can remember being since... umm... well, you get the picture.

Trouble is, these days, I don't need to *remember* how drunk I was. There's evidence. Firstly, the email from Ian which arrived this afternoon. And I quote:
"Sober viewers must be warned these people had drunk quite a bit (18 cans, 12 bottles of wine + 2 rounds in the pub) which may explain hangovers on Sunday."

And secondly the video footage which that email introduced showing, among other things, Ritchie and I at around 1am drunkenly singing Supper's Ready at the top of our (slightly out of tune) voices. I hope they have understanding neighbours.

We have a week of similar, although hopefully not quite so intense, evenings to look forward to. Let me just check we've put paracetamol on the shopping list...

Broken China

Our annual pilgrimage to Cropwell Bishop took place yesterday, to experience once again the delights of the Chinese food at the Wheatsheaf.

Last year, we had the "cheap" menu. The one without the aromatic crispy duck. Now for me, no Chinese meal is complete without crispy duck. So last year's performance was a huge disappointment. The cheap menu includes in its place some kind of deep-fried mince served in a lettuce leaf bowl. Totally no substitute. This year we all agreed we'd go for the more expensive menu. The one With Duck. Only guess what? The hoisin sauce was not real hoisin sauce. It was runny, vinegary, and had none of the distinctive flavour of hoisin. So even with The Duck, the meal was not up to the expected standard.

Sure the dim sum were nice. The ribs were nice. The mains were nice. But without a decent helping of duck, with proper sauce, it just ain't the same. Luckily, as always, the company was more than up to standard, so we still had a good time. If we were only going for the food though, I don't think I'd bother again.

You are being very expensive, Mem-Saab

A constant stream of weekends stretches behind me during which decorating looms large as the primary activity. So it was with great joy that we kicked the lounge project into the long grass this weekend and headed off to Nottingham for a night out with friends.

The festivities started early, with champagne and strawberries on the terrace at Ian & Gill's. My, aren't we posh? Yes, we are. Well, when you've got married after being together for 25 years (or thereabouts) and you've just returned from your honeymoon, you can be forgiven for pushing the boat out a bit. And they did. Top stuff. Champagne supplies appeared to be virtually limitless, so we sat and quaffed from around 5pm to when the taxis arrived shortly after 7. And quaffed, and quaffed, qand offed, nand squiffed, ajklfc,...

Not feeling (much) the worse for wear, we poured ourselves into two taxis and headed into town, to the Mem-Saab. Situated on Maid Marian Way, not far from the pub where we spent almost every summer evening 30 years ago (the Trip to Jerusalem), this oasis of fine Indian cuisine presents an impressive appearance both from the outside, and on first entering. A cool, dimly-lit interior with lots of marble, linen, and polished wood, we were shown expertly to our table and ordered drinks and poppadums in the traditional manner.

From then on, the evening comes back to me as a series of significant events. The arrival of the food courses, the bill, the walk to the canalside bar, me adopting a rather brash American accent whenever I spoke to any of the wait staff or bar people (don't ask me why - although I heard recently of something called Foreign Accent Syndrome and started to wonder if I am a closet sufferer), the sudden decision to leave, catching a taxi. I can't remember much about what we discussed over dinner, although I know there was a lot of laughing and joking (as always).

I remember the meal being good, but not spectacular. The menu was quite disappointingly sparse, with a lot of lamb and fish dishes (not keen on either), but I did manage to find something I liked. The reshmi kebabs were excellent - very spicy and nicely textured - but the chicken jalfrezi main course was fairly mediocre. Luckily it was tempered with a very nice peshwari nan, and of course the highpoint of the night and an unexpected bonus was the excellent rasmalai we enjoyed for dessert. Probably the nicest example of this traditional dish I've had, and I've been eating it for - guess what? - about 30 years.

Not a place I could eat at frequently - there's not enough variety on the menu - but thankfully that won't be a problem as this was probably a one-off visit. Nevertheless it was definitely worth going for the experience. My initial reaction to the bill was that it was very expensive, although afterwards when I remembered we'd polished off 6 bottles of wine between the 8 of us, I revised my opinion slightly.

All that aside the highlight of the whole day, as usual, was the company. No matter how frequently or infrequently we spend time with friends, it's always a joy. We're already planning our next get-together, sometime in October. Well, you need something to look forward to, eh? And maybe the decorating will be finished by then.

You wait ages for a story and then three come along at once

In this instalment: Repairs to the shower; I visit my Mum in hospital and meet up with some old friends on the way home.

Busy day yesterday. First off the plumber man, Andy, came to investigate the leak in the shower and why it only runs cold. This has been going on some time, but since we opted for a tiled floor in the bathroom we knew the only way to investigate the leak was from below, which means taking down some of the kitchen ceiling.

The leak was never life-threatening so we decided to leave it until we were ready to start work on the kitchen and would be fixing up the ceiling anyway. We'd been a bit worried that it might have been a badly-fitted drain pipe, because it always seemed to leak worse when the shower trap was beginning to get blocked with hair. The other alternative was a badly sealed shower tray, and this is what it turned out to be (the hair blockage simply caused the water to rise above the lip of the tray, and then pour through the broken seal). But the news was, unfortunately, not as simple as that.

Andy (a man of some experience and also someone who likes doing things the right way) was worried about how the shower tray had been fitted. Cast resin trays that he's installed in the past have always had to be bedded down in sand and concrete so they don't flex. Ours has been mounted directly on the flooring joists. There's not even any floorboard to support the full width of the tray. I remember the original fitter saying he needed to take the boards out, and even shave an inch or so off the joists, so he could fit the tray flush with the floor. I never questioned it at the time, but we've ended up with a tray that is not supported in the inter-joist gaps which is not, apparently, a good thing, and one possible cause of the breakdown in the seal.

Another culprit is the tiling. The fitters tiled directly onto plasterboard. I remember an old plumber friend of mine telling me this was a bad idea ten years ago, but these guys assured me it was fine, so what can you do? For all I knew the intervening years had seen an improvement in materials, both board and tile adhesive, that rendered the old advice irrelevant. My mistake. Tiles mounted on plasterboard will always move, says Andy, which cracks the grout in the corners and allows leaks.

The solution is simple - bucketloads of silicon sealer - but it does mean we're probably now committed to replacing the seal regularly every time it breaks down. And the only indication we get when this has happened is a wet kitchen ceiling :(

Sadly the solution for the cold running shower was not so simple. After checking for blockages and testing that the valves were working OK, Andy concluded the coil is faulty. "Luckily" the shower is still under warranty, but it means more hassle digging out the paperwork and jumping through whatever hoops the manufacturer requires to organise a replacement.

To complete all the plumbing work had taken until after 1.30 which meant I was not going to make the afternoon visiting session at Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, where my Mum underwent hip replacement surgery on Thursday. She'd been really suffering with it for some time, but it wasn't until a new GP arrived at her local surgery that she'd been offered a replacement. Can you believe her original GP (of almost 20 years) told her she couldn't have the operation because of her condition? The new guy put the lie to that as soon as he arrived and booked her in as an emergency appointment because she was in such a lot of pain.

I arrived in Nottingham in time for the evening visiting (6-8pm). Although I've visited people at QMC in the past I had no recollection of the parking arrangements and drove around the campus one-way system twice in the dark having missed the turn for the multi-storey car park the first time. I then discovered the car park is on the opposite side of the campus from Mum's ward. QMC is a huge place and it took me almost ten minutes to walk across to West block and find the right ward. Fortunately as with all hospitals everything is well sign-posted so I always knew where I was going.

Mum was feeling very sorry for herself. Propped up in bed with a foam block between her knees to keep her leg in the right position, she was unable to move around at all, although she wasn't in any pain. Just the discomfort of sitting "on the same cheek" for several hours at a time. The nurses to try to "turn" immobile patients regularly, but they are very busy so it's never quite regular enough. I was impressed by the security though. The last time I visited a sick relative - about ten years ago - there was free access to all wards, which simply opened on to public corridors. Some high-profile attack cases have forced improved security, and the most vulnerable wards are now protected with card-swipe entry systems. These are active both ways, so they protect against confused patients wandering off as well as against unauthorised ingress.

They're taking the MRSA/hygiene problem seriously too, with wall-mounted antiseptic gel canisters beside the doors and notices requesting visitors to clean their hands before entering, and upon leaving. I thought this a very positive move and duly cleaned my hands, but my cousin later informed me that their visiting experiences showed that most people ignored the notice.

I spent almost the full two hours with Mum but towards the end she was dropping off to sleep mid-sentence and becoming increasingly confused. She didn't want me to go, but I pointed out they'd be kicking me out anyway in 15 minutes and the nurses were coming round to sort out her position and needed access to both sides, so I said my goodbyes and left. Some of her confusion is probably a result of the meds, but I think a lot of it is simply that she's been knocked out of her routine and can't really cope. She hadn't realised she had a motorised control to change the angles of her bed, or that she had a personal TV, or that she'd been given an exercise sheet, and was confused by the difference between the drugs the hospital were giving her and the ones she takes regularly for chronic emphysema and other conditions. "What's this?" she kept asking, "I don't take this." Quite upsetting really, to see her so frail and vulnerable, but everyone I've spoken to says what a difference hip operations make, and I know she'll recover rapidly once she can get out of hospital.

Leaving Nottingham at that time meant I wasn't going to be home until 10pm so I'd decided to stop on the way home for a bite to eat, and the prospect of returning to the Dog & Partridge seemed very attractive. I had no idea what time they stopped serving food, but their meals were so delicious last time we stopped there I thought it was a risk worth taking and drove past motorway services and other sources of accessible commestibles, arriving at the Dog at 8.55pm. They weren't very pleased with me - meals finish at 9pm - but they took my order with good humour.

Walking in from the car park I'd passed a woman complaining to anyone who would listen about the back door being locked on a night like this (very blustery and rainy). I thought I'd recognised her but it wasn't until I stood next to her at the bar and she was joined by her husband that I realised who it was: Mark and Janet (he used to do all my plumbing when I lived in the village). I hadn't seen them for seven years and we spent a very pleasant hour catching up while we were waiting for our food to be served. I'd expected to have to eat alone, so the prospect of friendly company was a real fillip. We shared news over fish, burger, and lamb respectively. Mark's business is thriving. I remember him asking me, almost exactly ten years ago, whether I thought it was a good idea to branch out on his own or whether he should stay in the comfort and safety of being a paid employee. Well he DID set up his own business back then, and now has 14 people working for him and looks after the plumbing and heating requirements of small businesses across the whole UK. Nice one Mark! Not only that, but he'll be chairman of the Plumbing Foundation this year. A real success story, and an opportunity for me to name-drop!

Bookless & Feckless

No book review this month, because I didn't read it. It was "We Need to Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver. Out of all the books I've missed reading, this is probably the one I should have read. The conversation was one of the most stimulating the club has had, and I sat on the periphery thinking it all sounded very interesting.

Next month it's The Life of Pi. Christmas intervenes and there's no club meeting until January, so I might actually get round to reading it given I have twice as long as usual.

I had a phone call from Mother before I went out to the club gathering. She phoned to apologise for being "off" last time we visited (the weekend before my birthday). It was one of those visits where Nikki has to keep kicking me to remind me not to rise to the provocation. In one respect it becomes increasingly difficult not to react - as the conversations become ever more bizarre with her recollections of what has actually happened gradually leaving reality behind in the same way a plane gradually climbs to its cruising altitude - but in another way it gets easier. The more it happens and the more extreme the example, the easier it is to realise she can't help it and indeed doesn't even know it's happening. This particular visit was the most surreal so far, all the more so since the topic at the heart of the argument (or what would have been an argument had I not been kicked almost to death) was such a fundamental and long-standing part of our visits.

Being creatures of habit, we generally have the same thing for lunch each time we visit my Mum: corned beef, oven chips, and mushy peas. She gave up cooking anything more involved than a can of soup or a ready meal many years ago, so we take care of the chips and peas, but this has been a staple of weekend visits to my Mum's for a long time. Five years, easily. Probably longer.

So this particular day, when we'd arrived a little earlier than usual if anything and had been looking forward to the usual banquet, we were surprised to find she'd just eaten. A late breakfast, we assumed, and so we left it rather later than usual to mention lunch. By the time it got to 2 o'clock we were both being deafened by the protestations of our stomachs, so I ventured "you've already eaten then, have you?" in a kind of non-committal way.

"Well, you said you didn't want anything," was the (rather accusatory) reply.

I stood with what I thought was a bemused look on my face. At least, it should have been. I was, after all, bemused. Mum interpreted it as the look I give her when I know she's ... misremembered ... something. I was treated to standard phrase #15: "Don't look at me like that. I know I forget some things but I'm right about this."

Let me draw you aside for one moment to explain how many times I've been accused of doing something, or saying something, that there is no Earthly way I would ever have done or said; how many heated arguments such accusations have led to; and how many of those arguments have ended with something being said that triggers the right memory, resulting in standard phrase #16: "Oh yes, I remember now. You're right John." I can't count the first or second number, but the third is "all of them."

So, egged on by the kicking, I didn't rise to the bait but instead waited for the off-the-wall explanation. It came. Apparently I'd phoned to say we wouldn't be wanting the regular corned beef meal as we planned to stop somewhere en-route and eat before we got there. This was clearly fixed in my Mother's mind, and she believed it was as true as the fact that we were in the room with her right then. But it never happened. I bit my tongue, and mashed a cup of tea to silence the rumbling of our stomachs.

As is usually the way with my Mother, we returned to the subject several times that afternoon. When she knows I don't agree with her she'll try to convince me she's right. Sadly the process for this isn't to bring any additional information into the discussion, or look at things from a different perspective. No, she thinks I'll change my mind if she simply repeats what she's already said on the subject. Which she did. Several times. Pretty soon my right leg, the one nearest Nikki, was swollen to twice its normal size, but I never rose to the extreme provocation. We left early, with the incontrovertible excuse that we had to stop off on the way home to eat.

The theory of clouds and silver linings was given added credence by the fact that we chose, at Nikki's suggestion, to stop at the Dog & Partridge on the A628 just past the Flouch. We walked in to this delightful haven of warmth and hospitality and all the frustrations of the day fell away. They had a roaring fire in the grate, a well-stocked bar from which we chose two different pints of locally brewed ale (both delicious) and a kitchen that served pub food of a standard I have not enjoyed for many, many years. We will definitely be returning, and arrived home relaxed and satisfied.

And so to tonight's phonecall from Mother. "I hope you didn't think I was awful not having any food in, but I've had to defrost my freezer because I can't bend down to clean it any more, so I didn't have your usual chips."

I reassured her that it was fine, but there was more. "I told John [next-door neighbour] you were coming and he said 'corned beef, chips and mushy peas?' [we're something close to a national institution] but I had to tell him I wouldn't be able to do it because the freezer was off."

Discovering the real reason behind the lunch fiasco was, I guess, some comfort. Obviously there was no recollection on Mum's part of the conversations we'd had the Saturday before. Thinking about it later, we decided she'd become confused with an earlier visit, when although we had in fact eaten lunch, we'd later declined dinner because we were eating out with friends in celebration of another 50th birthday. You have to laugh though. Standard phrase #9 is "Thank God I've still got all my marbles. My body might be packing up but at least I've still got my mind." Something tells me I'll be using the "irony" tag on this post.

Home

Saying our goodbyes to the sleepy village of Shipton, we took the scenic route to my Mum's through Northampton and Melton Mowbray, stopping for a pint at the Griffin in Plumtree.

This is probably the first pub I ever visited - it was the one my Uncle Ken used to take us to occasionally on Sunday lunchtimes when my Dad and I visited my Nan. At the age of 8 the journey from the Meadows (where my Nan lived) to Plumtree seemed to be a trek worthy of Amundsen but in reality it's only about 10 miles.

In those days, too, the presence of an 8-year-old meant the adults were forced to drink their drinks sitting in the car park. There was no beer garden and no adventure playground like there is now, nor any "relaxed" policy about kids sitting inside the pub during daylight hours.

Social mores have changed out of all recognition in the last 40 years.

Welcome the newest member of the old farts club

You'll remember what a glorious time I had celebrating my 50th last year. (If you don't remember, then you can look here, here and here) Today it was the turn of my long-time mate Pete to join the ranks of the over-50s.

Of all the mates I've kept in contact with over the years, I've known Pete the longest. Way back when, our Dads both used to give us a ride to school on their way to work, with the result that we found ourselves hanging around a virtually deserted school at 8.20 every weekday morning with not much to do apart from talk to each other, and hang around the drinks machine waiting for the service guy to finish cleaning it, at which point he would "test" it and hand out free drinks.

So approximately 40 years later - give or take a year - we're still mates and we "just happened" to be visiting my Mum on the day of Pete's birthday, and we "just happened" to suggest that it would be good to pop down the Test Match for a few sherbets. Meanwhile a mutual friend was busy emailing everyone we knew to make sure they'd be there too, and organising with the landlord to lay on a private table, food and a cake. What we didn't know until we arrived at the pub was there'd be live music on too. So the whole evening went off with a bang, even though two of our close friends and their partners were unavoidably detained in Greece and/or with family matters.

The Test Match is one of those places that looks very ordinary on the outside, but inside is like a home from home. It has a large crowd of regulars and an even larger crowd of semi-regulars like us. People who live out of town but who make the pilgrimage there whenever they can. There are many reasons for this. Partly it's because you can always guarantee to bump into someone you know, some of it is down to the memories of great parties that have been there before. Added to that the staff are friendly, the beer is good, it's within walking distance of "home" if we're staying over (or a short bus ride if it's early enough), it has a fabulous chippy right next door, but even after you've put all these reasons together there's still an intangible "something" about the place that remains undefinable. A sense of belonging. More, a sense of continuity.

The Test Match was home to drinking buddies when I was attending the junior school less than five minutes walk away. Now it's home to some of my drinking buddies. And when I'm too old to make the 150-mile round trip to drink there, it will continue to be a haven from the frantic pace of the 21st century. With its quirky art-deco interior, some might look askance and think it just another seedy, run-down, suburban boozer. But they don't know the heart that lives there. Countless years of good times, good friends and good vibes have soaked into its bricks and its plaster and imbue the rooms with a welcoming aura unsurpassed by any other single hostelry of my experience. Long may it thrive.