Tuesday and another day of self maintenance. I wake, I take my vitals, once again all good and get up early. The rest of my morning was spent Hoovering around and putting clothes away, they seem to distribute themselves all over the place. I also arrange a visitors pass to the gym for my eldest daughter who is going to train while I and my partner are going to have our nails done.

On the stroke of noon I and my partner enter the Spa at the gym having left our eldest in the gym. My partner is having the lot done, hands and feet but I am just having my subtly sparkled nails done. The two beauticians sit and get to work on us whilst chatting and keeping us amused. My nails have to be cleaned down to the original nail and then four layers of stuff applied. Each new layer is baked in a nifty little UV hand oven. After about an hour I have my sparkly nails back. I am growing accustomed to them but I notice that just occasionally someone notices them. God knows what they think as they spot them alongside my long white hair, sometimes with a Viking runic bead in the end of it. Although I can probably guess.

The family come together in the gym lounge and move off home, for me to spend the afternoon reading more of Let it Bleed, the Rebus novel. I have the luxury of a long reading session until tea. The family were looking forward to a good old fish and chip supper but were thwarted by the the chippy being closed. That’s 20% of the village shops being closed, the owners are away in Cyprus till the 25th of August on their annual trip home. Which just leaves the Indian, which no one wants. So for the first time in my life I am persuaded by my eldest daughter to order Nandos, yes Nandos! I start to watch a football match until it arrives I admit I am dubious about my lemon and something butterfly chicken with rice and Peruvian tomato salad, neatly packaged in little boxes. I am pleasantly surprised, it tastes okay, I did note just how small a chicken it must have been. The Peruvian had slices of a green thing in it that I could not identify, so that got left but the rest was fine. So having eaten and seen Rangers go 3-0 up in the European qualifier I switched over to watch Korea week on the Greta British Sewing Bee. The pattern challenge was difficult and the made to measure was tricky as well. It was obvious from the start who was struggling and sure enough come the end of the show the welsh women with the strange hat went. There was just time for an episode of Sinner before taking the bins out, taking my meds and heading for bed.

Wednesday and a call wakes me to tell me that the new cold frame is being delivered in 45 minutes. I take my vitals, which are all good and get up to make warm drinks for myself and my partner. She leaves quite soon with her brother to visit their mother and sort out stuff with the carers. So I am left to assemble the the new raised cold frame. I gather up my tools and and wheel the flat pack round to the patio where I unpack it and begin assembly. It all goes well until I find that on one pair of slots the grub screw passes though the retaining slot, which it should not do. I head for my garage workshop and fish out packs of washers and add them to the construction. After about two and a half hours I have the thing completed. I wrangle a couple of heavy duty paving slabs into place and erect the cold frame on them having levelled the ground. Eventually it is all done and the new cold frame is in place a few minutes before my partner returns.

My partner makes lunch and then she set about pricking out some seedings from cold frame number one into pots for the new cold frame. Its a laborious job which I leave her to as I clear my tools away and tidy up. What’s is clear is that we do not have enough compost so after a period of repotting my partner and I drive off to the local garden centre and have a snack and buy compost and some more plants that were ridiculously cheap, I mean Hosters at £2 a throw is good value. So we return home to find that the bird feed peanuts I have order have arrived. Everything is barrowed into the back garden, things put away and watering done. Eventually its time to stop so that my partner can go out to the pub with a friend and I can draft the blog whilst listening to the Prom concert (Rachmaninov piano concerto No.2) A rare oasis of calm. It feels like a busy day but tomorrow I need to train and begin to get ready to go on holiday on Saturday. There will food, night meds and sleep and a lingering sense that I am somehow falling short, I’ve not made progress on the new website nor have a written any letters or any poetry. There is nagging sense of something but I cannot put my finger on it or my pen to it, yet.