Safe and Secure

I’m not a great one for wearing poppies, but I do donate.  I suppose it’s mainly because I seem to hate logos and badges of all sorts.  Even at an important do, where name badges are compulsory, you’ll find that mine will accidentally fall off.  Perhaps, I don’t be like to be labelled.

I took my two-minute silence at exactly eleven this morning on Hampstead Heath overlooking London.  It is one of my favourite spots and it was where I went when I first heard about the three cancers my family have suffered in recent years; my husband, Mary and Harry.  I went when the first two died and I shall probably go when Harry passes on too.

If you want to visit the spot, just go to the place where Judi Dench picked up Kate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal.  There is a picture in this post.

I haven’t said much about my new man.  There was a few posts earlier, but I deleted them when I effectively closed the blog.  It’s now nearly a year since we met and I feel that I am now part of a large extended family, as he has quite a few siblings.

Two have phoned this morning and it’s contact, I’ve not had since Mary died.

I can understand why sometimes large families are so much better than the small one I belong to!

I got up at six-thirty and have had a good long swim.  Naked!  It so much better and there is nothing to wash afterwards except yourself in a nice warm shower.  Especially, as I’ve got one of those walk in jobs with a computer that controls the temperature.  I just press the button and the water is delivered at the same temperature as when I switched it off. 

How much hot water would we all save if all showers were like that?  Baths are only for sharing with others, champagne and soapy bubbles, but not for getting clean!  Although you might get up to some things that others find dirty!

My family or possibly me, must be cursed.

So my husband had a good life and probably lived his term, but he didn’t die the best of deaths and left me alone.

My sister, Mary, lives a virtuous life and then dies before sixty of a horrific cancer, that bloated her and left her without any pleasure except her wit.

And now, I’m going through it all with Harry.

At least my daughter and her family will be coming early today to help me. Not with Harry, but with my own hopes, fears and feelings.  They expect a widow like me to be able to cope.  I can’t!  And it gets worse!

My new man will also arrive.  But then is it any better for him, as he is a widower too and has been through all this.  But we are stronger together, than we are alone.

It is now time to get dressed and go to Waitrose.  It’s funny but since I heard about Harry’s cancer, I’ve been corsetting tighter, showing more cleavage and wearing higher heels and some of my more extreme leather suits.

Is it that I’m saying to him, that I’ll be strong and you needn’t worry about your mother?

But at least, if the worst happens, I won’t be lonely.  Just very, very sad and unhappy!

It used to be that if you challenged your solicitor, that you couldn’t publicise this on your web site or blog. In many cases, this also applied when you won. As obviously, who would want to see that a certain lawyer was useless.

But not anymore!

Private Eye has now won a case, which means that you can publish the rulings against lawyers.

Mary would have approved.  She always said that too many professionals get away with incompetence.

I was leafing through The Times website when I this article about the Top 50 Spurs Players.

Now I was eleven when Spurs won the first League and Cup double in 1961.  I only went once that year and that was to the match where they were presented with the league trophy.  Incidentally, they lost and that has been typical of my football watchingf.  If I go, the team loses.

My father though was regular and had been at the Cup Final in 1921, when they had previously won the FA Cup.  He used to regale me with tales of such as Taffy O’Callaghan, Alf Ramsey and Ted Ditchburn.  I didn’t see any of them.  I should say that I was the one who would listen to his tales of football, so it was me who eventually got taken.  Mary just wasn’t interested.

But in the article they mention Tommy Harmer.

I never saw him, as he left Spurs before my father used to take me to White Hart Lane.  But my father had a soft spot for him, as Harmer was not unlike my father in being short in stature and wiry.  As my father would say, Harmer had more tricks than several hundred magicians.  He would delight in showing with all the actions how Harmer would take a ball from a short pass from a corner kick and then dance his way up the goal line into the penalty area.  (My father had form as a dancer, as he had actually appeared on stage! I don’t think he had been very good!) But Harmer was and in many cases he either got a penalty or the ball was laid back for someone to hafve a shot from close range.

I’ve never seen anybody do anything like that, although I’m told George Best did it a few times.

But I’d love to see someone have a go.

I did see an awful lot of Jimmy Greaves, Pat Jennings, Alan Gilzean and those of that generation in the later 1960’s amd early 70’s.

Those were the days.

But then I had my kids and life got rather restricted.

There was a program last night, that I watched on great British female singers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Standing out was Dusty Springfield.  I still occasionally listen to some of her fabulous songs. 

She was actually another Mary, like my sister.  And like my sister she died of cancer before her time.

Gerald Butler was one of my sister Mary’s favourite judges.

He’s really done it today by saying that Cherie Blair shouldn’t be a judge because of her indiscrete memoirs. 

It will be interesting how this spat ends.

Humph was somebody who made me smile a lot.  He did the same to my sister and Mary listened to his programmes a lot as she lay dying.  Now he’s gone too.

He will be missed by all.  He was truely a British institution.

I don’t know what will happen to this blog.

But for the moment, I’m just going to watch it, reply to comments and probably will not add any new posts. 

I just don’t feel like it.

Some have doubted the blog’s reality and said elsewhere that this blog is fiction. But I can assure you that the harrowing posts of the last few days are real and timed exactly how the events happened, even if I was sometimes late in posting. (I was rather busy.)

Mary died at one-fifteen tonight of complications from an exceedingly rare squamous cell carcinoma of the heart.  I hope that if anybody else ever suffers from such a disease, then the modest words here will be of some guidance to themselves and their carers.

It is up to the readers to judge how much of the rest is true.

Mary died at one fifteen this morning after not really regaining consciousness from being put to bed by the nurses.

It was a peaceful death and we’ll all miss her.