For a strange reason which I cannot attempt to discern, my Microsoft Outlook account was incredibly difficult to access this morning but I managed it eventually after 30 minutes of going round the houses. These mornings, I tend to wake up at about 5.15 and then I lie quietly in bed listening to the soothing collection of tracks which ClassicFM plays at this time in the morning before I get up to start the day at about 5.50. This morning the weather looks sets fair and I am contemplating making a trip to Droitwich where I want to visit a little jeweller to whom I have been recommended to get a new chain for Meg's Mexican medallion. She wore this constantly but I want to donate it to a close family member but with constant use the existing chain broke and needs to be replaced. I don't think that I have been to Droitwich for the past few months so I will go into the cafe that we used to frequent and acquaint them with the sad news of Meg's passing. Also, I have one or two favourite charity shops and what used to be the old Wilkinson's store which I think was made into a Poundland superstore if my memory serves me correct. Some of my regular routines are a little out of kilter this morning as it is approaching mid-August and people are away on holiday. For example, the Methodist centre in town has a wonderful coffee bar and meeting area complete with a 'chatty table' but they close down during the month of August so that it can have a spring clean and the regular attenders go on holiday. So I think I will be pleased once this month is out of the way and normal life resumes in the early autumn. The day before when my son and daughter-in-law had called around, they helped me to sort out the interactions between my Teacher's pension and my tax affairs. I have inherited a portion of Meg's pension but evidently a dead person cannot be taxed and so the tax accrued to me, But HMRC system seems, although I am not sure, to have reallocated some of Meg's personal allowance to me without any intervention on my part. I am receiving letters from the Teachers' Pension Agency in which none of the stated amounts match up at all with the previous information they sent me only a week or so ago and meanwhile the Inland Revenue are sending me communications which are as clear as mud. I think I am going to sit back and do nothing and see what income flows actually occur during the month of August so that I can keep track of things which seem to have been more complicated since Meg's death three months ago now than they were before. Whilst I was with the family yesterday, we were laughing about the fact that I must have become a familiar sight across Bromsgrove and known to people who did not even know our name. After all, there are not many people with a Korean cow leather jacket sporting a hi-visibility vest and with an Australian style bush hat (minus the corks!) pushing a wife up and down in a wheelchair down to Bromsgrove several times a week. I am stopped on a fairly regular basis by people who now solicitously ask, when they see me on my own, 'How is your wife?' only to be a bit shocked when they learn of her death. Eventually, of course, all of this will cease but it is true that friends of friends have observed me in the past and the news actually did spread.
One of my near neighbours posts a copy of the local newspaper and I generally give it a cursory glance but today, one particular story caught my eye. About a year or so ago now, I must have been pushing Meg up and down the Bromsgrove High Street when we espied a new coffee shop which was actual the finance producing arm of a charity for abandoned horse and other animals. We were about the only people in the shop and we engaged the owner in conversation. The shop had been very carefully and tastefully refitted at a cost of some £30k but as well serving coffee and home-made cake, there were also some selected pieces of furniture and 'objets d'art' all available for sale. But we were told a terrible story that the new owners of this store had only been open for about a fortnight when they were given notice to quit because another nearby charity had offered more rent to the developers so the animal charity proprietors were being turfed out. I was horrified by this story and said that I would patronise them again as soon as they found a new shop for their venture and I read in the newspaper that they have, indeed, secured some new premises just off the High Street and they are going to be opening this Friday. So I am certainly going to make a great effort to seek them out and to patronise them regularly as Meg and I had been given a wonderfully warm reception when we took our coffee there a year ago.
I did take myself off to Droitwich down the road and succeeded in my principal objective which was to buy a new fine sterling silver chain for Meg's medallion of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The old broken chain made of Mexican silver was weight and they gave me £5.00 of credit for it to help defray the price of the new chain. But the rest of my visit to Droitwich - the first since Meg's passing - was rather a bitter-sweet experience, not helped by the fact that of the three shops that I visited, none of them contained any of the items (some as prosaic as Brillo pads) for which I was looking. So, I came home and cooked myself a meat and two veg type dinner before I do some weeding as it is 'brown bin collection day' this week and I need to seize the opportunity to weed when I can. I generally dispose of the tallest and most unsightly weeds at the front of the house on these occasions so the house looks inhabited.
© Mike Hart [2025]