Thursday August 18th 2022

A pleasant day in Malvern for Lois and me, accompanied by our elder daughter Alison and her three children Josie (15), Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12). Lois and I have been living in a house in Cheltenham for the last 36 years, but we've now reserved a brand new home in Malvern, still under construction, but we're hoping to move in at some time in the next couple of months.

First stop is a coffee-shop, "Café in the Green", in the Barnards Green area for a coffee and a piece of cake. The café is about a mile away from where our new home is going to be, which is in Strothers Avenue. One of the few downsides to our new home is gong to be the number of times we're going to have to spell that name "Strothers" for people who don't know the area.

Damn!!!! Still, let's not dwell on that now - it's a small point after all, in the grand scheme of things. Let's be fair haha!

We move on to the estate where our new home is being built. We can't go within about 20 yards of the house, because of health and safety - it's still under construction. So we start by just having a walk around the estate.

we call in at the estate's marketing suite to talk

to the salesladies

Then we visit the street our house is on -

it's one of the ones on the right in the yellowish "Cotswold" brick

After that we look round the so-called "show house", the one that's shown to all new prospective buyers. It's not exactly the same model as our house, but it's got a lot of features in common.

the living room

the dining-room

the bedrooms

See? And yes, I can see yet again that our "1930's house furniture" won't look at all right in these modern-style "spaces". What a pity! Still we can't just go along to IKEA and buy a whole lot of new furniture, can we. It would cost a fortune - damn !!!!!

13:00 It's lunchtime, so we drive to the nearby pub, "The Three Horseshoes", where Lois and I have already lunched about 3 times during our house-hunting exhibitions. It began feeling like our "local" even before we had finally decided to buy a house in the neighbourhood, which was nice.

The Three Horseshoes pub at Malvern

lunch at The Three Horseshoes" pub in Malvern

We drive back to Cheltenham, and around 4 pm it's time for a last nostalgic walk to the local football field, for the children to play on the equipment - something they've been doing on their visits here all their lives, so very nostalgic. This is their last chance before we move to Malvern.

There's a lot of new play equipment, however, that wasn't here when they first starting coming as little toddlers, that's for sure. In those days it was little more than some swings, a slide and a simple climbing frame.

20:00 We spend the evening watching a comedy film "Clockwise" from the 1980's starring John Cleese as a manic headmaster desperately trying to get to Norwich in time to make the keynote speech at the national headmasters' association's annual conference.

Tremendous fun !!!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!!