08:00 Lois and I wake up in our enormous bed in the luxurious Hawkswell House Hotel in Iffley, Oxford.
How nice to find that we're waking up here again, where we've had so many really good times in the past, even though not all our stays at the hotel have exactly been fun occasions - there are two I remember as funeral-related stays.
In 2011 we stayed here when my mother's ashes were interred in her parents' grave at Rose Hill Cemetery, and in 2019 we stayed here again after the funeral of my Auntie Bobby, who was my mother's sister-in-law and the last of that generation to pass on.
In 2011, I remember that it was nice weather and Lois and I were outside in the hotel gardens after my mother's interment ceremony, when my dear late sister Kathy phoned me from the US to ask how it all went - she hadn't been able to attend the interment due to her own poor health.
Still - happier times today, and we decide to have the nice cooked breakfast in the dining-room. It's a pity that it's all self-service now however, with staff - all East Europeans - just standing around offering to help you if you get stuck.
The thing I hate most about self-service hotel breakfasts is doing the toast: you have to work how to do it, and it takes forever, and meanwhile other people sometimes try to slip their own bread selection in, or else a massive queue builds up - both unattractive outcomes, if you ask us!
What madness!!! So today we decide to skip the toast and just have fruit juice and cereal followed by a plate of bacon, scrambled egg and sausage with tomato, with a cup of decaf tea.
Call us mad unconventional freaks if you like haha!
10:00 We check out of the hotel and get on the road home to Malvern. Yes, it's weird, but suddenly Malvern seems really like "home" at last, even though we've only been there 2 months.
It's soon raining really hard, and it turns out to be a really unpleasant journey. Added to that, it suddenly occurs to me that I may have left my phone charger back in our hotel room, and that bothers me all the way home. Crazy isn't it, how one gets these ideas. And when we arrive home I find that I didn't leave it behind after all, and it's there, safe and sound, in my bag of "extras". Total madness !!!!
When we get back to our street in Malvern, it's nice to see no building work going on, and all the houses on the opposite side of the street look as if they're either occupied or ready-to-be-occupied, which is nice. Hopefully it won't seem quite so much like living on a building-site from now on.
I feel really exhausted today from the effort of concentrating at the wheel for nearly 2 hours this morning, in order to drive us the 75 miles safely through all the heavy rain. I'm just not used to having to do that these days - and the pandemic and associated lockdowns didn't help with that, no doubt about it.
When we get back at midday we find a bunch of nice Christmas cards on our doormat and also our 2023 calendar made up of our own photos from 2022, all of ourselves and our two daughters' families, Alison's in Hampshire UK and Sarah's family in Perth, Australia, plus photos of my sister Gill and family in Cambridge.
The it's back up to bed for the afternoon. Tomorrow we'll have to get back to normal life, that's for sure.
Oh dear!
Later, as evening falls, we stumble out of bed again, and I take this picture of the other side of our street, which clearly shows that more couples are starting to move in there, which is nice.
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