"Are my seams straight, on my surgical stockings?"

Today is my 10th day after discharge from hospital - I'm a "recovering hippo-holic" [phrase partial copyright: comedian Richard Lewis], with a shiny new hip inside me, but I'm still having to wear a pair of fetching white surgical open-toe TED-style "compression" stockings, which need changing every 2 days.

They're really close-fitting, and somebody in my position in Malvern society obviously can't afford to be seen with wrinkles in my surgical stockings, needless to say.

When I was in hospital, how the nurses fought to get my surgical stockings on and off me! - which sounds more exciting than it really was [You don't say! - Ed]. And now that I've been discharged, my poor long-suffering wife Lois has to do the job instead - usually when we go up to bed for our afternoon nap. Today she has found a YouTube video which explains the quickest way do it, and it proves to be a real life-saver:

14:00 This afternoon when we go up for our nap she has another go at me flat out on the bed, and with the best results ever - not a wrinkle in sight - it's just my legs that are wrinkled now, but then that's a given at our age, isn't it - be fair!!!

later I showcase my wrinkle-free stockings for the cameras,

plus my somewhat wrinkle-ridden knees [not shown]

15:30 When we've finished our nap I have a potentially embarrassing telephone appointment with one of the doctors at our local GP surgery. I have to confess that Lois and I have lost the little pack of medications that the hospital gave me on discharge. Luckily I get that nice Doctor Sarah who just laughs and agrees to prescribe some more, which we hope to pick up tomorrow morning when we go round there for our COVID vaccine booster.

It's embarrassing to admit that you've made the kind of mistake even a 6-year-old child wouldn't make, but I try to say to Doctor Sarah that we've "only just moved into this house", having downsized from our house in Cheltenham after 36 years, and that "everything is still in a bit of a mess here, still". 

This excuse is wearing a little thin now after 18 months, but it's still the best we've got at the moment. If you've got any suggestions for any new ones we could start using, then postcards welcome as usual! 

flashback to November 1st 2022: Lois in our new living-room in Malvern

the day after we move from our much bigger house in Cheltenham

Plausible excuses are worth their weight in gold, aren't they. Did you read about poor local man Jason Lochrie recently, on Onion News?

Poor Jason!!!! Lois and I have been retired now for 18 years, but we still remember a bit about our old jobs. Work is a tyranny isn't it, especially when it comes to finding excuses - they soon run out, and people also eventually tend to notice if you have a "rota system" for choosing your next excuse to "pull out of the bag", even if the rota has been encrypted by a massive computer, as I found out when I was still working. 

"You're busted, Colin!", I remember my workmates saying to me triumphantly one morning.

Our daughter Alison, now 49, is now fortunately able to give up her job as a classroom assistant at a local primary school where she and her family live, near Headley, Hampshire. It's a pretty meagre salary that she gets, and she understandably finds it irritating to be asked from time to time to fill in as class teacher, when there's an unexpected gap in staffing - but still being expected to do it on her meagre "teaching assistant" salary.

flashback to 2019: Ali Ed with their 3 children, at Wembley Stadium

Lois and I suspect that her husband Ed is maybe suddenly earning a lot more money now, to put it mildly. A legal adviser for some of the UK's railway company boards, Ed is, according to Alison, doing less and less actual legal work these days, which makes Lois and me suspect that he's doing more "director"-style work. We know he's already playing a part "cosying up" to figures in the Labour Party, in the expectation that they'll be forming our next government.

Yikes! When your children are in that awkward "student phase", you don't expect that they and/or their eventual spouses to be moving in those types of circles in decades to come, do you. My goodness!!!

flashback to 1997: Ali and Ed (left) when they were just

humble university students at Cardiff, seen here with

our other daughter Sarah, and Lois, at the stepping-stones,

Ogmore, S.Wales, the ones that my mother crossed every day 

to go to school in the 1920's

Happy days !!!!!

Ali's time has been stretched to breaking-point recently - doing her classroom assistant job, and then coming home to look after their crumbling Victorian mansion with its 6.5 acre grounds, and ferrying the couple's three teenage children here there and everywhere. All three have exciting trips abroad scheduled with their schools in the next 12 months taking part in various projects: Josie (17) in Tanzania, Rosalind (15) in Ecuador, and Isaac (13) in China - he's studying Mandarin.

All of that lay far in the future, back on that day in August 1997 - picture above, when Lois and I were celebrating our Silver Wedding with a trip to S.Wales to see the areas around Bridgend, where my mother grew up in the 1920's.

You just don't know what the future holds, do you? [Have you only just realised that, Colin? - Ed]