Absence explained

My parents have been staying here for the past week, and as usual have done great things, bringing order out of chaos and doing some of the jobs in the flat I've meant to do and several which I'd never realised needed doing. On Thursday my mother, my sister and I went to Bath, where we toured the Museum of Costume, shivered in sub-zero temperatures, met a very talkative robin and a friendly cat (both of which probably saw human beings as gullible meal tickets) and searched for Jane Austen's house, now divided into three flats and inhabited that afternoon by a sewing circle.

On Friday evening I abandoned my flat to my parents entirely, and migrated to London to move pennypaperbrain. I'd expected to be part of a moving party three or four strong, but in the event the other hands either phoned in sick or just didn't show, and Penny and I were left with a van and the contents of the flat. Thanks to Penny's packing skill we were able to make only two trips, but complicated and ingenious packing leads to complex and imaginative unpacking, and negotiating a goods cage that once belonged to Superdrug, and an ex-Bull trolley designed for wheeling PCs around, through the narrow doors between the car park and the liftwells, and up to the flat.

The flat is a spacious studio room with a small balcony and an excellent view; it's a great improvement on Penny's previous domicile. Thankfully the vendors had left behind a sofabed so I didn't have to sleep on the floor, which I avoid where I can. Once the twelve-hour ordeal was finished, what had seemed like one of the most difficult days of my life suddenly looked much better. I was fed by Penny at a new Indian restaurant; so new, in fact, that most of their desserts hadn't arrived from their supplier, and nor, in fact, had their coffee machine. The final bizarre note came at 1.18am when I awoke to find Penny's pale face looking down at me, seemingly intoning a news report from the BBC World Service in a male RP voice - apparently I'd been snoring so loudly (not a usual problem as far as I know - perhaps it was something to do with the angle) that she had been forced to consider sleeping in the bath, and I had also fallen asleep with my radio headphones on.

Reflection on a decade

It occurred to me that, in its way, Friday night, when I travelled into London to help pennypaperbrain move, was the tenth anniversary of her election as SocT president. The date was wrong, but it was AGM night; and it's unlike me to miss AGMs. Congratulations to CJ and the new committee.