The morning email included something from Dr.Chowdhury's secretary - subject line "Patient letter". It was a "secure message" encrypted by something called Egress, which I'm already familiar with because The London Clinic use it for their communication with me. Decrypting it would have been simple if it had been sent to the same email address that the Clinic use - but it was sent to a different email address. My fault, perhaps, for having so many of them.
I sent the secretary a message via Egress explaining the problem and asking her to re-send to the other address. Then I went down to the kitchen and set about sorting my hoard of excess strawberries (thank you, Tesco!) into ones likely to last three days and the others already starting to go a little soft and mushy. I boiled those up with a little sugar, macerated them with a potato masher, sieved off the juice from the strawberry pulp and reduced it to a small volume of essence of strawberry - all while making a batch of spreadable butter with the Thermomix and sorting out a few problems with the iPad before Sue needed it for a conference call this evening with some of her wind band musicians.
We had a light lunch with our new supplies of cheese and then went for our daily "exercise", intending to walk along the main road towards Chelmsford and back. Not the most interesting walk, and at several places you are forced into the road by narrow (or missing) pavements or overhanging hedges - not too much of a problem at this time of year. No pavement at all on the other side of the road, which means that on the way back you have no choice but to have the traffic coming at you from behind. So we decided to divert onto a public right of way across the fields, almost opposite the house. Walter the Trionic walker coped with the difficult surface wonderfully well with his 12" pneumatic tyres and syncro steering. Nor ordinary walker would have got far on that track. Well worth the 700 GBP cost - or 20% more if you pay the VAT, which I didn't as I claimed disabled exemption.
After that we finalised the paperwork needed to update and simplify our wills and I emailed it all off to our solicitors Some satisfaction there in getting a long-delayed job done - and in these days, you never know when one or both of them may be needed.
Then it was Sainsbury. We've been trying to get me priority for delivery slots as "extremely vulnerable" but despite registering (at least twice) on the gov.uk site that Sainsbury pointed me towards, nothing happened. Sue 'phoned while I had my long-established Sainsbury account open on my computer. To cut a long story short (or else this will be a very long post) she didn't really get very far and my account disappeared. Trying to log in again didn't work, and then it was treated as a new account - and they're not accepting new accounts at the moment.
I tried my luck on the phone, and got hold of a woman who must have been at the end of a long hard day dealing with difficult customers. That's the politest way I can put it. Once I had explained the problem - which I could only do by talking over her - she told me she could only speak to Sue and that there could only be one account per household (which I suppose does make sense in these times). Sue was on that videoconferencing call so I really didn't want to disturb her. In the end I did call her, and the Sainsbury woman helpfully terminated the call.
Sue tried again, and got through to a much more helpful Scotsman who sorted it all out. We now have just the one Sainsbury account (Sue's), and we're promised that it will have priority status because of my age and blood cancer. All we have to do is wait for a confirming email...
That brings me back to the secure Egress email. The secretary wasn't responding to my emails and I discovered that the phone number I had for her was an appointments-only one and no use to me. So I bit the bullet and set up a new Egress account with the "wrong" email address. That gave me access to the secure message, which was a copy of Dr.Chowdhury's most recent letter to my GP (I've had copies of those through the post up till now). I'm sorely tempted to post an image of it.
It has a formal letterhead, it's addressed to my GP, and it finishes with a 'Yours sincerely' from my consultant. In between the two, nothing. Nothing at all. A perfect and absolute blank.
All that effort and annoyance for literally nothing. I've sent the secretary another message with the letter attached and asking her to try again.
As I wrote back at the start, a good day and a bad day rolled into one. And now I'm going to go and have a blob of ice cream with strawberries drizzled with essence of strawberry.
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