21/06/23 Southend

Went to Southend for a bit of a walk along the front and some lunch. There's only one lunch to have in in Southend so we went to a place we've used several times before for fish & chips. Disaster! Chips so underdone as to be close to raw in the centre. We had to send them back.
Then took the train to the end of the pier. At 1.3 miles long it's too far to walk these days. I thought this photo was worth posting:

And when we got back to the car, we had a parking ticket. For parking outside a marked bay. Well, the markings were so faded as to be near invisible. We have photos and are challenging the ticket...

17/06/23 Anchor

Nothing new of any significance, just some warmer weather and lunch today at the Anchor on the banks of the Crouch. Excellent lunch it was too. I had a fancy mushroom fusili, and the Eton Mess in the photo was Sue's not mine. I had the out-of-focus blueberry cheesecake in the background. All photos by Sue, and taken from a Facebook post.

11/06/23 Marks Hall

 Just some photos from a beautiful day at a favourite place.

080623 Numbers

I now have a collection of five hospital numbers from five different hospitals, and that doesn't include Princess Alexandra or Guy's. I probably have numbers for them as well somewhere in my records, if I didn't shred them when we moved. So a possible total of seven from adult life, eight if we go back far enough to include Poole - that one definitely lost in the mists of time, if I ever had one. Another sign of getting older, I suppose.

08/06/23 Appointment

My appointment at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital came through - October 9th. Rather longer than I'd hoped for but that's the way the NHS is these days. Perhaps I'll get lucky with another cancellation. One slightly worrying thing is that the orthopaedic surgeon I'm seeing has his specialities listed as sarcoma and metastatic disease. I don't have the slightest reason to suppose I have either of those and if a hint of one of them had appeared in that recent CT scan, my unofficial medical adviser has quite rightly pointed out, I would be on a 2-week urgent cancer referral. But the stupid worm of doubt in my mind won't accept that...

Boules at Towe yesterday went quite well - played two, won two on  a very difficult stony "terrain" where a lot of the throws went off at 45 degrees (or worse) on first bounce. Fortunately my partner was a very good shooter, and that's invaluable on such tricky ground.

I was not put into a good mood on arrival, because the car park had been re-decorated, courtesy of some morons and the local foxes:

Also had a copy of the clinic letter from the Springfield orthopaedic surgeon. He says I should continue using a stick and avoid putting any extra load on my left leg. I had worked that out!