Found it!

I walked upstairs to bed and saw my watch winking shinily at me from a pile of junk in Rob's office. It was invisible from the step below and the step above, but it caught the light just right and I found it. Yes, we had already looked there.

So I have my ring, because I found it, and Rob has his ring, because I collected it from the jewellers where he took it to be mended.

I love, by the way, my caterers.

The Weekend Has Begun

So today I tidied the house ready for the cleaners, then Janice came over to work from here - we have better bandwidth, and getting from Reading to Oxford today would have been a little awkward.

I made lunch for Janice and Rob and we ate it inthe garden. Janice came out to find a tray with potato salad, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, tea, coffee, bread, cheese, etc etc - and siad "So this is what it's like to have a wife! I can see why it's so popular!" Put like that, it really is much easier to see why men objected so strenuously to the loss of the guaranteed housewife. It really is.

After lunch I went to visit our neighbours, who I have neglected terribly for about a year. Jean and Ray were among the first to talk to me after I moved in to this house and are a lovely, lovely couple in their early sixties. Neither of them is blessed with good health, and I feel quite bad for having become so wrapped up in my job and illness that I abandoned them. But I made it over and stayed for about 3 hours, I think, and had a lovely time. We're going to pop in just before the wedding so that they can see our clothes, because there's no way Ray could get to the wedding, and anyway, they wouldn't know anyone.

So then Janice and I went and worked some on her bridesmaiding dress, and then we came back and barbequed some burgers and some sweetcorn. The sweetcorn was a bit of a disaster.

It feels like weeks since we woke up, not less than a day.