Mad Darby Diaries

 I have spent the last two weeks with my grandson who is a confident 6 year old, not shy in voicing an  opinion or being critical.  'You're rather hopeless at drawing aren't you Grandma?  I can teach you how to draw a tank.'   'Mm,'  he said, staring at my pathetic efforts, 'you're just not very good at it, are you?'  We visited my adult grandson in Kettering and we were playing hide and seek.  Looking up  at his 6' 4'' uncle he said, 'Would you like a rest because you're not very good at hiding?' He announced yesterday that he had lots of ideas of how to get rid of Trump, Johnson and Putin, and he did, but my favourite was putting them into a car with ejector seats and sending them to syrup land. France has been saved once again from the far right taking control but it there are a scary number of people who support Le Pen.  I am not a fan of Macron but I can tolerate him, although he needs to come down from his high opinion o...

 This is the week all my  sons are gathered in the same place.  There is something special about that, especially after the enforced separation caused by the pandemic.  Since my visit to the UK at Christmas, one son has acquired 2 cats, not yet fully grown, and they have led us on a merry dance with their antics.  I am not a cat lover, more of a cat tolerater so it was somewhat disturbing to be woken up during my first night here by cats walking across my head.  I tried turfing them out but as I sleep in the attic and there is no door, I gave up  and waited for them to stop leaping about, an event that was never going to happen.  The second night my  son blocked the stairs to the attic with a screen,  to no avail.  I caught them up on the roof having escaped through the Velux window.  Now I  know  where the term 'cat burglar' comes from.   Yesterday I took  my grandson for a walk and stopped in a pub fo...

 People complain about bureaucracy in France and it is true that it can be a bit convoluted, but it does function and work if you produce the correct paperwork.  I am in the UK at the moment and nothing seems to function.  After 8 months, HMRC finally  answered the phone but they couldn't explain why there was a problem, although they did acknowledge that a problem clearly exists.  No, they couldn't do anything to rectify their obvious errors because they were dealing with queries from 2020. My son had a scan five months ago and has yet to receive the results.  My sister has been told that she could expect to have her cataract operation, which she badly needs, in about five years time.  As she put it bluntly, 'I probably won't care whether I can see or not by then.' We went for a walk yesterday along the canal and had lunch in a pub.  What a joy it was to see a whole table of adults with learning disabilities enjoying their Sunday roast.  Why...