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...

 Have you ever felt, or looked like a goldfish?  We all know  someone  who talks incessantly, totally unaware that perhaps the other person might like to say something, and never listens anyway.  I know  someone just like this.  This morning I had coffee with her.  Even when I managed to start a sentence, she limited to me to 3 words before she talked right over me.  I lasted an hour, not having managed to complete one sentence.  I said I had to go as I had lots to do when she stopped me in my tracks.  'I can't stand that woman, you know the fat one.  She talks and talks and never lets me get a word in edgeways.'  If she had been 'large' herself I would have shown her a mirror.  Two  weeks ago I turned the heating off, opened all the windows and  went for walks in the glorious, warm sunshine.  Today I kept the windows closed, put 4 layers on and huddled up in my winter coat as the temperatures plummeted...

 I played golf this week, the second time in a year so you can imagine the results.  I used to play a lot before I switched to tennis, and I wasn't too bad at it although I was never going to win anything.  The advantages of tennis is that it takes 3 hours at the most, it is invigorating because of all the running and we can play in all weathers - indoor courts.  Golf, I find, is exhausting, even though it is just walking around with a trolley, stopping occasionally to hit a ball.  It takes hours to get round the course and if you are like me you only  play in good weather.  Golfers tell me that you can play golf into your nineties.  Well, I read about a Ukranian who is 93 and still plays tennis.  He said the war was not going to stop him. All my neighbours have cats and one has dogs.   'Don't you have a cat?' they ask.  Well no I don't.  It is not because I dislike them, I have had dogs before, but they are a tie and I do...

Saumur was so relaxed today with the population finally able to walk around, go into shops, mingle freely, with no masks.   I don't care what some people say it is not natural in the western world to cover our faces.  I want to see the expressions and most of all I want to be able to understand what they are saying.  Finally we oldies can go back to lip reading. I asked for an estimate to re-cover 2 upright chairs and having waited 3 weeks to receive it I went to the shop and asked for it.  The next day they emailed it to me - 2000€!  As I could buy 2 new chairs for that, I binned it.  I was telling this to a French friend who said, 'Ah yes they do that, estimate ridiculous amounts, when they don't want to do the work.' We all ridicule the 'red book', an enormous tome, which details the legal working practices in France but ridicule no more.  P & O only sacked British workers as sacking a worker in France is fraught with difficulties and can b...

 'You can't teach an old dog new tricks' the saying goes but that is not strictly true.  Look at how the senior population have embraced the internet.  Of course I can't include my sisters who absolutely refuse to even use WhatsApp or for that matter get a mobile phone, let alone a computer.  There are some things that I would willingly embrace but I recognised that, even in my youth, I would never learn how to have a decent serve.  This morning, while playing doubles, I was being persuaded to stand at the net.  I know, having years of experience, that I do not perform well at the net, in fact I am  totally intimidated by a ball whizzing straight at me from 3 feet away, so instead of smashing it right back, I duck.  Thankfully my usual doubles partner knows this and we are a winning team with me running backwards and forwards, side to side at the back of the court while she intimidates the opposition on the other side of the net. This morning I wa...