11February1996

My dear folks,

A grey Sunday morning, softened by the musical genius of Mr Beethoven. Here in the study there is hardly any other sound to be heard, other than the background hum of the computer. No traffic, no sirens, no people! I like it. I know that tonight we will be cast back into relentless analyses of the Northern Ireland situation, with the same people saying the same thing for the thousandth time, as tho’ endless reiteration could change anything. The same blind prejudices & tribal allegiances & “it’s all their fault over & over again”. My fervent wish is that Northern Ireland would dislocate itself & float off into the Atlantic together with Bosnia & a few other of the earth’s festering haemorrhoids.

I heard Sinn Fein spokesman, Martin McGuinness, this a.m. - asked if he condemned Friday’s bomb - saying he first wanted to offer his sympathies to the families of the victims & I thought I’d have needed his sympathy like a kick in the crotch. Of course, all the political & security chiefs have gone into a huddle & we will no doubt issue solemn warnings later in the day & we’ll see what we’ll see in due course. Let me leave it there.

Jones & I supped last night with Penny & Richard as planned. I badly needed some exercise & we agreed to walk over to Islington. We reckoned on 2 hours & were just about right. Jones settled down for a chat with Richard who was preparing supper while Penny & I spent an hour on her computer. She was keen (having ploughed through the fundamentals of word processing & databases) to get on to spreadsheets. I confess I struggled to enlighten her. I set up half a dozen spreadsheets some years ago to calculate our Portuguese budget & booking schedule. Ever since then, I have taken the previous year’s model, deleted the old information & filled in the new. So it took rather more head-scratching & experimenting than I’d have wished. But we eventually got a model for an annual budget up & running & retired quite pleased with ourselves.

Our hosts had gone to some lengths to provide us with a banquet & we did it justice, staggering heavily if pleasantly laden into the night. Digestion demanded further exercise & we were pleased to wander for half an hour in the direction of home. We had the pavements largely to ourselves & the streets had rid themselves of the heavy evening traffic. The pubs were full of people for whom Saturday night was clearly an important occasion. A taxi conveyed us through the grottier bits of town & we alighted in St Johns Wood for a final half hour stroll home......... a taxi sandwich, I guess.

We found Ann’s account of her anniversary weekend waiting on the fax - thank you! I read it twice to myself & once aloud to Jones, assimilating her reflections on the economic & political environment of Kevin’s new job. Cathy has also been reflecting on the workloads confronting most of the family. I don’t think they’re good for one. Roll on that lottery win, whatever your doubts sister. We had a statistician tell us that to have a realistic chance of winning (a share of) the big prize, one had to invest a £1,000 a week for 60 years. That doesn’t deter the nation which tells itself that somebody’s got to win & it may as well be me. My news is that my last ticket won £10 & I can’t find the ticket. I’m not losing any sleep over it, irritating though it is. What does bother me is the thought that it might have been the big one & I’d be frantic!

We’re going to take a stroll through the park a little later & then I’ll get my head down for a couple of hours. Think of you lots!
Blessings!
T