31March1996

My dear folks,

Sunday afternoon. There’s a blue & white sky framed against the window that looks exactly like the blue & white sky screensaver on my computer. Every so often it’s backlit by a brief burst of ressurectional sunlight. My CD is playing highlights from the last night of the Proms. It’s music which hearkens back to a grander age when adventurers proclaimed large bits of earth extensions of England in the name of God and Queen, somewhat to the surprise of the locals who had their own enough of their gods and queens. Mavis is trying to tell me that he’s starving in spite of the half plate of biscuits left over from breakfast. He likes his evening goo better than breakfast biscuits & feigns famished wobbly walks to illustrate his supposedly ravenous state.

Tinkle goes the phone & a fax pours out of the machine from Cathy! How nice sister! Make no apologies for your handwriting which is perfectly legible &, by Benson standards at least, quite neat. I am sorry to hear about your Delhi belly. I keep such things at bay with regular small doses of red wine or - as at present - drops of KWV XO - which, as a bonus, is also a superb tipple. It’s a formula I can recommend to you. Thank you again brother, Brendan. Cathy, I’m off to Portugal for a week on Saturday 13 April - more or less as you return from the farm. Have a super break! Annie! Mark’s health is alarming. I recommend to you a visit to London during which the pair of you can relax & catch up with the latest London musicals. June is a very pleasant month! What about it? In another five hours I shall be able to gain access to my email to read Alan’s message. That will be a big moment in my life.

I got in an uninterrupted 3 hours on the computer this p.m., trying out several applications available on a CD ROM from my computer mag. Most of these are of little use & nearly all of them are shareware, i.e. you are obliged to register them & send off a fee or the application (generally) seizes up after a set period. To my frustration, a couple of them were so difficult to install that a solid hour of hard effort came to nothing. I did install several others, tested them out & - with 1 exception - got rid of them again. That weren’t worth the space they occupied. One marvellous programme I bought last year monitors all such installations, giving you little reassuring messages all the while & if you don’t like what you’re seeing, it gets rid of them again.

The woman who owns several of the flats I look after dropped in around 11.00 for a review. I’ve been spending a lot of her money recently, not to speak of my own time! I suggested that I might hand a couple of the most troublesome flats over to professional agents. I was relieved to find that it was fine by her. Afterwards, she stood me to lunch at the Elgin Lokanta. From there she left for the airport en route to Calgary for a week’s skiing in the Rockies. She’s a granny but so fit & lithe as to belie the image entirely. She spends much of her time in the gym & had just returned from a week’s skiing in Austria when I saw her. That’s the way to live.

I got in a brisk walk later, threading my way through the park, picking up 3 bottles of red wine at the bottle store & doing a rapid tour of Maida Vale to get some exercise. If tomorrow’s half nice, I shall take myself off up the river. I need to stretch my legs. I longed to have a dog to walk this p.m. Tomba, where are you? A stick is a poor companion by comparison. The sun has reappeared for a final bow before ducking below the horizon. Reminds me, when I started up the computer this a.m. it flashed up a message saying it had altered the clock from winter to summer time & was this in order please? I gave it a little pat on its cyber bum to reassure it. It’s not as nice to pat as Jonesy’s but I guess that’s a good thing. Love you lots. T