It's 6am [Tuesday 21 April]. I'm just home from driving my last visitor to the morning ferry for her journey home to Glasgow.
For the last month and more I have had visitors. It's been wonderful. Fraser of my New Zealand family and his partner came and stayed for a while and for the last week, Sue, one of my oldest friends has been staying.
John and Sue came to the Island, as I did, in 1974 but they arrived a few months earlier. We became close friends almost immediately and we have been close friends ever since then although, sadly, John died in 2019. When John retired they moved to Glasgow to be nearer their children. My surviving son, on the other hand, is an Islander through and through and still lives here (although he's away at sea a lot - he's a chief engineer on super-yachts). Working at sea was - and to some extent is - typical of Islanders from here.
The first thing I discovered when I tried to blog this morning was that my absence from Blogland (I assume that was the reason) meant that I had to jump through hoops to get back into my blog. I even had to find my password which was rather frightening for a while.
Apart from having just become Treasurer of the Bowling Club almost my commitments are easing off. I have discovered that I'm not as young as I was although I am, I confess, surprised at how much energy I have lost now I'm in my 80s.
My parents were still walking up Blencathra in the English Lake District when they were in their late 80s and early 90s. In my early 80s I still frequently walk the three miles rounds the Castle Grounds but it's fairly flat and the 'usual' walk is just 3 miles.
I wrote the above on the date at the start of the post and then went out and when I came back I couldn't get into my blog. I've no idea what happened but it was a bit scary. All those years of blogging and all of a sudden......nothing. Until this evening when I tried a different platform and in I got: but I had to use my password. Thank heaven it was stored away somewhere.
So I shall post this whilst all is going well. Hopefully a more interesting post will follow soon.