Bah!

We had the engineer to the boiler yesterday and he replaced a part and said he was 90% sure he'd fixed the problem only by yesterday evening the leak was worse than ever so we rang for him to come back and arranged for Ruth to let him in because we'll be in Kent and this morning the boiler's not leaking at all...

Back in Kent

They'd closed a section of the M1, which let us in for a long, slow drag through the outskirts of Mansfield and made us late for lunch at Alice's. We stayed in Leicester for little more than an hour. Ivy is more outgoing than she was last time we saw her. Alice reckons she now has a vocabulary of about 200 words.

There've been changes in Kent. The new bathroom floor was laid this morning and Jenny has engaged a carer to come in every morning (starting Monday) to help my mother wash and dress. I feet very tired, slightly disorientated and- thanks to our choice of in-car listening- have snatches from the collected works of Peter Bellamy chasing one another through my head.