So, I said airily, I have taken the afternoon off. I didn’t think it through at the time (the malevolent combined power of Lemsip and red wine, perhaps) but of course, all that means is that you’ve got more to do the next day.

Smart people learn from their mistakes. Really lazy ones just shrug and go and play with the baby.

An annoying morning trying to get travel insurance, went through all the hoops and then it said it couldn’t print out the policy because of unidentified error 99999. Hm. I don’t know if it has taken my money or not and emailed to ask. No reply as yet except a promise that an acknowledgement with a reference number has been emailed to me. It hasn’t. They were fine last year when I wanted a year-long world wide policy, but a modest week for two in Venice evidently doesn’t atract quite the same level of service.

No, I’m not going with my husband.

This afternoon I decided to take off, as assuredly I wouldn’t go in to the office, yesterday or today, if I had one. So I’ve listened to music and rewatched a film. The music, which is on now, is piano duets by Schubert played by Sviatoslav Richter and Benjamin Britten and I love it and play it often. BB’s father was my father’s dentist and young Ben practised upstairs, with the effect that the drill and the viola were uncomfortably linked in his mind. The film is Criminal, with Maggie Gyllenhaal et al, which I first saw on a plane to India and have since bought. Lightweight heist caper but I like it.

Shamed, I admit that I dropped a book in the bath the other night. I know, I know that I shouldn’t rest them on the edge while I undress but it doesn’t stop me. I am drying it out slowly and ironing it but it will join the half dozen other crinkly books that have been similarly abused over the years. Grandbaby is in love with books at present and brings them over to be read. Her favourite amonst mine is one called ‘Where is Bobo?’; Bobo being a knitted doll of unidentifiable sex or species who is the beloved toy of a toddler Sam. It’s a charming book but as I could only whisper yesterday, thrice was twice too many times.

Each of my children had a favourite baby book. Daughter’s was Smith the Lonely Hedgehog by Althea Braithwaite, Elder son’s was Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss (he must have been a little older perhaps?) and Younger son’s was Each Peach, Pear, Plum by Janet and Alan Ahlberg. I loved the Blackberry Farm books (can’t remember who wrote them and I’m too lazy to look) which were still in print when my children were small; I read Mrs Nibble to baby (breathily) only yesterday.

Today I’ve lost my voice. Yesterday it was husky, this morning it was a croak and now it’s hardly a whisper. I have a meeting this evening at which, luckily, I don’t have to speak at all except socially afterwards; I will just smile a lot.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been unable to speak. I used to work at the local library and the same thing happened one Saturday. By lunchtime I was silent and, unfortunately, was due to be at the little branch library 3 miles away for the afternoon. It’s not easy being in sole charge of a library when you have laryngitis – this was long before the days of computers and swipe cards and we needed to talk to our customers. Though librarians are universally lovely people and still talk to us even though we can now bypass them altogether by using the electronic equipment.

The next time was when I’d had an operation on my vocal cords. I was not, in truth, unable to speak but forbidden to do so, warned that vibration would cause scarring and permanently affect the sound of my voice. It so happened that my mother-in-law died suddenly while I was still in hospital (the last thing she did for me was to buy me a Roberts radio as a consolation present) and this meant that I couldn’t simply lie low for a few weeks as planned but had the social publicity of a large funeral.

It was the first time that I began to understand what it is really like to have a disability. Mine was trivial of course because of its short duration, but I became a non-person. I was not physically excluded from groups of people, but if I started to write a comment during the conversation no one ever waited to see what I wanted to say. Not my family, not close or distant friends. A few people talked to me, politely, but I felt that I no longer mattered. More, I realised that if I was so easily disregarded, I had not mattered in the first place.

There was one exception to this, my nephew (my husband’s sister’s son) who made a casual point of sitting down with me after the funeral for a long chat, unembarrassedly making most of the conversation but leaving opportunities for me to write my notes and then responding to them as if I’d actually written something interesting. He was only in his early twenties but demonstrated more understated understanding than anyone else.

I have always rather regretted having the operation in fact. I liked my husky voice and it was the only time I’ve ever been able to attract men simply by uttering a few words. Several men, otherwise reserved and unflirtatious, said, ‘my god, you’ve got a sexy voice’. What a pity it only lasted a few months.

Not long ago my husband of several decades and I were having a conversation about domestically life-changing decisions. Admittedly, conversation is rather overstating it as most of the occasions I came up with ‘do you remember …….?’ had the reply ‘no’. Including some particularly fondly remembered and meaningful ones. Such as the decision to move to this house, which is the one he was born in. I know where we were (lunch at the yacht club in Lowestoft), where we were sitting, what we were eating and what we said. He told me that, his father having died a few weeks before, that his mother had decided to move. I said, would he like to move there? You know how it is when (as my sister says, often, but she’s an impulsive girl) mouth overtakes brain? I didn’t know I was going to say it until I heard myself, I loved my house, a big Edwardian old rectory.

Okay, so he didn’t recall it. What about the one a week later (gosh, 1983 was an eventful summer) when we decided that a new start was a good time to have another baby? Well, the baby certainly happened so he wasn’t denying it, but he didn’t remember actually talking about it. How about the decision, when he reached 50, to ease off, workwise, have less money but enjoy simple family life? ‘Huh? We decided that?’ Me not to take a job when youngest went to school? ‘?’

‘But you’re supposed to be the one with the good memory, that’s why I’m able to forget everything.’

Finally, and I’m glad to say that we were both laughing by this time, I said ‘Do you remember asking me to marry you?’ He replied keenly that he did. ‘what do you remember?’ I pressed on. I’d hit the jackpot here. ‘Well, we’d been to Long Melford for the evening, I had an appointment at the art gallery there to look at some pictures and I bought a Henry Bright that I thought Nigel would be interested in, but he didn’t much like it so I’ve still got it. Never had anywhere to hang it though. It was on our way back.’

I knew we were driving to Lowestoft along the A12; or more accurately, we’d stopped in a layby when he brought up the subject, but this colourfully arty background had escaped me years ago. I was hugely impressed. So I asked what he had said. He could, of course, have bluffed, since obviously he’d asked me to marry him and I’d said yes, but he admitted that the details had blurred into time forgotten.

He remembered the year and the month, but couldn’t recall the date – neither can I come to that. It took us years to remember our wedding anniversary, we used to have to look it up. We knew we had only been going out together for three weeks when we became engaged, though then had a very long engagement of over three months, which I thought was a bit of a waste of time. I suppose my sister isn’t the only impulsive one in the family.

I went to a meeting in the village, only 3 of us remembered to go so it was more of a chat with coffee and chocolates. Our host’s garden has a gap in the hedge to Lorna’s drive, you cut through her garden, then across Sybil’s lawn and by her garage to the road. Which is good if you carry a torch and I, recklessly, don’t. There’s a hard frost and no lights and I stumbled into trees and flowerbeds. The new moon lounged negligently on her back and, once back on the road, I walked with my head thrown back so that I could pick out the constellations. A barn owl hooted from the other side of the field.

I like walking in the dark and I think it’s a pity that street lighting stays on all night.

I still haven’t found the CD changer. I am going to have to admit defeat and ask at the garage. I must remind myself that being laughed at is good for me.

My television licence reminder came today. It offers, as an alternative to the full price yearly licence, the short-term licence for 74 year olds, which seemed a little pessimistic at first sight. Of course, pro rata until you are entitled to a free one at 75. Well, that’s something to look forward to. Or there’s the Blind Concession. It makes one quite grateful to be eligible to pay the full price.

It is, as of Wednesday, Lent and several of my friends, more sincere and less self-indulgent than I, have given up treats, most of them chocolate or alcohol. I haven’t. I volunteered to give up Big Macs but it was felt unlikely that this was a serious deprivation for me, although I protested that I’d eaten one in January.

Greengrocer son, who I think I will call Baz, rang anxiously to ask if I’d been given two cakes recently. I had and fortunately have only started to eat one. He was relieved. I have to take one back.

His shop is just by the (once a week) market place. A lady brings fruit cakes to Geoff, one of the stallholders. Just because she is good-natured. Once Geoff wasn’t there as the weather was bad so she gave the cake to Baz instead and he shared it with us. It’s delicious. No eggs and no added fat, it contains sultanas, cherries, pieces of ginger, coconut and is moist but not too rich. So now she occasionally brings one for us too. But Baz gave me one last week and then forgot he’d done so (that boy has the attention span of a mature fruit fly, and he would agree with me; I’m not being rude here), so a few days later Dilly gave me one too as he’d taken it home with another cake that another customer had given them.

Anyway, point is, Geoff wants his cake. So, lucky I haven’t scoffed it already. But aren’t the customers lovely?

The sun is shining today and bluetits are keenly searching the shrubbery outside my window. I heard a tapping against the kitchen window earlier and one was having a go at the putty, or maybe finding a few spiders on the window frame. I need to clear surplus vegetation out of the pond before frogs start laying as it will all be tangled up and I won’t be able to do it. We must build a good framework with wire netting to go across the pond for Grandbaby’s safety – for the tadpoles’ too as we’ve been visited by a heron on occasion and it hoovers up whole beakfuls of newly hatched tadpoles.

Hardly any snow though it’s bitterly cold. I have my new car now; my husband went to give a lift to the couple we’ve bought it from from their home to the garage and brought it back; then I went with him to fetch his car left in their drive. We each had things to do separately but I found myself doorkeyless when I arrived home so I had to wait nearly an hour for him to let me in. I spent some time reading the manual of the new car and couldn’t find the CD changer anywhere. Or rather, where it goes. It says there is a sliding panel but not where and I feel a fool, having searched the car fruitlessly. The book describes the whereabouts of everything else, even if it’s glaringly obvious, but not the discreetly hidden.

Now I’ve got it I can’t drive it until Friday as that’s when the insurance changes, there wasn’t any point in cancelling the other policy with a couple of days to go. I meanly put in £5worth of petrol into the old one; I don’t have to go far tomorrow and I don’t want to sell it with a full tank. That does sound parsimonious and it’s small defence to say that there was probably a gallon in there already but I also didn’t want it right on the red. The really shocking thing is that £5 buys only 5.5 litres which is about a gallon and a quarter. Pricing it by the litre does disguise the cost and over £4 per gallon would appal people.

Grandbaby came through to be looked after this morning while her mummy and daddy went to hospital. Daughter-in-law Dilly had an appointment for a scan; they are expecting another baby in September. Babe’s latest accomplishment is to stack bricks one on top of each other; she’s not quite had the co-ordination before although she’s been practising. She expects, and receives, applause for this accomplishment and joins in enthusiastically. She and Tilly the dog are at ease with each other now; Dilly was concerned about hygiene to start with so we kept them apart, but now she crawls and puts everything in her mouth, cuddling a dog too will be a further boost to her immune system.