Well, it was a tremendously close decision, we had excellent candidates.  Weren’t we lucky?  We have been so anxious.  Turning people down wasn’t made any easier by liking them personally and having built up a rapport over two days, but the delight of the successful man was a pleasure to hear.

Just before the final interviews, I spoke to a member of staff and she asked how I felt, and I realised that my heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it.  Last time that happened, Badgerdaddy had me striding up a steel hill outside Ludlow.  I didn’t reach the breathless stage admittedly, but it was very demanding.

Not that I did the preliminary work, three other governors did that.  I handed over chairmanship of the committee to someone else, who has superb organisation skills, and the paperwork to two others, who did so much work, very well indeed.  My forte came over the interview process, when my ability to be bossy came to a fore.  There’s no beating about the bush, there are times when I take over.  Though shy in my younger days, I learned Social Skillz and they stand me in good stead, especially now I’m not.  Shy, I mean.

I’m still high as a kite I have to acknowledge, but will slump later and, I hope, sleep soundly tonight.

I need to walk away from the wine bottle.  I’ve got a lot of reading to do tonight.

Yesterday, I suddenly felt completely drained in the middle of the afternoon and sat down for ten minutes for a nap.  I woke an hour and a half later.  I’d had very little sleep the night before, but all the same, that was a bit extreme and really messed up my revision plans.  However, I seemed to have done all my worrying during that sleepless night and had six straight hours before the alarm woke me this morning.  And I had allowed time for a last-minute read-through (I’d not been neglectful last night either, obv) and I was ready to leave, having walked the dog twice – sheesh – by 7.50.  That I didn’t actually leave until 8 o’clock showed that I was, again, near to tears with nerves.

However, that’s the way I deal with nerves, I get them over and done with and then move on.  I felt fine after that.  And the day has been really stimulating and engaging.  Tomorrow come the formal interviews.  I didn’t leave school until 7, then had to come home and cook dinner, have somehow managed to drink half a bottle of red wine…h’m.  It went down without having an effect, adrenalin processes alcohol instantly.

Now down to work.  Onwards and upwards, darlings.  And it beats doing the housework any time.  I love a challenge and to be challenged, I’m not ready for retirement yet, dammit.

Today was the only free day I had to do some domestic bits and pieces.  There were dozens of newspapers to sort out (Russell never throws them away when I’m not here) and the house was pretty untidy.  I’m planning to move the freezer and needed to clear the space where it’s going, the beds were due to be changed – general this and that.  So I spent an hour or two clearing and sorting out and was ready to start cleaning when friends arrived.  So I stopped, made coffee and stayed to chat.

And then a van drove up and, to my surprise, my cleaners got out.  I haven’t got the four-week schedule sorted out in my mind, I thought they were coming next Tuesday.  It was brilliant, the house was all ready to be cleaned and I just had to get out clean bedlinen for them.  So I had a free afternoon, not that I did anything much with it, once I’d prepared a big apple crumble, sorted out quite a lot of wine that’s been delivered, walked the dog and so on.

Al, Dilly and the boys turned up while Squiff was at Brownies, which was good as I hadn’t seen them recently.  And Ro and Dora are going to come over at the weekend.

First, three days of interviews, two of them long ones, for the new Head.  I may blog, but please excuse me if I don’t.  I actually think that Ofsted is easier than this.  I hope I’ll be very cheerful by Friday night.

A news report last week might give a clue about the effect on me of my congenital hip problem – if you’d like to read this before I go on, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve been one of my online friends for a few years, you’ll know that I had a hip replacement when I was 56 because I had severe arthritis in my right hip.  The reason I had arthritis was that the sockets of my hip joints were unusually shallow.  This was something I was born with, was not severe enough to give me ‘clicky hips’ as a baby, would not have shown up except in an x-ray and wouldn’t cause problems until middle age, but appreciably younger than age-related arthritis would affect me.  Furthermore, it is hereditary, but only through the female line.

My mother did not have the condition because, although she had arthritis, she didn’t have a replacement joint until she was seventy, which is a normal age, especially as she had had several bad falls on that side.  Nor does my sister, who is about to have a new hip but she’s in her mid-sixties.  So I warned my children to stay slim and active but not overdo the weight-bearing exercise and shrugged it off as bad luck.

However, when I was a baby, my parents (who owned and ran a largish hotel in Weymouth) employed a young man – I can’t remember in what capacity, but he came from a big family and dearly loved babies and small children, and he used to carry me around with him while he worked.  My mother told me how he took a large shawl, swaddled me snugly, then wrapped it round himself too so that he had his hands free.  I was very content, apparently, though it sounds jolly hot to me now.  But maybe it wasn’t good for my young bones.

I hope that’s it, because it reassures me that my own children are much less likely to develop the same thing.  I carried them around as babies, but just slung on my hip, they had to learn to cling on like monkeys.  I realise now it was the ideal position for healthy hip development.   I made life hard for myself really, lugging a baby around much of the day, but they liked the closeness and so did I.

I’m not due to see my surgeon for another 15 months or so, for a five-year check-up.  I must remember to mention it.  He’s acutely interested in research, as you might expect from a quite young consultant, and told me about the problems with metal-on-metal joints before there was any publicity about them at all.  In fact, he said that all surgeons at Norwich refused to use them and that he’d had to do many revisions of those that had been done elsewhere.

Although I had to stand still and pant several times and I certainly couldn’t walk uphill and talk, at least the unaccustomed uphill exercise last week gave my lungs sufficient workout that I could play the clarinet con brio this morning – sight-reading as well, I hadn’t got around to practising – having hardly touched it for nearly two months.

This afternoon, mate with chainsaw arrived and first took down the apple boughs that were leaning on the roof of the outbuildings, then went to tackle the oak while I wheelbarrowed the logs round to the front porch.  The tree having been dead for a while, we can use them this winter.

The next three hours were spent cutting, barrowing and stacking.  Mate with chainsaw reckons the best part of two tons of wood are contained in that branch.  He cut up the smaller boughs and I stacked them against a wall.

I will have to think of somewhere else to put the rest of the logs, once the big pieces have been split – see the rot in the last picture, you can see where the weakness lay – but the small ones can dry out over the next couple of years.  We still have plenty of wood for now.

The obscure title of the post results from a discovery I made this afternoon, though apparently it’s well known to country folks: that is, cows love to eat oak leaves.  I took a number of the end branches over the drive to them and learned a certain amount of Cow as I did so – I was returning with the empty barrow, having taken a load of logs, and Scarlet gave an excited little moo that certainly said “Look! She’s coming back!”  I took them some more leaves and a few minutes later, still loading wood, a peremptory moo gave sharp instruction that those had been eaten and they were ready for more, and maybe I’d jump to it as they were waiting.  I tried eating a leaf myself, but I have to admit that I can’t quite see the attraction.  It didn’t seem that much more tasty than plain grass.

I’ve just finished a job.  That is, the entire job, just about.  I’ve sent out the last mailing as Nadfas Area Secretary, all I have to do now is check through all the info to make sure it’s all in the right folders and give it to the incoming secretary.  It’s been more work than I’d envisaged when I agreed to take it on, four years ago, and it didn’t honestly suit the way I work best, though I didn’t discover that until it was too late.  I can’t say it’s been my finest achievement, although I never actually failed and got all the work done in time, every time.

As for the various things that went wrong, the first was here, before I even arrived in Ludlow.  I phoned Russell to say I’d got there and he sounded harassed and asked to phone back, because Big Pinkie and her friend Scarlet had got out.  Although the winds were nothing like the strength or duration that they’d been south of here, a large branch came down from the lovely oak tree on the drive and it took down the fence, enabling the cows to get out.  Russell arrived home from Bungay to find Pinkie on the drive, heading for the road.  He shut the gates of course and called the farmer – Alex and Dilly happened to arrive shortly afterwards and helped chivvy them towards the other field in the meantime.  It’s a huge branch and there was a fair amount of rot, which is upsetting – the trunk is ok as far as we can tell, and we’ll get advice on what to do for the best.  It’s a beautiful tree and it’s lost about a quarter of its crown.

The next morning, I had an automated phone call from my credit card company, fortunately having given them my mobile number.  To my alarm, it reported three suspicious transactions, or rather attempted ones, one for Tesco online, one for an internet company in America and one to Jimmy Choo in London- that last was for £500.  I have nothing but praise for how it was picked up and dealt with – all three had been declined and, as soon as I pressed the key to say I didn’t recognise any of the transactions, I was put through to a helpful person who reassured me and dealt with the situation.  I haven’t worked out yet how my card details were taken, but it was instantly cancelled and a new one was waiting for me when I arrived home.  All a bit disconcerting though, I’ve never had any problem before and I haven’t given details to anyone I wasn’t actually buying from – I didn’t respond to a spam email, for instance.

The third thing was an email I received within a short time of my arrival home.  Another of our candidates had withdrawn from next week’s Headteacher interviews.  We’re all frankly bemused that people apply for such a job and then change their minds – one or two might have a change of circumstances, but there have been six of them!  We cancelled the interviews back in September because we felt we didn’t have a wide enough choice, but this time we are carrying on with our remaining candidates.  They all are very strong, on paper at least, and we are reasonably hopeful of finding the ideal person.  But the governor who has taken on the timetabling of the two days of interviewing has had to draft it repeatedly, and we are now going to rejig the whole format because it won’t work with three.  I hardly knew how to email everyone to tell them, I felt it was my fault – though I know that’s silly.

Here are pictures of our poor tree, with my size 5 foot to give you an idea of scale.  The wind also brought down a dead apple tree, which is now leaning against the back of the garages – fortunately, it hasn’t done any damage to speak of.  We won’t be short of firewood, that’s for sure.

I’ll catch up in due course, just today’s bits and pieces.

Finance meeting, where the auditor nitpicked to the nitpickingest degree and then congratulated our director of finance on her fine work.  It hadn’t felt like that, we felt thoroughly criticised.  When one reads about how schools embezzle funds, one wonders how.  We go by the book, check and double check and are still asked to explain every penny.  I was way out of my depth, can read a balance sheet and understand much of the finances, but I reached the switching-off stage, far too hard.  However, a précis having been written, my poor brain is catching up again, albeit creaking and groaning,

This afternoon, we went to see Weeza and the floor.  By the end of the day, the sitting room floor was completed and looks wonderful.  Solid oak, a lovely colour and finish, suitable for under-floor central heating, guaranteed 30 years.  Far better than tiles or carpet, we couldn’t be more pleased.

Then Weeza and I visited an old friend of mine.  She’s just moved in with her daughter and is a lovely lady who I’ve been friends with for about 20 years.  She is now 91 and can’t manage alone – in the early stages of dementia, no one would know it except for occasionally forgetting a word, she’s still her delightful self.  Her daughter and Weeza got on well too, she has lived in the village for a couple of years and is very pleased to know her mum has friendly contacts.  Weeza and Phil are thrilled with the village – a Trick or Treat evening was lovely, starting at the village pub where they’d laid on free activities for the children, then off around the village.  People had dressed up as witches and so on, welcomed the children in via apple bobbing, offered popcorn and bat’s blood, which I suspect was Ribena but which alarmed Zerlina into refusal (though she apple-bobbed in a stranger’s porch) and they felt warmly welcomed.  Only 200 houses in the village, but a school and a pub and great community spirit.

Whole lots of work this evening, I must get on – hope all’s well with you, I will read blogs sometime over the weekend.