I really want to go home, but I need to wait awhile because it’s nearly six pm and the traffic will still be heavy. I’ve got a lot of work done on the catalogue but I’m finding the photos really annoying – try to move the position of something slightly and it may, once in a while, leap to the other side of the page. Not the next column, but apparently randomly. I will have to RTFM, but not now.

It’s been a quiet day, other than a long phone chat with Tim’s sister this morning. When I was tired of typing, I looked in a few cupboards and drawers that I’d not opened before – I could have, over the last five years, but I never needed to and I’m incurious by nature. The enormity of all the sorting out is depressing. Like me, Tim has a lot of kitchen paraphenalia. A lot of it will just have to be disposed of – and I should take the opportunity to try to turn out some of my own excess, especially if there’s any of Tim’s equipment that I want to keep.

Fortunately, there’s not much furniture that he especially valued. One smallish bureau, though I’m not sure I’ve anywhere to put it, plus a few small pieces I like. An awful lot of crockery, a few hundred books – he’d had a few turn-outs himself and tended to give away books that he wasn’t likely to read again. His music, instruments, photo albums, ornaments, pictures – it’s the more personal things that are the hardest, always. All the music he wrote is in a lot of notebooks – not as notes on a stave but the notes and times themselves, along with the words of the songs. We had such little time together. I want to capture and hold his essence. I fear, as time goes by, starting to feel as if it had been a dream or forgetting the fun we had until he became unwell. I have become a worrier and I’ve been, in private, quite tearful and anxious this summer. I hoped I was overreacting, all the same.

I’m home now and the journey was quick and uneventful until the last hour. It should have been the last three quarters of an hour, but ludicrously bad diversion signage caused the problem. As I left Bury St Edmunds on the A143, there was a sign saying “road closed.” At the next few roundabouts, the same thing. It didn’t say where. Eventually, there was a diversion sign to the left, so I took it. No more diversion signs and I couldn’t follow the satnav because it kept trying to take me back to the road I’d left. I daresay there was a sign and I didn’t see it because hardly anyone bothered to dip their headlights and I was blinded repeatedly. But I ended up in Diss, whence you go back on to the A143.

On the A143 where it bypasses Diss, there are two roundabouts, one on the A140 Ipswich/Norwich road and one about a mile down, towards Bury. I headed for that one. It turned out that the road blockage was within that mile, between the two roundabouts. A quick five-minute diversion was all I needed, on a road I knew, and if the closure signs had said where the block was, all would have been well. I wished I’d just kept on driving until I wasn’t allowed through any more.

Anyway, no harm done except to my emotion and temper. I have an answerphone message to say that my new clarinet is finally arriving tomorrow in Norwich. I’ve lost all enthusiasm for playing of course, but I guess it’ll give me something to work on over the winter.