Sad start to the week

From http://ianrstewart.blogspot.com/

Yes - it was Syd's wife's funeral this morning. Good turnout from friends from Banchory and Torphins. Syd did everything himself. He said Barbara was a very private person and they had discussed funeral arrangements before. Barbara didn't want anybody she didn't know involved in the arrangements, so there was no minister - Syd himself gave the eulogy and pressed all the buttons to put on the music, draw back the curtains etc - there was no staff to be seen anywhere.

Their 3 sons travelled in from their homes in London, Spain and Switzerland, and each did a little speech about their mother. Different.

So I've just about recovered my sleep pattern now - and I managed to get a couple of games of golf at the weekend too, but it's really noticeable how dark the evenings are becoming. In fact, this Wednesday is the last of our midweek golf this year - how sad. I guess we came back from holiday a little later this year. It's Boat of Garten this weekend - Syd, as the winner in May, was supposed to be organising, but he asked me to take over a few weeks ago, so I'm doing it all now.

Almost a month of eating and drinking in USA hasn't done wonders for my fitness - I've struggled on the latter parts of the rounds of golf I've played since I came back - and it's only a couple of weeks now until our walking trip to the Lake District. I do hope the climbs there aren't as steep as some of those on the West Highland Way that we did at this time last year. It's over a month since the last of our preparation/training walks - and that was a fairly sedate one up Glentanar - so I'm not really in shape for 3-4 days of hard walking.

We missed the Edinburgh Fringe this year as well - pity.

It's probably about time to start looking at flights to USA next year as well. Of course, we've got a few trips before then - notably Oz, and also Macdonald Forest Hills in January - but we've also promised ourselves trips to Bath and York some time - need to plan those in soon.

So that's about it now. I'll finish with last week's Graze Box:

Not sure how long I'll carry on with them - was a bit of a novelty.