Assessment appointment

A lovely sunny day again, starting with a lie-in and pancakes for breakfast, made this week with gluten free buckwheat flour, as an experiment. It was a great success, they were very tasty! 

I walked over to the Heath Hospital for my pre-op assessment. I wasn't given a date, as the assessor's report has to be okayed by an anaesthetist on Monday. Then I'll be sent an operation date. In preparation this time I'll only have to self-isolate for three days and be covid tested before being operated upon. 

I walked back home, after the hour long assessment, arriving just in time for lunch in the sunshine in the garden. We both had a siesta, then walked over to Bute Park to wander through the woods beside the Taff. Wild garlic and bluebells are now out in abundance, replacing the daffodils and varieties of narcissii which thrive in abundance beneath the trees. When we arrived home my Fitbit told me I'd walked over 20,000 paces, just under ten miles. That's a first for me, and I'm neither foot-sore nor exhausted as a result. Slowly my stamina is improving.

Water in the river Taff is very low, revealing lengthy stony reaches along the banks where some of the many hundreds out picnicking in the parks, are enjoying the water and lighting fires. Yesterday kids were jumping and somersaulting off the bridge into the short stretch of water under the bridge which is perhaps five feet deep - a supper ritual for adolescents ever since the bridge was constructed. Today, a police van was out. All but one of the kids had disappeared. Just one was swimming about defiantly upstream, being 'observed' by a masked policeman from the bridge. I couldn't imagine the copper wading in and making an arrest! A man was approaching the bridge from the Bute Park side with his three year old daughter. She eyed the stony stretch below the bridge on the other and exclaimed "Daddy, is that a beach over there?"

Before supper I finished my sermon for St German's tomorrow, then we watched a movie called 'Goodbye Christopher Robin', about the relationship between A A Milne, author of 'Winnie the Pooh' and his son Billy, and how the books came to be written around the various characters of the child's animal soft toys in the 1920. It made Billy aka 'Christopher Robin' into an unwitting child celebrity which has a negative impact on his life as he grew up. The author suffered from PTSD after returning from the World War One, and saw his son join the army, go missing and eventually return home safe and sound, no longer resenting the loss of his childhood, but realising how much his father's books held treasured childhood memories of normality for some of his comrades in arms. A fascinating true story.