Had an appointment at the surgery this morning at 8:30am. It was my decision to book it at that time. My logic is that the earlier in the day the appointment the less likely it is to be delayed by overrunning previous appointments. It is only a 5 minute drive from our house so not too bad really despite the fact that I had to get up at the unearthly time of seven thirty or simlar. Who knew that time even existed?
I left the house at just before eight fifteen, brought the brown bins in, scraped the ice off the windscreen and set off. At the docs the system you use to let them know you’ve arrived denied my existence and suggested I spoke to the receptionist. This was fine because at that time of day there was no queue.
Said receptionist, having ascertained my identity, asked whether I got the text message? The nurse had called in sick and I’d have to rebook. Sigh. The sms arrived at 8:02. No, I didn’t see it. I have most notifications switched off as otherwise my phone would be constantly dinging. These things happen. I’ve rebooked for Tuesday at ten to nine. That extra 20 mins in bed makes all the difference.
Ah well. Had I thought about it I could have swung by Fosters to pick up some bacon for THG’s 100th Park Run celebratory brunch on Saturday but I didn’t. I’ll pop down a bit later. Life eh?
Coming back to the early start, if I thought that was bad, when we fly to Rome in March for the rugby we have a 06:50 flight from LHR T5 so we are staying at the Sofitel which we like which softens the blow a bit. There are loads of other BA flights to Rome but I booked it months ago before the rugby dates had officially been announced so I used points. This way I could easily cancel the flight if it turned out that the dates were wrong and the early flight was the only one available for booking with Avios. A few weeks ago I decided I needed to recover the points to use for a different trip so I looked at a paid option instead. A single was by then £750. Each. There are two of us! I stuck with the free flight. We can have breakfast on the plane, fwiw. I might sleep the whole way.
On the plus side we land at 10:25 so should be at the hotel by noon and can do some touristy bits. Our pals don’t get there until the evening. Mind you Rome is somewhat mind boggling when it comes to touristy bits. There are so many of them it’s difficult to focus and we’ve had a few trips there over the years so none of it will be new (geddit?).
The hotel is near the Vatican so might nip and visit the Pope on Sunday morning. Always good for a blessing. At least the last one was. It’s part of the job description. That and being the final approval signature when it comes to dishing out new sainthoods. There are some things where you have to have the top guy in the signoff loop. The top mortal anyway. One assumes that the candidates will already have heavenly approval or they wouldn’t have been able to pull miracles out of the bag in the first place. It’s how it works.
Fox came at 21:17 last night. Something also set the lake cam off at half three in the morning but there is nowt visible. Seem to get a few false positives from time to time. I knew to look because earlier I’d looked at the cctv and the back garden camera also registered movement at that time and I could see the lake cam infrared light come on. This can only be seen because the cctv also uses infrared. Interesting. Tharrldo.