Yesterday, Friday

There is building work going on over the road.  Yesterday, the power went off at about 10am.  There were 4 vans from the electricity company working all day to fix it.  As dusk drew in, I rounded up my stash of candles and lit a few, and it felt very cosy. I took a flask to a private hotel in our road to beg for some boiling water.  They were unaffected by the power cut and they were very sweet about it.  I offered to pay for the water, but they wouldn't accept it.  It is a small but posh hotel and I thought they were very nice and neighbourly.  My daughter Caelyn wasn't happy about the power being off for that long, so she sent her husband to come and get me with instructions not to take any nonsense from me.  Nigel nagged me on his own behalf, and I packed a bag and a Brak and went to them for the night.

The scene outside my house:




I got a couple of snaps of the children. My camera is playing up badly. The left side of all the photos are blurred with less bright colour and ghosting, so any pic that looks OK has been cropped a lot. I get withdrawal symptoms without it so I have opened a web savings account where I will stash a few quid here and there until I have the right amount for a new one. I think I will get another Casio as it takes brilliant pics when it works. It has taken thousands of photos and has been dropped a lot (I am clumsy) so I don't feel it owes me any money. I dropped it with its lens out once so it bent and could not go back into the camera body. The photo shop in town wouldn't repair it because it is cheaper to replace it. You can't get kettles or irons or that sort of thing repaired any more either. So, thinking I had nothing to lose, I used force to get the lens to retract, and it worked! That was more than a year ago, and its only been playing up for a few weeks, so I think it has done very well. Anyway, here are the pics, such as they are. Extremely cropped, but still OK.



To show you what I mean, I'll post an original photo below and a cropped version as the next photo down:
The photo above is blurred on the left too. Still, it works after a fashion.