Thursday 13 February 2025: Home!

I thought I’d have time to write up and post a blog by late morning, but I’m a bit late again.

On Tuesday I closed work down early as we were off to the pictures. There’s a tiny ‘luxury’ cinema, the Everyman in Horsham, 2 doors away from the hotel and we’d booked to see Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucien Msamati and Isabella Rossellini. We thought it was worth seeing because, apart from the star cast, it was based on the book written by Robert Harris.

When we arrived, we ordered something to eat and drink, and it was brought to our seats! We had little tables attached to our 2-seater settee and there was plenty of leg room plus a shelf close to the floor that we could put our feet on or keep phones and/or bags safe. What a lovely, delightful place, decorated in a retro style with a clean and modern feel. 

The film, I thought, was very well produced. It was so good I thought it may have been filmed in parts of the Vatican itself, but while some of the exterior filming was done there, most of the rest of it was filmed in a studio in Rome. Whatever, the setting was beautiful and very realistic. As others have said online, the ending was fine by itself without the added, possibly unnecessary, twist. But I didn’t mind the twist. 

When we go back to Horsham, we’ll definitely look to see if there’s something else on there we’d like to see. 

We had our hotel room until noon on Wednesday, which meant I could still hang out and do stuff there if I needed to. I didn’t get online, though, other than on my phone or on the tablet. But I did get around to the client edit, which was good. At 12 noon, I did the idiot sweep and checked out, then went and waited in the restaurant for the poet to come and collect me.

I’d just had my breakfast when he turned up. We’ve been doing this 16:8 diet since a week ago last Friday and I’ve still only lost a pound and a half. However, my energy levels have definitely increased and my mobility issues are definitely fewer, so it must be doing me some good even if the weight isn’t dropping off me. And, let’s face it, nothing else ever works. 

One of the pros is that I don’t have to have breakfast before noon, which gives me the opportunity, should I wish to seize it, to put real clothes on in the morning and run an errand before changing back into house clothes, rather than change clothes several times in a day. One of the cons, though, is that I sometimes wake up and think there’s no need to get up yet because I’m not eating until noon! This latter attitude is very lazy and I must snap out of it.

So I’ve decided to do just the former and try to run one errand every day, whether that be driving somewhere in the car, walking to the post box/post office/hairdresser/doctor, or doing my 15 minutes in the garden. On Wednesday morning I seriously risked the latter and told myself to just Get Up! (So I did.)

The drive home was uneventful, and it didn’t rain, but there were a couple of accidents on the motorway coming back. None of them was serious enough to close the motorways or allow the air ambulance to land, so hopefully only minor injuries, damage and shock were involved. Nevertheless, that 4-hour door-to-door drive took us about five and a half hours.

We were supposed to be having a salmon dinner for our tea, but neither of us felt like cooking when we got back. So we rustled something up out of the freezer, which tasted very ‘processed’. Before we strove to cook everything from scratch, it would have been more than acceptable. Now, we notice. 

Jobs today included that first daily errand, yesterday and today’s blog posts, and that client edit.