Good Grief! It's March!

...and I am officially elderly. If I were to be knocked down by a bus (heaven forbid!) the incident would be described as an 'elderly female pensioner was hit by a bus. eyewitnesses have stated that she appeared to be trying to balance on a skateboard...' or something like that..

However the upside is that I now have a bus pass, can have my eyes tested for free and don't have to pay for prescriptions any more. Yippee!! Where shall I go on the bus? How about Haverford West? (Where's that? I dunno, be interesting to find out.....I expect..)

I was bored one day last week and decided to google the address that I lived in when I was a child. We (my parents, sisters and brother) moved into a newly built block of council maisonettes, one of four similar ones, from the soon-to-be-demolished prefab where we had lived since I was born, (and possibly longer).

We had a lovely garden at the prefab, it seemed huge to me anyway, but the maisonette just had a piece of ground divided up into squares, one bit for each family. Enough room for a washing line and a bit of grass and some flowers. My dad soon took over the next door's bit of earth as they didn't want to grow anything and soon after acquired an allotment to grow vegetables.

The blocks of maisonettes, functional, but truly ugly as only late 50's council buildings could be, were end on to the railway line, the London/Scotland line (whatever that was!). It was still the age of steam trains and the Flying Scotsman was a regular passer-by and shaker of windows and rattler of walls.... In the summer the sparks from the engines would set light to the grassy sides of the rails and then we'd have the added excitement of watching the fire brigade come to douse the flames..

We all went to different schools, mine was Minchenden School in Southgate, which was quite a distance from home in Wood Green so I either took a bus, a train or a tube depending on how much walking I wanted to do. During the summer I would quite often walk home from school, I think it was quite a long way but then that was what we did in those days in the last century!

Now why did I get nattering about this? Oh yes, having googled my old address I discovered that all those maisonettes are now desirable places to live and sell for £250k. Well they did before this current credit upheaval..

Anyway, enough of all that, I had a fantastic birthday, going out to lunch 3 days on the trot with different bits of friends and family, only slightly marred by Whizzy slicing her foot while running in the icy woods and needing stitches and anaesthetics and bandages and a huge mortgage to pay for it all.. I had thought about pet insurance, but because the dogs are so old, the premiums would have been £30 per month each and that is quite a lump. Even then it wouldn't have covered all the treatment. So I just paid the bill and told the dogs they'd better not have any more disasters for another 6 months (touch wood!).

Whizzy's all better now...and is asleep on the sofa. Flower is also asleep but on the floor. I vacuumed about a ton of dog fluff from the sitting room the other day and there's probably as much again now. I should put the fluff outside for the birds to build nests with, but I'm afraid they might suffocate under the weight..

Right that's enough for now, the album continues to continue and I am beginning to believe it's all a figment of my imagination and will never be ready. I expect it isn't and it will though!