Monday 7 April

I said in the previous entry that we could hardly have chosen a worse time to visit our son Steve and his family in Spain. We were due to arrive just one day after they moved into their new apartment, and we thought they would be much too busy to want to cope with visitors. But as it turned out, the timing could hardly have been better, from their point of view, although it was certainly no holiday for us.

This being Spain, nothing ever happens on schedule. And when it does happen, something usually goes wrong. The building work was originally supposed to have been completed in December, but it dragged on for another three months after that. The apartment is one of a block of eight, and the basic structure is very impressive and stylish, with marble tiled floors and ornate hardwood doors throughout. But the contractors seem to have lost the plot when it came to connecting up the utilities. When you ring the doorbell for Flat 1B it rings in Flat 1A; when the water company sent an engineer to turn on the water supply for one flat, he only succeeded in turning it off for another flat; and so on.

So I suppose it should have come as no surprise that when we arrived there we found that Steve and Jo were still living in their previous place. They didn't seem unduly bothered by this – they have learned to adjust to the Spanish pace of life, and to be patient about the incessant delays and setbacks. But at long last the new flat was practically ready for them to move in, and for the first two days of our stay we helped them to ferry boxes and bags of stuff from their old rented house to the new flat. On Monday, a week ago today, I sat on a box in the nearly empty flat and kept an eye on the handsome young Telefonica engineer who was trying to make sense of the tangled mass of cabling so that he could connect the phone, with the ADSL connection that is essential to Jo's work.

On Tuesday a friend of Steve's turned up with a large van to transport the heavy stuff, the washing machine and the double bed. For the first time ever, I took advantage of my age and said (truthfully) that I no longer had the strength or the stamina to help carry the washing machine up the awkward flights of stairs to the upstairs flat. The bed was too large to go up the stairs at all, and had to be winched up with a rope to the patio at the side of the flat, which overlooks a neighbouring garden. The elderly neighbour kindly gave us access to the garden, and proudly showed off the fine collection of fruit trees in it.

The next day, Mary and I looked after Tom and started to clean up the flat, which the builders had left in a fair old mess, with plaster dust, wood chips and other debris all over the place, while Steve and Jo drove in to Seville to buy some much needed new furniture and fittings. I spent most of the rest of the week assembling flat-pack furniture, which is something I enjoy doing. But it didn't do my sore thumb much good. I have had a painful right thumb for several months, presumably a case of tendonitis or RSI. I blame computing for this, and I have moved the mouse over to the left side of the computer in the hope that the problem will go away. For a while this seemed to help, but the strains of helping with the removals, assembling furniture and playing with a boisterous grandson all combined to make the thumb very painful, so much so that it was keeping me awake at night. But it is already much better now that we have come home and life is peaceful again.

Talking about the boisterous grandson reminds me that Tom, at three and a half, with big blue eyes and long blond hair, is a real cutie. He is a very happy and affectionate child, and full of energy. When our own kids were that age they were quite quiet most of the time. But Tom is very bouncy and always wanting to play vigorous games. The photo catches him in a rare contemplative mood. He goes to school from 9 to 2 each weekday, loves his teacher, seems to get on well with the other kids and is learning Spanish very fast. Before long, all being well, he will have a younger brother. Jo is seven months pregnant, and according to the latest scan the new baby is going to be a boy. Jo is already looking large, but feeling fine and still pretty active. However, she was glad to have Mary there to do most of the cooking for the week. Usually we take them out to a restaurant at least once during our visits, but this time there was so much to do that we all agreed to leave that until next time.

The week was gone all too quickly. Steve was embarrassed that we had spent the whole time working when we should have been having a holiday. But we were glad that we had been there when they needed us. By the time we left, they still hadn't quite finished shifting all their stuff from the old house. The new tenants, two women both called Concha, were supposed to move in on the first of April, but (this being Spain) they didn't seem to mind that they were still having to stay in their previous place several days after their own lease had expired. Also (this being Spain), the owners of the house had somehow agreed to let it to two separate sets of people, the other pair being a married couple where the wife was also called Concha (short for Concepción, apparently a rather common name in Spain). But the three Conchas had managed to sort things out amicably by the time we left.

Our return flight was early on Saturday, and rather than leave in the middle of the night for the four hour drive to Málaga airport we said goodbye to the family on Friday afternoon and spent the night at the Venta de los Arrieros hotel in Colmenar, where we always used to stay when Steve and co. lived near Málaga. The elderly proprietor and his wife welcomed us like old friends, and embraced us warmly in front of the other guests, which made us feel very special.

So now we're home again, and I had better be careful not to spend too much time on the computer for fear of damaging my left thumb before the right one has recovered.

Wednesday 9 April

I haven't actually looked back to check, but I'm quite certain that in nearly five years of online journalling I have never before written an entry on 9 April. The reason is that today is our wedding anniversary, and our present to each other is always that we go out for a nice dinner in the evening. The only exception to that is if I'm away at a math conference, in which case we have to make do with a phone call, saving the dinner until after I get back home.

So how come I'm sitting in front of the computer right now, typing this brief entry when we should be out celebrating our 37th anniversary? The answer is that we both have bad colds, and we decided that it would be better to have a quiet meal at home and sit around feeling sorry for ourselves before going for a hot bath and an early night.

Ah well, next year in Jerusalem, as they say. Or more likely, next year in Honolulu or Auckland, if our plans for a round the world trip this time next year work out as we hope.

Tuesday 15 April

After ten days, my cold is finally starting to clear up. Actually, it felt like more than just a cold. Let's call it a severe upper respiratory tract infection. That sounds a bit more impressive, doesn't it? I have doubled up my usual dose of Becotide^® inhaler, in the hope of preventing the infection from going down to the chest and turning bronchitic.

Poor Mary is having a worse time of it than me. Because of her chemical sensitivities she is unable to tolerate drugs, and she has to rely on natural remedies and homeopathy. She knows a very good homeopath, who usually manages to find effective homeopathic treatments for her ailments, but this time she is not having such good success. She has had a bad sore throat and laryngitis for the past week, and it's only slowly beginning to improve.

These bugs always seem to home in on the weakest part of your system. For me, that's the nose and chest. In Mary's case it's the throat that is most at risk. She had a vicious throat infection one time when we were living in Philadelphia. It was something like diphtheria, and her throat had almost completely closed up by the time we got her to the hospital emergency room. That seems to have caused a permanent weakness, and ever since then, her throat has been vulnerable to every passing virus.

I suspect that this present bug also comes from North America. We currently have an Australian colleague visiting our department. He stopped off in Canada on his way here, and picked up this infection that he has now passed all around the department. I suppose we should be grateful that he didn't come round the world the other way, stopping off in Hong Kong and spreading SARS everywhere.

Phase one of the occupation of Iraq seems to be more or less complete. So far, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. I'm really surprised at that. In my cynical way, I assumed all along that the invading forces would be bringing stocks of WMDs with them to plant in bombed out factories and reveal in front of the TV cameras to a suitably shocked world. But this has not happened. Can it be that the warlords in Washington are less Machiavellian than I suspected?

Not a bit of it. It turns out that Donald Rumsfeld and his cronies have depths of deviousness going way beyond anything that I had anticipated. Their latest argument is that since there is no sign of WMDs in Iraq, that proves that they must have been spirited away to Syria. You can't help but have a sneaking admiration for sophistry on such a cosmic scale. I suppose we can take this as a cue for an invasion of Syria some time later this year. Then when no WMDs are found there, it can only mean that they have been transported to Lebanon. Quick, let's invade Lebanon! No WMDs there either? Okay, they must have been shipped off to Libya. Or Iran. This story could run and run.

The real agenda behind the warmongering in Washington seems to be that it is all part of a grand scheme to realign power structures throughout the Middle East and thus bring the Arab–Israeli conflict to an end: the so-called Road Map for peace. The idea is that if all possible sources of support for the Palestinian intifada are eliminated then the Israelis will agree to the formation of a Palestinian state. I can well believe that the US has the ability to wipe out Hezbollah and Hamas, but I very much doubt whether Israel will then offer anything worthwhile in return. I certainly can't see Ariel Sharon enforcing the evacuation of the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, however much he may announce his willingness to do so.

An Arabic commentator on BBC radio remarked sadly that the trouble with the Road Map from his point of view was that it looked as though all the signposts on it pointed straight out into the desert.

Today's Guardian has the main front page headline "Bush vetoes Syria war plan". I hope that is right. Don't put money on it though.

Of course if Syria really is developing and stockpiling chemical weapons, that is a serious cause for concern. Nobody wants to see that happening, and in the 1990s practically every country in the world ratified a Chemical Weapons Convention with the purpose of eliminating these weapons altogether. Sadly, one country has undermined the whole treaty and prevented it from coming into effect, by refusing access to international inspection teams on its territory. No prizes for guessing which this rogue state is (it's George W Bush's USA, of course).

Monday 21 April Easter Monday

Very little to report here this holiday weekend. Usually we manage to have friends or family coming to stay some time during the Easter break, but this year there were just the two of us. Probably that's just as well, because we are both still convalescing from the virus that knocked us out on our return from Spain and we were glad to spend the holiday quietly on our own. Last week there was very little happening in the University, so I cleared my desk by Wednesday lunchtime and came home to spend the afternoon with Mary, sitting out in the garden reading. That may not sound very exciting, but in fact I think it is the first time we have ever been able to sit outside before Easter. At a latitude of nearly 54°N, Leeds is on a parallel with Goose Bay, Labrador. So even with the aid of the Gulf Stream it never gets really hot, and even in the height of summer it's unusual for the temperature to reach 25°C. For that to happen in the middle of April is unprecedented. But it was just about that warm for most of last week, and we were happy to take advantage of it. It couldn't last, of course, and today we are back to a more normal 10°.

Apart from lazing around in the garden, doing crosswords, watching the snooker on the TV and delivering local election leaflets for the Lib Dems, I have found time to update the links page on this site. There has been quite a turnover in the list of favourite journallers. Some journals that I used to read regularly have given up altogether. Others have fallen into the cesspit of LiveJournal, where I am reluctant to follow them. But other new ones have joined the list, and I hope some of them will lead to ongoing friendships. Best of all, one of my oldest online friends, Mickey, has started journalling again after a lapse of a year and a half. Pity that he's decided to migrate to LiveJournal, though.

What's the matter with LiveJournal, then? Quite simply, it has just about the slowest and most erratic servers on the entire internet. I know I'm not the only person who gets tired of trying to get through to their pages.

Having said that, I have a confession to make. I have signed up as a LiveJournal user. That doesn't mean that I am about to transfer my journal from here to there. I doubt whether I shall post any entries at all there, except maybe once every few months to ensure that they don't cancel my membership. My reason for signing up with them is that I have an online friend with an LJ site, who was being bothered by an online stalker and had to restrict access to his journal to friends only. So I have had to sign up with LJ if I want to continue to read him. And having done so, I can see why some people find LJ attractive. With its 'friends' feature, and the facility for friends to make comments on each others' entries, it really does foster a sense of community. But that doesn't compensate for its ropey servers.

Sunday 27 April

The trouble with being a property owner is that properties need maintenance. Lots of it. There was a time when I would spend almost every weekend working on some construction, repair or decorating job around the house or garden. But for the past few years I have postponed all the jobs that need doing. Maybe I'm getting old and lazy. Maybe I just prefer to do less demanding things, like surfing the internet. My excuse has been that I'm saving up jobs so as to have something to keep me occupied when I retire. Unfortunately, some jobs won't wait that long, and some have been postponed too long already.

Take the garage doors, for example. When we moved into our present house, in 1980, the garage doors were in a sorry state. At least two of the six glass panes were cracked. When I went to replace them I found that the wooden frames were so badly rotted that the whole doors would have to be replaced. The garage is a prefabricated unit and it should have been easy enough to find a new pair of doors for it. But for some reason the door frame is a totally nonstandard size, and I couldn't find anywhere that stocked doors of that size. I also couldn't afford to have new doors made to measure, so I decided to make a new pair myself. I bought the timber from the local DIY store, and over a period of several weeks, if not months, I built the new doors to the same design as the old ones.

Though I say so myself, I made a pretty good job of it. The frame is held together with rugged mortise and tenon joints, and after 20 years it has not sagged or warped at all. The doors have only been repainted once during that time, and they should have been painted again well before now, as I discovered yesterday when I took a bucket of water and a sponge to wipe several years' worth of grime off the paintwork (the picture shows how it looked before this was done). Beneath the layers of dirt I found a patch where the paint had come off and the wood was rotting. I certainly don't fancy the idea of making yet another replacement garage door, and fortunately I don't think I'll have to. The bad area has not yet spread too far, and I think I've caught it just in time.

Today I felt like a dentist as I dug out the rotten wood with a chisel, painted it with a wet rot hardener and filled the cavity with wood filler. The little picket fence beside the garage also had patches of wet rot in some of the slats, and I treated and filled these too. Now it all needs painting. That'll keep me occupied for the next few weekends.

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