All The Days Are Blurring Into One

I think it's Thursday today although, as every day has been almost identical for the last two weeks, you could tell us that it was Wednesday, Tuesday or even Saturday and we wouldn't know any better. Who would guess that preparing to move from a family house of twenty-three years would be such a challenge? The last twenty-four hours has been one of the most grueling yet. 

Yes, yesterday we hit the point on the schedule that read "photos". I've always enjoyed taking snaps and in the forty years or so that Marion and I have been together I must have taken many thousands and, before we hit the digital age, most of those thousands of photos were printed by the local shop and religiously stuck into albums with the better ones finding a place in one of Marion's large collection of frames. We had a large antique coffer completely full of photographs so, starting yesterday at around noon, and finishing at about the same time today we went through every single one of them.

This is what we ended up with. Now I don't want to panic our children and other relations; the bulk of those big bin bags is taken up with empty albums - we threw away very few photographs with people in them (other than those of people we'd rather not remember). Most of the photos disposed of were my attempts at landscapes and holiday scenes; so bags full of atmospheric shots of castles, Lakeland fells, hotels we stayed in, Mediterranean beaches and fish I once caught were consigned to the tip. I've made so many visits there in the last two week that I'm on first name terms with some of the blokes who work there now and I walk around the place with such authority that people have started asking me which skip they should deposit their stuff in. We still ended up with three packing boxes of photographs, albums and frames to take to Framlingham but at least we've spared our kids some work in the future.

Before we started on the photos it was the turn of the smallest room in the house - the cupboard under the stairs. It was like the Tardis! Who would have known that all this stuff would have fitted in here?

Marion is so keen on leaving the house nice for whoever comes in after us that she suggested we might want to decorate it. Hmmm.

After working flat out we decided that we really ought to get to the cinema. We haven't been for almost two weeks and, although there was nothing on at Vue that really took our fancy, we ended up at Red Lights. I spent most of the film wondering if the bloke playing the young scientist was the real scientist Professor Brian Cox off the telly. Turns out it was Cillian Murphy but I'm not the first one to notice the similarity as I Googled the names of both together and loads of stuff came up. Sadly the similarity between Murphy and Cox was the only thing that was interesting in the film. It was, in fact, pretty rubbish. Sigourney Weaver is a scientist who debunks the paranormal, Murphy is her assistant and the film opens interestingly enough with a haunted house for them to investigate. But then Robert De Niro enters the fray as a blind psychic who once persuaded Murphy's mum that she could fix her cancer by paranormal means and the film revolves around the two doctors' attempts to destroy De Niro's credibility and expose him as a fraud.  A few things go bump in the night which is a good job as they woke me up - maybe we've been working too hard on clearing the house but this really was a dull film.

  I even managed to find a photo of the two of them together.

There's so much going on in our heads that we're still reading when we go to bed to try and wind down. I read  Theres' Always Tomorrow by Pam Weaver this week. I gave it four stars on my Amazon review but feel a bit guilty as I was slightly critical and I know that when I get around to publishing my own novel I won't enjoy criticism. Here's my review.


"I spent a while trawling through the Amazon bestseller lists trying to find a good read and There's Always Tomorrow caught my attention - it looked like my sort of book - a mysterious letter, family intrigues a period setting.

And it's a good story about good and evil. It captures the atmosphere of the fifties very well and the reader is always compelled to discover what happens next. But I did have a few niggles. For me the heroine Dottie is almost too good to be true and whilst Pam Weaver's writing is very competent, whenever we got to showing emotions, there was always a tear running down a cheek or a heart fluttering in a fairly melodramatic and overstated way that had me picturing the characters like actors in silent movies. I don't want to appear overly critical as it is an enjoyable book, but I do feel that this exaggeration and almost cliched showing of emotions let it down at times and I sometimes felt as if Dottie and some of her pals were characters from one of the many Enid Blyton books that are referred to in the text.

Although there is a dark side to the book, it's a pleasant and unchallenging read and I think that it's a story that would make a good TV drama."

It's Friday tomorrow (I think). That means it's the conservatory and lounge to get sorted. Can't wait for the weekend (dining room).