Weekend

We went up to Lincolnshire this weekend, partly to visit the Dowager Countess, but mainly to look at Jan's dream house. You may recall it from a few posts back--in New Road, Jan's home street, with a semicircular leaded window and six bedrooms, a snip at a quarter of a million pounds or thereabouts. It is indeed just as lovely inside as out and would enable us to live and work (creatively, with a following wind) and store all our stuff and hold some truly epic Nycons. The downsides are that it would probably need as much spent on it in redecoration and rewiring and such as this house cost, that it would take three times as much effort to keep clean as this one would if I ever actually made any effort, so we would need help with that, and that we really, really, honestly could never afford it in a billion years. And the old couple who are living in it are very nice, and desperate to sell, which made us feel a bit awful, but we had at least to look.

Once again the warden service excelled in the art of not being there. When we arrived, despite the fact that cousin Maureen's daughter-in-law had booked the guest room a week earlier, neither she, Maureen, the DC or anyone had the key to said room, and there was no sign of any warden presence and no way to contact same. We did eventually get in, by a series of desperate shifts and stratagemmata, and it was very comfortable, so that was all right. And we spent some time with the DC, and some with cousin Maureen, and I got some pies from Wisbech and put some flowers on the family graves, and we went to Saturday evening mass at Holbeach while the forces of Anti-Popery bombarded the church from the neighbouring gardens, and then we come home, in my case to a letter telling me my incapacity benefit ends on the fiifteenth inst. So there we are.