Staying Home Part 2: Day 4

It wasn't such a bright morning today, and both M and I were feeling tired so we went for a slightly shorter walk. Our walks have started to split into trainer (sneaker?) walks and boot walks - trainers for walks around the local area, sticking to pavements and surfaced paths, and boots for countryside walks which at the moment inevitably involve at least a certain amount of mud. Today was a trainer walk, down to the older part of our end of town. Until the mid-1960s the town where we live was actually two completely separate towns, with a county boundary between them and each with their own town council, police station, magistrates court and so on. However, they increasingly shared infrastructure and the road which bridged the canal and river started in one town and ended in the other, built up all the way along and with no gap in-between the two, so the two were merged into one unit and our end was transferred from Buckinghamshire to Bedfordshire. 

We live on a large estate built in the 1970s and the older part of our end of town is 19th century, built around the rail station. As we walked up one of the older roads I spotted this cheerfully coloured door. At the top of the road is the parish church. The original 13th century parish church still exists, but is a couple of miles away in an isolated position with only a handful of houses nearby. This newer one was built in the 19th century to serve the rapidly growing population and to save them having to walk across the fields to old St. Mary's. The buildings adjacent to the church were originally a school. 

The church overlooks a park, and as we walked along the road to the entrance this brick wall covered with  moss and ivy caught my eye. We then went through the park to the station and crossed the tracks by the station bridge. Until a year or so ago there was an old iron bridge, separate to the station, which crossed the railway to the park, but it was becoming unsafe and had to be demolished. We then walked back through the other end of our large estate, stopping off at Tesco Express for some bread and bananas on the way (why is there always something we run out of!). 

Thanks to Covid this was the first time for many years that I did not play at a Remembrance Day service with the brass band. During lockdown indoor public religious services have been cancelled. Scaled down outdoor services of remembrance are allowed, but bands are not - only a single trumpeter or bugler to play the Last Post.

After we got back from our walk I had a soak in the bath with some Lush bubble bar and a scented candle. Very decadent! After lunch M and I started watching yet another Michael Palin series; this time he is travelling through the Himalayas. After M went to work, I spent a couple of hours working myself. I try to avoid working at weekends, but often we have to enter the questions we write into an online application which is annoyingly slow but often seems better at weekends, presumably because less people are using it. It doesn't take much concentration, so I watched several more episodes of The Good Place while I cut and pasted and tagged. I then had a minor success. The dishwasher had developed a puddle in the bottom and was refusing to drain (the second time this has happened in a month, which doesn't bode well!), but I decided to try running it empty to see if that would clear the problem and it worked. It may only be temporary, but at least I managed to wash dishes in it this evening. H took a break from studying to cook us lamb curry for dinner and we watched the Strictly results show. I intended to read for a while but it didn't happen as my eyes were boggled from staring at the laptop screen for too long this afternoon.