Snow in London

Set off to London via Hertfordshire at 9am, home just before 9pm. C at her mother's, myself at the PBS for a meeting. The snow tentative rather than fully committed but making a decent show without settling. Still, it is good to feel those sharp little taps on my face then have them dissolve and run down my cheek. I put the ragged umbrella up - we have a sad collection of ragged umbrellas, since whenever we buy one it goes ragged within a week - and watch the raggy parts sag and billow. Only yesterday one of the ragged umbrellas all but exploded in my hand as I was putting it up and a nice spike of it gouged a sliver off my index finger.

My father, about whom I have not written for a couple of weeks now, is on the relative mend. It seems one of the doctors poisoned him, which is the way another doctor put it. Had he taken the medicine as dispensed he would have been dead in two or three more days. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't keep food down, he couldn't evacuate, he was losing weight so rapidly I thought - we all thought - he was a goner. Whether it was the prescription itself or the misreading of it that led to this is impossible to say without a more detailed enquiry that he doesn't actually want. He is not quite back to what he was but each day he grows a little stronger. We are a hardy bunch really, that is unless people start bumping us off, or we decide to do it ourselves. Both courses have been followed in the past. We like to keep options open.

Too late and too tired to do anything much except perhaps put up this YouTube of The Limeliters performing Flanders and Swann's 'Have Some Madeira my 'Dear'. It is a wonderfully melodramatic and leery performance, better than Flanders and Swann's own, the best I could find, and one to add to the sung light verse canon.



'Have some Madeira, my dear / You really have nothing to fear...'