Sunday, February 05, 2006

Hope upon hope

By the time we'd taken the third service at the prison we were getting good. Well, not bad anyway. I got a few 'thank you, miss' as the men left so it can't have been too bad.

The only problem arose when I nearly got into a fight with a prison officer. You know how smug the English can be. The Welsh are never like that; we rarely have the opportunity.

The games night was remarkably even-tempered. We did a quiz to test our male/female-ness. I'm pleased to say that I came out on the female side, unlike one of our party who was very border-line.

We also played Masquerade. I've never played it before and hope I never play it again. It's like charades only worse and I had to mime 'Frederick Soddy, professor of inorganic chemistry at Oxford'. My team guessed Oxford. We lost rather badly. I'd like to say that we had harder clues to mime but the other team managed to guess 'Bishop Desmond Tutu's tutu' and 'Sir Harry Secombe's inside leg measurement'.

We nearly didn't make it to the games night as, when we were getting ready, a strange smell developed in the kitchen. It turned out to be the fluorescent lamp fitting that had been leaked upon. Husband switched off electricity and removed fuse, but I still refused to go out in case something was smouldering away secretly. I didn't want to come home and find Harvey fried. I wasn't happy until the whole light fitting had been removed, the source of the smell discovered and my concerns put to rest. So, as well as no water last night, we also had sparse electricity as one circuit was switched off.

As I write it's lunchtime Sunday and the situation has not yet been resolved. Although the leak is more of a dribble than a geyser now.

It's 34 years today since my mother died.

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