The diary after that was rather full - Christine had a Zoom meeting on the next day. Somehow, late on Saturday evening Mike realised that he was going down with a cold. Remarkably this was the first 'proper' one since we move up from Cornwall, over five and half years ago. Each one is different and this time the dominant feature has been a throaty cough. By Saturday morning he was not a happy bunny!
Sunday he failed to make it up in time to go to church along with Christine but had a very rare lie-in, almost until lunch time! He gathered sufficient energy to assemble some key items for the evening roast but it needed Christine to finish it. He also made a batch of mushroom soup for a meeting the next day.
Monday was a scheduled regular meeting of the Waterways Chaplains on the K&A which we host alternately with another couple in Hungerford. However, they have just had a parental bereavement and were not available for this day and so we had agreed (back on Friday when there seemed no reason not) to host instead. Hence the soup! By the time the cold emerged it was really not feasible to find Plan C! Nevertheless, Mike kept out of the meeting itself, dug a mask from the Covid era from the bottom of a drawer and mostly remained well clear.
Ironically, we had booked our winter Flu and Covid jabs for Tuesday - for some reason unlike last year they were organised independently. The flu was being done by the pharmacy in Morrisons whilst the Covid was by our GP surgery. But on the day before, we had a text to say that Morrisons had run out of flu vaccines! At least this enabled us to address Mike's concern about asking his body to process two vaccinations at the same time as fighting a cold. (The system does not seem to worry about it!) When Christine called our surgery to see about a new date they suggested that we move to a date next week when both can be done together!
None of that has much to do with boating and we have left Alchemy in the very capable hands of Brinklow Marina staff until we can next visit. At present, we have no plans before much closer to the next season although we have booked a blacking slot in late March not far away. So it seems likely that this blog will, as is usually the case, be in hibernation for a while. Of course, we continue to follow a number of blogs that are still active (see the blog roll on our website)