Sunday

Quite a busy few days. My brother came to visit from Birmingham / Northern Ireland and a good time was had by all - I've been non stop for about a week and today, being Sunday, is a day to catch up. Quite a lot has happend,but suffice to say all is well, the weather has been beautiful, everyone has been lovely and the only bill I have left to pay is my tax bill.

The lock on the front door broke yesterday, trapping us both inside and forcing me to climb out of the bay window to try and fix it from the outside - I'm replacing it today - nearly 30 quid for a new one!!! I thought I had a spare upstairs but all I could find was a yale without the key.

The weather has been spectacularly good and is lovely again today. The dogs have been quite well behaved but stole two bagged custard tarts and tried to hide the evidence by burying to foil trays. I've started getting my pearly king outfit together for the royal wedding party - it's already been 'adapted and scaled town to something more like a jumper. Picked up some pressed tin Victorian style letters and will support the words 'Kate' and 'Wills' with 'Bollocks'. Pearl buttons are rather more expensive than I thought... I've gone for a lot of plastic. The woman in the haberdashers might have thought I was a bit 'touched'

My brother gave me several boxes of paperwork left over from my mothers estate - I went through some last night and it was very depressing and upsetting - I didn't realise how close she had come to bankruptcy, there were lots of things I didn't like - I read through a large folder of letters from the bank from 1990 -1999 which started off friendly, accomodating and complimentary - and gradually became threatening, arrogant and condesending as time went by. We always wondered where all the money went - and I found one letter that confirmed the entire income from selling one business and property was absorbed by a single VAT bill. I think she was incredibly poorly advised, and was at one point fleeced by a financial advisor who went bankrupt - I have no idea how much she actually lost through him, the papers were incomplete.

One thing I found interesting was a bank book that was in her maiden name and still in regular use long after I was born, in addition to her other accounts. There were piles of paperwork from the heath service regarding her declining mental and physical state, lots of stuff about care plans by people who didn't care and evidence of OCD behavior (reams of long hand written lists of royal family trees and dates in 5H pencil ). I also found periods of quite sad religious devotion, particularly St Jude - patron saint of desperate causes... obviously the bastard wasn't listening.

There were some more positive things in there too - but not much. Registration certificates for her Siamese cats and things like, that I'll dig out the interesting stuff and share it - the rest I'm probably going to destroy - after I've spoken to my siblings about it - it has no interest to anyone apart from us and is pretty grim reading, might be best to let it all lie.