January

 January has been a bit grim. Wind and rain and mud.  The lawn is now a mud patch as the dogs have been playing on the sodden grass. And I’m fighting a losing battle against mud they bring into the house too. 

Some signs of spring in the garden

Overall it’s been a quiet month.  Much TV watching. Like many people,  I watched the drama about the Post Office and was appalled by the way so many honest people’s lives were destroyed because of the refusal of the Post Office to admit their Horizon accounting software was faulty.  My mother was a village postmistress for 35 years.  She was rather like the Jo Hamilton, one of the victims of the scandal, helping her customers out in many ways.  Thank goodness she had retired before the software was introduced - she would have been devastated to have been accused of dishonesty like Jo was. Here she is just before she retired in 1998. 

I recall the stress of the weekly ‘balance’ as she called it.  When we were children, it was on a Friday night  and any planned outings were delayed until the balance was complete.  The usual problem was an issue with the pensions.  You had to total the amount shown little square date-stamped dockets torn from pensioners’ books.  In the early days it was all done manually, then we had an ‘adding machine’ a big clunky early version of a calculator with a pull handle.  It was easy to make a mistake and finding those mistakes could take a long time. 

This was awarded to my mother by the Post Office. In fact she was postmistress for 35 years. 

As soon as we were able to count money, my sisters and I began to help in the post office which also sold other things such as stationery and knitting wool. When I was over 16, I covered more officially for a couple of weeks when my mother had a ‘holiday’, which was, in fact,  just the occasional outing.  I wasn’t terribly successful as a stand-in and when it came to Friday night I just couldn’t balance.  I must have made some kind of mistake - overpaid someone’s pension or forgot to tear out the little docket. I recall my mother having to put the money in to cover this shortfall. She should have taken it out of my wages but I don’t think she did. All this came back to me when watching the ITV drama.  I felt so sorry for those innocent post office who were treated so badly. 

I have also spent several enjoyable evenings in January building the Lego flowers I got from Kate for Christmas. Here they are.

Tomorrow I am escaping the wind and rain for a few weeks, leaving Paul and the dogs behind and heading to New Zealand via Singapore.  Looking forward to it very much.