absolutely nothing

 The day was spent, simply, hopefully tomorrow will be better.The long lens to take the pictures of the birds with was repairable, it works now.

This was another day, housebound.

Read the news in the world, Russia is attacking, China is laughing and everyone else is just trying to cope

It is pleasant in the upper rooms now, now that the dust has gone. and the balcony is useable.

But apart from the repair of the lens and the reading of a one hundred page manual nothing of interest at all. The son repaired an old pair of electrostatic headphones.

They are forty years old now, and they still work.

dust

There was no way that leaving the house this morning was a good idea. Maybe things will be better tomorrow. So stayed in, accepting the parcl from the postman when he rang the doorbell. And then start to clean up the upper balcony, the balcony in such an unfortunate mess. Since there is a roof over the balcony rain never falls there, and sweeping it is really dusty. Buy a cheap metal storage shelf and set this up in the old lavatory at the end of the balcony. The old toilet seat is still there, but it will never be used again.

Put all the tools onto the shelves, it is starting to look tidier now.

The dust from the sweeping is in the clothes and the hair and everywhere.

That job is done now, and when the sun comes back again it will be possible to sit out there in the late morninga and in the early afternoons to enjoy the sun.

not special

No, things did not get worse, but it is still not possible to go for a walk. There is just not enough stamina there yet, and there are too many people around. Spend the morning considering the cost of having a lens repaired. Then decide that there is no point in having a lens that is not trustworthy, making promises that may not be keepable. There is no use in having a lens that will focus anywhere, or that needs to be knocked gently in a particular place to maybe work. Make a packaghe, pay the fee, and stick the label on the box.

Later, the parcel man arrives with a small parcel, give him the package with the lens in it. The contents of the new parcel will replace the sold cameras, a small package replacing all the packages sent all over Europe, to China and Japan. The money came in and now the money has gone out again.

It is a nice machine, much like the other one, just a slightly more modern version, a better sensor. but otherwise not much difference at all.

In the evening, take a walk, and take a few pictures. A picture of a small church, for example, a pretty subject, but nothing special.

worse

 The pain in the morning is worse now, and the clocks are all wrong and it is still dark. The alarm goes off an hour early, on account of summertime having started last night.

And there are no eggs in the refrigerator, therefore it is just toast and coffee for breakfast. It is all too bad.

Try to telephone with the doctor, but nobody answers.

Get dressed, reset the mechanical clocks, and leave the house.

At the doctors practice, there is no one in the waiting room, and both of the doctor's assistants look bored. But they are happy to help, explain the problem with the pains, and they provide an appointment

It is only possible in the coming week, because the doctor is on his holidays.

Let us hope that things do not get worse still.

impossible

A day spent like yesterday, just moving things around and tidying. The weather is great and it is impossible to leave the house. The infection will not go away, and it is not possible to go any distance away.

Thus remain in the house trying to organise things that have not been organised for years. And there is still a noticeable depression there which just will not go away.

The news from Ukraine is strange, the conflict is more complicated now.

Perhaps it will be possible to write a few more lines later. It is not possible now.

Now the evening meal has been eaten, and the electricity is failing for a second at a time. All digital machinery resets, and the son comes out of his room ready to argue. But it is nothing but a short power cut.

And go to bed early, in the hope that things will be better tomorrow.

housekeeping

 To tidy the chaos.Sift through the items, sort them piece by piece. Get rid of those bits of paper that will never be used, and get rid of the bills for telephone calls at work that are now long forgotten. Clean the drawers  of the document cabinet one by one. Use soap and hot water, and watch the water go black. Perhaps this cabinet had never been cleaned inside.

Sort all the things, then move the copying stand out to the cabinet, assemble it piece by piece, and clean it too. Use an oily rag to get the moving parts to move smoothly again. Now the machine is standing there again, and works perfectly. It has just changed rooms.

Start to arrange all the small parts in the cabinet, so that a tidy workplace can be made.

Take breaks to read the news, and to eat an ice cream.

Take a package to the post office in the supermarket, that will get that out of the way. It does not matter that it will only be collected on Monday, the item is out of sight and out of mind.

It is a pleasure to put things back into order, to arrange things and to plan the work that will be possible with all the newly arranged items. All it really is is housekeeping.

future

The man was highly trained as a military intelligence officer, and that organisations methods and protocols are a fundamental part of his life. His intelligence and resolve and whatever put him in the position he is in now.
The thought that neither was he alone in his organisation, nor is his organisation alone worldwide, is more worrying than this single manifestation of human evil. It is not his physical appearance that is the problem.
The problem may well be that he is a person who, as an officer of the state's power structures, will go to any means to uphold state power structures. No morals, no sense of decency, and no regard for human lives anywhere will be allowed to interfere with this aim.

The message arrived today with the news that the parcel arrived in Japan, and the customer wrote that he is satisfied . There is not scratch and no abrasion says he. This is the end of that worrying episode and it should be possible to spend the money now.

Good, good for both the wallet and the future.

escape

 Sitting at the desk, looking up at the second-floor balcony and the window beside it, see that there is another butterfly there, desperately trying to get out and fly to the light. See it fluttering up and down behind tht e dirty window.

Go on up the stairs and go the length of the balcony and enter the wood store. The butterfly is just resting. See that the cat had been there too, there are the remains of a destroyed butterfly on the window ledge. Open the window again, as yesterday, and shoosh the butterfly out. This one flies away at great speed, over the rooftops towards Trausnitz castle.

Return downstairs again, return to looking at things on the computer, trying to organise things. There is a package there with a filter in it, ordered for the lens that was sent to the Netherlands yesterday for repairs.

Label the filter, put it into a plastic bag and pack that into the camera bag. It is an orange filter for black and white work, and it will remain there until the small 135 mm lens returns from the repair. It is strange to be moving on with repairing things like this, when others would simply be planning their holidays and buying yet another bigger television or things like that.

Currently the major thoughts are the starting great war in Ukraine and concern over the personal ability to escape. And the concern to that a further donation needs to be made. Who to? Which aid organisation? Who knows?

butterfly

 Seen through the window whilst cleaning the upper balcony, a butterfly trying desperately to leave the warm dry air of the wood store. It is flying up and down the dusty little window, trying to leave for the air and the sunlight and the promise of some kind of sustenance. Leave the balcony and, in the wood shed, open the half of the window opposite to the one that the butterfly is so sadly fluttering against. Carefully, using a piece of paper, coax the butterfly towards freedom. It leaves the shadows of the wood store and flies away in the bright sunlight.

From the balcony, see that it is resting on the tin part of the roof, gathering sunlight on its spread wings.

Later watch it fly to the wall to another sunny patch there.

The cat starts to display interest in the butterfly, so shoo away the cat.

The butterfly flaps a way over the roofs of the town. This is the end of hibernation, but it is really much too early, the weather is too warm.

варвары

 That is all not so bad now, it is just that there are not enough red cells in the blood, the patient is a bit anaemic. The doctor is nice and writes a prescription for iron tablets. There is a vision of chewing rusty nails, but this has no bearing upon reality.

This morning, read the news early. Thousands of dead Ukrainians and nearly ten thousand dead Russians. In the space of few weeks. And read that the population of Mariupol has been decimated and hospitals destroyed in Kiev. There is no argument to justify this, all of Mariupol has been flattened by artillery. It is unbearable, this barbarity. Unimaginable for one who has spent his whole live in a peaceful civil society.

Go for a walk up the hill with the wife, she tires quickly.

And then go to the apothecary and pay for the prescription

There is "Eisen(II)-glycin-sulfat-Komplex" written on the package.

This does not sound like rusty nails. But perhaps it will help. And then read the news on the newspaper left in the hallway by the tenant. Accaunts of more barbarity therein, and news ofthousands of women and children fleeing the country for the relative security of the rest of Europe.

one hour fifty minutes

Today is the day that the inspection of the parcel for Japan may take place. It is a random inspection that may take place between eight and ten on this morning. A car from the customs authority may come by and demand to inspect the parcel. If it is in order and the contents are as declared an export licence will be granted. If they do not appear, then the word of the sender will be accepted and a licence will  be issued by ten in the morning, the documents will arrive by email and the parcel may be sent.

This will hopefully not happen often. One of the advantages of being part of the European Union is the free transport of goods, and now, in the time of all of these embargoes transport of goods outside the common market is troublesome.

It is still early, the son just left for school, a silent departure, not a word of goodbye or any such superfluous gesture. The coffee made for him and left upon the stove has been consumed, it has been accepted. It is like leaving scraps for the birds, they do not waste time acknowledging such gestures either.

It is another hour and fifty minutes, then the waiting will have its end.

There is time to read about the Russian occupation of Mariupol and their cruel bombardment of Kiev.

Ten in the morning passed, and an email arrived with the documents, and all is safely done. Fold the documents into a transparent cover and tape them to the parcel. Make a 'phone call to ask if it would be in order to take the parcel to the collection point belonging to the service. The woman on the telephone said that this would be quite all right. Leave the parcel at the pick-up point, and that is the end of that saga.

two weeks

 It is nasty a nasty feeling when an illness will not go away, and gives the impression that it is there to stay. An unwanted guest, a guest who takes his host so for granted that and causes pain in the normal run of the day.

That guest appears to be leaving, and it may be possible to take of on a walk again sometime soon. Why did the man with his endoscope have to be so careless?

It was just bad luck.

Bad luck that has left this patient nearly housebound for the last two weeks.

Nod

 A silly waste of a day, but it was better to go back to bed and sleep off the feeling of exhaustion than to fight it. The depressed feeling that comes from tiredness or maybe it is just the tiredness that comes from a feeling of depression, the lack of personal guidance, the inability to do anything from personal inspiration.

The wife points out that the tap in the kitchen is dripping.

Look at the tap, the thing that Americans like to call a faucet.

"just going to the bathroom to use the faucet". Strange sounds.

It is dripping.

Open the utility flap beside the chimney and turn off the water main, go downstairs and find a spanner to loosen the thirty two millimetre fastenings on the dripping fixture. See there- a rubber gasket has broken. Go back downstairs and rummage in a drawer full of bits and pieces of plumbing parts and find two new rubber gaskets, all done up in a little ziplock bag.

Carefully replace the fixture, making sure to tighten it evenly.

It does not drip any more.

On the travels through the house see that the biological waste has been accumulating, it needs to be brought to the municipal dumping place at the end of the street, next to the bottle bank. Collect a bag of waste paper, a bag of old bottles, and the bucket full of biological kitchen waste and take the whole lot to the end of the street, and on past the museum, and put the items into the designated waste containers.

And then immobility grips again. There are so many things to be done. But in the face of all this mess just 

take off the trousers and go to bed and sleep off the encroaching depression. This was written after waking up. Cats spend most of their time sleeping, but they have no problems with guilt for having wasted so much of their lives in the land of Nod.

postage

 At the post office there is a notice on barrier between the space where the telling machines are and the space where the normal post office is. The notice on the lowered barrier informs anyone who is interested that the personell are on strike, today and tomorrow. This would give them all an extended weekend.

Two of the items fit into the letter box, so put them in. With the one remaining item go to a nearby supermarket which has a parcel office in the corner. It is a short walk through a strange part of town, located on a busy street which does not really go anywhere. There is endless motorised traffic on this street, it is almost dangerous to cross over to the other side.

Pass the dilapidated small house that has just been standing empty there for the last twenty years. It is a sad sight, as if somebody just walked out and abandoned the building.

A little further on there is the big modern supermarket. Get in line at the parcels counter and wait for the other customers to finish. Then the clerk tells me that not enough has been paid on the small packet. Look at the sticker which the wife had printed out and see that it is so. 

Take the parcel back home, thinking all the while that this is good for exercise. 

The wife exclaims that this is not possible, the clerk must have made a mistake. Then she looks at the label, and realises that she had printed the wrong amount onto the label herself. A short while later, walk all the way back to the parcel office in the supermarket. On the way see that some of the side windows in the old house have been broken. It will probably not be around for very much longer.

The clerk's eyes smile when she sees the parcel with the different amount on it and exclaims "That's the way it should  be."

Thank her and leave, for a longer walk around the town.

Yellow

 Today, a second wave of yellow dust from the Sahara is to be expected. This is what the weather man announced on television yesterday. At just before seven in the morning the light is nothing but grey, with the sound of cars rumbling over the cobbles on the streets nearby.

The news of the failed Russian invasion of the Ukraine is rightly the most important thing in the news today,  a megalomaniac's failure of judgement.  The Russian dictator is holding the world as a hostage to the threat of the use of nuclear weapons and his troops are becoming ever more brutal as their death toll increases. It is a horror beyond imagination for one who has lived in the comfort of western civilisation for the last sixty-six years.

All in all it will be necessary to wait today, there will be no long walks anywhere. It will be necessary to wait for the parcel people to collect the Japanese parcel. It will be necessary to stay inside to continue fixing things on the house. And it will be necessary to stay at home untill the illness goes away.

It is now half past seven, and the light has not gone yellow yet.

bureaucracy on the 16th, forgotten blog

 16

forgotten day

that is just too bad, a day spent trying to straighten things out in the house, electrical things that never worked properly since the electricians were there, that never worked at all.

Electrical things are difficult when it is unclear as to which rules the installing firm worked by.

Gave it up, and then was overtaken by a wave of paperwork, A sale in Japan, and a sudden realisation of what paperwork for the European Union really means. An ELSTER number is required, to be able to apply for ATLAS, which does not appear to work unless an EORI number is available. Also, a number is required to be able to classify the goods.

It is easier to let the carrier do the work, but for this service this carrier charges forty Euros. And on top of all this trouble there is also insurance. 

This is  what bureaucracy means.

cold and grey.

 The sky outside is covered in deep yellow cloud, the light everywhere is yellow, veering towards orange. It is dust, carried all the way north of the Alps over Spain, it is a cloud of fine sand which has turned the sky deep yellow. This is the first time to experience such an effect, the warning on television yesterday had shown pictures of spain in an orange light. It is almost the same today, now, here.

Listen to the news on the radio. What Russia is calling a special military operation and what the rest of the world is calling an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation has now been going on for two weeks, at a ruinous cost to Russia, and a high cost to the rest of the world. If they lose, they are going to have to pay the cost of repairing all the cities that they have destroyed.

The sky is still yellow this evening, it is now turning orange. It is almost thinkable that there is a connection between a war that is destroying lives in Europe and a mass of air transporting fine sand all the way across Europe.

A lens arrived today, in a good condition, but not used for many years. The grease that keeps the parts moving smoothly was gummed up,

The thought of sending the item to the makers to have the grease replaced at great cost crossed the mind. But then a tiny spot of fine watch oil on the offending part released the whole mechanism. After careful removal of the surplus oil the lens works.

Should there be a problem it will be possible to send it on to the manufacturer anyway.

And now the dust cloud has passed, the sky has gone cold and grey.

Fuse number 4

 She says to stop using the light switch by the  entrance to the flat because it has come loose from the wall. This might be dangerous. This fixture has been defective for ten years now. Everyone has become used to it, it was installed by some electrician who did not realise that it was too close to the swing of the door, and that people would catch their hand between the switch and the door. People did, and the switch got dislodged. It has been hanging there, loosly fixed to the wall for ten years.

Now the wife has become aware that it might be dangerous, and the solution is to not touch it.

Agree that it is to be replace, and suggest the flatter light switch with a toggle and a porcelain base bought some years ago at a brocante market in France. The instant smart remark is that it is probably not a two way switch.

It is.

Remove the screws from the old switch, a huge bakelite rotating type switch. Check that the wooden supports for the interior wall are situated to allow for the mounting of the French switch. And then to the fuse box. See that the lights in the hall and those in the bathroom are on the same circuit as the socket in the hall. The socket in the hall to which the internet appliances are attached is on this circuit too. This is interesting but unimportant. Turn off the fuse No 4.

With the help of a workman's light remove the wires from the old switch and trim them to fit the French switch. Hook up the French switch and turn on the fuse No 4. It works perfectly. 

Turn off the fuse No 4.Then work out a way to fix the switch to the wall, which has been damaged by the repeated accidents with the last switch. It had been impossible to open the door and turn on the light at the same time, without catching ones hand between light switch and door.

Finally, find a way and find screws of a suitable length to serve.

Mix up a small amount of plaster to fill the crater left in the wall by the old switch. Fill the crater and smooth the whole thing with a wet smoothing sponge. Then mount the switch as planned.

Turn on the fuse No 4. It works perfectly. 

paper reminders

 There is so much stuff here, things that have never been thrown out, things that have landed in a box in a cupboard and furthermore forgotten , and then moved as a complete box to a new address and then lost and then uncovered again and the agony of deciding if this part of the past should be thrown out. Perhaps the best would be if all this haphazard documentation were destroyed leaving only those things that the memory deemed important enough to keep.

But that would require courage, there is a picture of the son, a young child feeding a goat. It would hurt to throw that away, for were it not for the picture there would be nothing but a very vague memory of the son having been fond of the goats at the pet zoo once.

At the moment he has other problems. He is finishing school, hopefully in an intact manner.

And this whole family structure will end then, and all that will be left are pictures which may have been truthful then but are now nothing but paper reminders of things that did not work out as was expected.

dead railway station

 Start so late on the days walk today, so late that there is no way of sensibly walking back home. It is good that there is such a thing as a map system on the phone, and it is also good that the nearest railway station is two kilometres away.

A place called Wörth.

A place equipped with the most depressing railway station building.

A building that speaks of past glory, of railway officials, of signalmen, of freight officials. 

That is all gone now and the building is empty and desolate.

Complete with bad graffiti.

There is a machine to buy the ticket from, there are no officials there who could sell you any. Wait for the train on the platform.

The only entertainment are a father and his young daughter playing with a fast and noisy radio controlled model car.

The walk was great, the weather was fine.

The railway station is a disaster.

psychotic freak

 A strange sense of weakness today, and the well known sense of things being pointless meet today and: 

stop movement.

Eat breakfast, solitary, as everyday. The cat is there, but she is solitary too, so therefore it hardly matters. Two eggs and two slices of toast, and butter. Perhaps the routine will change to porridge some time, but for now, it is eggs on toast.

And then there are the sons alarm sounds, one after the other. As a teenager, he does not want to get up, as a schoolboy he has to do so. But for whatever reason the presence of his father is upsetting him.

Get out of the way, and lie down on the couch until he has left the house. Fall asleep for a bit, the legs are weak and tired after the exercise of the last two days. The cat has been fed. The wife is still in bed.

Awake to see her peering in through the glazed part of the kitchen door, a scowl on her face as usual. She boasts that she never takes breakfast.

She just sits around listening to the radio and drinking coffee for hours.

And this is the truth.

The only sane being is the cat, and compared to a wild cat the animal is a complete psychotic freak.

in the hills

 Slip past the gate and briefly enter the private property of the power station. Follow the well-trodden path back down to the river again, and walk up the long ramp to the crown of the dyke. It is a long straight deep channel leading to the power plant. In the distance, a small bus approaches, going at just over walking speed. The driver is talking on his ' phone There is probably work being done farther on down the canal.

A little farther on a large earth moving machine approaches, closely followed by a heavy truck of the sort uses on big building sites. Conjecture that they have all finished their shifts and are going home.

The guidance system on the mobile 'phone keeps on saying "return to the route". The system is trying to make it's hapless user walk along the trunk road. This is not pleasant and certainly not a good idea. So ignore the data until the system catches on.

The walk to the doctor's practice takes nearly two hours. It would have been twenty minutes faster along the main road, but that would just not have been nice. The doctor is pleased to see me, she has started a new practice out in the country, outside the town. Upon leaving, ask one of the receptionists for directions to the cross country path to Landshut which crosses the hills. She gives a complex description, with terrific enthusiasm,

Arrive in Landshut after dark, the pedometer in the phone tells me that the walk was all of twenty kilometres long.

But it was nice, up in the hills.

no way out

 Climbing up to the castle, feel the warmth already. The jacket is too warm, even though the day is still cool. Upon leaving the park, unbutton the jacket's lining and put it in the rucksack.

This is the first longer walk in a week, and it is bright cold day. A day with a clear blue sky. 

There are few people about, it is Wednesday, and people are at work.

Listen to the music on the radio, and then there is the news.

News is always bad, but now it is worse. The carnage in Ukraine continues, and there is no simple way out.

And that is the end of the happy long walk. The next four hours are just spent going home.

sleep

 A day like yesterday, a day with no drive, a day spent freezing even though it is not really cold. There is no great clue as to what is really wrong, there will be an examination again at the beginning of next month, maybe that will shed light upon the miserable darkness.

Perhaps it is all in the mind.

Read about the Russian incursion into Ukraine, and realise that the Russian army is not as good in a military sense as had been reported. They may win in the end but until they do they will have heavy losses. This is a waste of human life. And the plan is not to release the embargo for years, if not for a decade.They will end up selling their gas cheaply to China. Nobody will be better off for all the suffering. 

That is not just in the mind.

Try to continue cleaning up the room upstairs, but when the cold gets to be to bad, lie down in bed under the blanket. Lying down helps, and slowly everything calms down.

two men in the middle of the road

 Two men standing in the middle of the road, one with a steaming can with a spout and one with a bucket. The one with a can pours molten black tar into the cracks between the cobble stones, and some seconds later the man with the bucket puts handfuls of sand over the tar. They are slow and concentrated in their work, and the traffic has to wait.

filling the cracks in the road

At the italian café there is a new waitress, a very clever young girl who thinks that she has a way with customers and can trick them into extra tips. It is not much money, but it is the principle of the thing.

Buy eggs and pretzels at the supermarket, and salt for the dishwasher too. Exhaustion is starting to set in again, and there is a constant feeling of freezing, even though the clothes are really warm enough.

The situation in the Ukraine is more than depressing. It is impossible to understand. Why would Russia attempt to take over a country that it was not at war with? Why all this violence? Why this disregard for international convention? Is it just nationalist stupidity, or do they really believe that they can get away with this? They will never get their oil and gas market back, and who is to trust the Russians as a nation now?

Too many questions, and no idea what it is all about. 

But everybody is scared. It is like a schoolyard with a big bully worrying everybody.

their way

 Listen to news all day, and for half of the evening too. Putin has led his army into a war that they will not be able to win, regardless of what they do. A man who cannot deal with peace can only start a fight, he can only bully for what he wants.

And he does not care if that what he wants is wanted by anyone else.

Sitting here as a freezing cold sixty-six year old, repairing a few chairs, and then wrapping himself up in a blanket. The son is doing his teenager things, and the wife is doing her online things.

Perhaps tomorrow will be easier, perhaps the Russians will have gone back to Russia tomorrow, and stopped trying to take over Europe, perhaps they will stop trying to force the world to see things their way.

escapist

 It is cold and yet the jacket is too warm. The river's surface is roughened with the wind, countless ripples formed by the wind on the uneven surface. There is little water in the river, it is a dry winter. The ducks and the swans are all swimming about with their heads underwater gathering whatever they like to eat from the river bottom.

Walk up along the river bank, then after six kilometers take a path through the forest. There are young people running here, almost always singly, keeping up high speeds. Maybe they are members of some athletic club or team, keeping themselves fit and keeping up their stamina. Cross the flood channel, there is a young man with a small vehicle and a very large kite racing on the cropped grass of the canal. He is tacking back and forth, sometimes going very fast indeed.

Follow a path along another small canal until this joins the river just before town. 

Then visit a restaurant, eat a bruscetta and have a cup of coffee. 

And then go home, to the bitter tensions there. Something will have to be done, just taking long escapist walks is not a solution.

Eissport Verein Landshut

 Make a picture of the graffiti under the bridge, some fan of the local ice hockey club had decorated one of the masonry pillars of the bridge with the logo of the club. Nicely done in spray paint. There are other comments there as well, but that is the main one,

The people were able to start the process to change the licence, the documents had been found. It all went very quickly and efficiently, there would probably have been no reason to be there personally at all.

But it does not matter.

The coffee in the Italian place is good today as well.

automatically

 Thursday, day to stay

at home.

Fill the blue bin with waste paper and cardboard from all over the house. A yellow bag is filled with scraps of packaging  waste. And the grey bin gets what is left. Up and down the stairs ten times until the mess is reduced. It will be so much more work before the mess is gone away completely.

The sad thought is that it will be no work to replace it. That will happen entirely 

automatically.

Eggs and toast, butter and cheese

 There are no eggs. Neither in the lower part of the fridge nor in the egg compartment at the top of the fridge. There will be no poached eggs without this vital ingredient. There is nothing to be done about this.

So make up a slice of buttered toast and a bit of cheese for breakfast. This is good too.

It is quiet in the flat without the son. His absence is not even made up for by the cat.

Later on in the Italian cafe listen to music and watch the other guests eat and the staff go about their business. The coffee is good, as it almost always is. The cook is a particularly interesting personality, watch him make a plate of noodles he with enormous concentration. The waiter with the beard picks up his money.

And when the coffee is finished, leave.

The supermarket has mainly older customers at this time, forever standing in the way. Remember to be patient, it will not be many years now, and their viewpoint will be understood all too well.

Eggs and toast, butter and cheese, that is all for today.

Later in the day, go to the motor club and cancel the travel insurance. It is insulting of them to double the fee just because of the age of their client. It is cheaper not being insured. The woman at the club is friendly.

hard time

Leave the house early, to drive to the one time workplace to supply some technical help to one of the trainees from long ago. She is now a master of her trade and she has married and is expecting her first child. She will stop working for six months and then her husband will take over the child minding duties.

But the software does not work. An American company, an American printer and the communication does not work because the two firms are competing.

Arrive at the old place of work,

Take out the bag with the cameras from under the seat, and the bag with the bottle of spirits, a present for the technicians, the one time colleagues. Walk around the buildings, and go to the workshops. There is nobody at the machines, it is nine, the official break time. Knock on the door, go in, and there are far more people there than expected there, the bottle is too small.

Chat, and suddenly there is a plate with sausages and sauerkraut on the table. Say thank you, and, see there, it is all really tasty.

Leave at ten to ten and go to the gate of the reactor. Show the identity papers and the covid documents and   get a pass for the day. Go down to the building and take the lift up to second floor.

And spend all day trying to find out what is wrong. This system will just not work. Why do people in competition with each other give their customers such a hard time?