There's a deathly hush in the close tonight...well, all this week

It's going to be awfully quiet round here in the blogosphere for a few days, with Dave away visiting his mother. He suggested we all take a week off from posting, but let's face it - if we did that, we'd find again what we used to do with our lives before we ever started blogging and we'd never have time to come back.

It's all a bit dampening to the spirits round here though. As soon as I've written this (I'm all dressed and ready and tidy, which is why the best thing to do is sit quietly like a good girl and not get muddy and disheveled) I'm going to a funeral - not my friend Felicité's whose funeral is tomorrow, but Bob's, who used to be a pillar of the high school governors for many years. I didn't know him outside the governors' meetings actually, but I'm doing the very grown-up thing of being a representative: though I don't expect I'll be the only one of us, most of the governors have joined since he left.

And yesterday, Sybil came and asked me if I knew how Mike was - he's organist at another church and helps out once a month here for me. He was due to have a hip replacement and I had it in mind to phone in the next week or two and enquire how things were going. But Sybil had heard that he's just had a stroke. I've phoned his wife this morning; he's starting to rally in that he can now move his arm and leg, but he can't speak yet although he can make sounds and laugh at his son-in-law's jokes. He had his hip op a couple of weeks ago - not the side that's affected by the stroke.

My mum had a stroke when she was young - late 30s. It's one of the reasons I am careful to not let things bother me. I keep as unstressed as possible and, without bottling things up, don't mind about minor annoyances. I relax a lot.