Monday 31st May 10

Gill woke me up absolutely ecstatic. She'd found my shaver recharger. And it wasn't what I'd remembered what it looking like. Friends, this is what senility looks like. You are CONVINCED that the trimmer lead you are looking for is two-pronged and has a curly flex. You look everywhere and at one stage find the old one which does look like that... but the jack on the end fits your old, now dead, trimmer. You have the vision that the lead you are looking for is curly and has two prongs, and look everywhere for it. Your wife looks everywhere. Your wife finds all sorts of things which were lost, some of which are very welcome finds. You go to great lengths to get another one, as your beard continues growing and you don't want to look like a hairy monster... just a well groomed one. You even bother a friend who customises another piece of equipment to enable you to charge the bally thing.

Then the next morning Gill looks at a mini transformer doodah which has been sitting on a shelf in plain view all the time with various other bits of electrical nonsense... it is three pinned, has a straight flex... and it has 'Remington' written on the back. An OMG moment when you realise that you are fallible, have a faulty memory which leads you astray (no pun intended) and that you cannot totally trust your brain anymore. This must be what senility feels like.

So, I took my trimmer off Ben's charger, and tried to trim my beard. I managed half of it before the trimmer died on me. Ben's charger hadn't worked. So I plugged the gadget into the newly found charger and the green LED came on, indicating it was now charging.

I was disappointed that the weather was really nice and I could not help going outside and tidying. At lunchtime I came in and on a freecycle message, saw that someone was offering a garden parasol, something which Gill has been hankering after for a while. So I messaged the offerer and got a message back quite soon from my friend Linda, saying yes, I could have it. I hadn't recognised her freecycle name. She had got it from another freecycler but had realised it was too big for her little yard. So I said I'd go over within the hour to pick it up.

So I cycled over to South Bank and Linda was pleased to see me, and she was on good form, looking lovely and healthy and happy. The parasol looked perfect. Linda showed me her little compost bin, which she said I inspired her to have, and it was looking good too (not quite as attractive as Linda!) but good looking nevertheless. I offered to riddle it for her, to create a small sack of material to top-dress her many pots and planters. I'll do this in a few weeks when it's convenient for her.

So, home via Country Fresh where I picked up a box of gubbins and a sack too. I then spent some time down the garden, I dug out an old pallet bin and put all the contents in a builders one tonne bag. This allowed me to start filling the newly emptied pallet bin. Which is good as Gill was doing a lot of pruning and tidying, and had produced a lot of vegetation for this.

But I'm feeling torn as I really should be shutting myself away and sorting out the website which is going live soon. But I cannot let a good day go, and I've seen the weather forecast for tomorrow... rain all day! Which means I should be able to do the website...

I'd soaked some beans and boiled them on the stove last night, and Gill mixed this with some tomato/onion stuff, to have with rice. It was delicious.

After this I went round to Ben to give his big transformer back and he showed me that it would have charged the trimmer if I'd have put the voltage up a bit. He had also sourced a solar charger which might do the beard trimmer and will probably do mobile phones. He didn't want this and gave it to me... so I'll give him some more dried fruit, which he and Jill really like.

When I'd collected the 'resources' from Country Fresh I'd found perhaps 40 pears of usable condition in one of the boxes. So I spent over an hour loading up several drying racks with sliced pears. So I was again not in bed til after 2am.