The first week of January 2026 brought hard overnight frosts and daytime temperatures hovering around 0°C. Heavy snow blanketed the north of the country, but here in Harborough we had only a light sprinkling of the white stuff. The central heating was fired up each morning, and the woodburner in the lounge was lit during the afternoons.

Feeling much better, for the first time in over three weeks, I ventured out on my bike into the frozen Leicestershire countryside. Despite numb fingers, I enjoyed the exercise. Having lost a couple of kilos in weight and suffered some obvious muscle loss through illness, I had expected the going to be hard, but surprisingly it wasn’t. Perhaps the cold played its part in that illusion.

Sue is now much more mobile, and many of the household tasks I have been deputising for are once again ‘being done properly’. Annoyingly, though she is keen to return to her routine, most of the U3A activities she enjoys have been cancelled due to the weather or illness among the organisers.

On the 5th, Charlotte took Lucas back to university and stopped by briefly with Ellis. Earlier that day, however, she had taken Harry to the vets after he stopped eating and became very unwell, leaving him there for further investigation. She collected him later that afternoon, armed with antibiotics and an appointment for the following morning.

The next day, around mid-morning, we again hosted Charlotte and a very poorly Harry after he had undergone further tests. Charlotte waited at Willow Bank until the call came from the vets with the results. The verdict was not good: there is a possibility that Harry has liver cancer. After returning to the vets for more antibiotics, it was agreed to monitor his progress over the next few days before committing to a scan to determine what is really going on. We all have our fingers crossed that, as with my own recent diagnosis, it proves to be wrong.

In other news, Philippa’s son Simon, who, along with his girlfriend, had spent Christmas and New Year with his parents, returned home to Manchester to discover that their house had been burgled. Despite the alarm being triggered, none of the neighbours bothered to investigate, and it appears the police are no more motivated.

Simon and Mel returned home at 1 a.m. on Sunday, the 5th, to discover that the French windows had been smashed with a brick. With the windows broken, Simon decided to sleep in the lounge for security reasons. It proved to be a wise decision, as he was later woken by someone attempting to gain entry, who was scared off by Simon’s presence.

Confined to the house during this cold snap, I set about creating a children’s book for Archie and Alice. Many years ago, when Charlotte, Sarah and Jamie were very young, I used to make up a story about a mother monkey, her baby, and a crocodile. It was a firm favourite, and I lost count of the number of times I was asked to tell it again. I always intended to write it down, and now, at last, I have.

The 9th of January was an awful day. The previous evening, Storm Goretti had struck the UK, bringing winds of up to 100 mph to the south-west and blanketing much of the rest of the country in snow. I cancelled the Thursday evening pool in the garden room with my rugby chums, as well as our planned trip to Tenbury Wells on Sunday to meet Philippa and exchange Christmas presents. Heartbreakingly, Charlotte then told us that poor Harry was in such pain, with no prospect of improvement, that they had made the terrible decision to let him go.

Poignantly, the following day marked the anniversary of my mother’s death. We woke to a couple of inches of snow and the news that Charlotte would not be bringing Harry to Willow Bank for me to say my goodbyes. He was suffering so badly that the kindest course of action was to take him to the vets as soon as they opened and end his misery. At 9.28 am, Harry, the wonderfully eccentric greyhound, passed away. So deeply loved, he leaves a huge hole in the family and will be greatly missed.

That afternoon, Sarah and Charlotte had planned to take me out for lunch as a belated Christmas present, but none of us felt up to it, and we agreed to postpone it until a later date.

Sue and I visited the Rothwells the following afternoon, after the family had sadly buried their much-loved Harry in the garden. Although it was an intensely sorrowful occasion, returning him home was what Harry would have wanted. The memorial that Charlotte created to mark his resting place will be a lasting reminder of the joy and affection he brought to everyone during his eight years as a cherished member of the family.

After my morning cycle ride on the 14th, the wretched start to the year showed no sign of easing. I had endured another sleepless night, and my frosty two-wheeled foray into the Leicestershire countryside felt particularly arduous. On returning home, and depressingly, the all-too-familiar burning sensation returned when I needed to urinate.

It was already too late for a doctor’s appointment at the surgery, so I waited until the afternoon, when Sue returned from a shopping and cinema trip to Corby. She dropped me off at Kettering Hospital before continuing to Charlotte’s to await my call. Three hours later, we were back home, armed with yet more, albeit stronger, antibiotics, a cream, and instructions to contact my GP for further tests. The most frustrating thing about having cystitis is that, if I were female, I could simply pop into the pharmacy in Harborough, just two minutes away, and be prescribed antibiotics without needing to see a doctor. As a man, however, I have to book a GP appointment first. How unfair is that?

After Sue met up with our former neighbour Viv for coffee and cake at Louisa’s Bistro in town, I spent the following afternoon providing a urine sample for the NHS. I was prescribed an additional antibiotic and booked in for further blood and urine tests, with another scan also in the pipeline.

Over the next few days, I began to improve rapidly, and by Sunday the 18th, I felt well enough to drive the couple of hours, in atrocious weather, to Tenbury Wells to meet Philippa and Paul at Sheila’s and finally exchange Christmas presents. In similar conditions, Sue’s sister and her husband had taken four and a half hours to drive up from Devon. We arrived at 11 am, with her sister following an hour later. Soon afterwards, Theresa, a neighbour and friend, joined us, making six in total for coffee and a chat. Despite her ill health and frailty, Sheila was surprisingly perky and clearly lifted by the company, eagerly catching up on family news and dispensing the latest Tenbury gossip.

At midday, Sue and I set off on foot, rain still falling, to walk into town for Sunday lunch at the Bridge public house, situated beside the troublesome River Teme. Sue was keen to browse the shops en route and see what had changed, while Paul kindly ferried the rest of the party by car. The Bridge’s carvery is hugely popular, and shortly after we arrived, every table was taken. The atmosphere was lively, with local families enjoying a Sunday get-together. Having grown up in the town, Sue and Philippa were delighted to be recognised by an old school friend, prompting an animated exchange of life updates. The meal was excellent and fully deserving of its local reputation.

It was still raining on our return to Sheila’s, although Sue and I detoured via the church so she could pay her respects at her parents’ graves. After coffee and cake, accompanied by yet more family reminiscences and town talk, it was time for us to leave and drive on to Cleobury Mortimer for our overnight stay. Pip and Paul set off on their much longer journey back to Buckfastleigh. Our route took us through murk and drizzle over the Clee Hills, where traces of the previous week’s snowfall lingered in frozen white drifts on the summits.

We had stayed at The Talbot before and were looking forward to its warm, friendly atmosphere. After a swift check-in, we spent some time in our room watching television before descending the quirky stairs to the bar for refreshments. The Talbot is a traditional 16th-century black-and-white country inn, tastefully restored. The information in our room spoke of a spectral lady named “Mary”, said to haunt Room 6 and to be responsible for sudden icy draughts. We were in Room 8. At breakfast, the owner, who also acts as chef, entertained us with tales of other apparitions, particularly mischievous ghostly children reputed to run up and down the stairs and corridors in the early hours, occasionally causing a 2 am evacuation by terrified guests. Thankfully, snug in Room 8, we heard nothing between the church bells chiming at 11 pm and again at 6 am.

After a perfectly acceptable breakfast, we took a damp stroll through the town, calling in at a charity shop in a fruitless search for a lost Rembrandt or a misidentified piece of gold jewellery encrusted with enormous diamonds. Perhaps next time. The journey home was through relentless drizzle, which finally lifted as we reached the outskirts of Harborough.

One of Sue’s belated Christmas presents was a book from Sheila. Keen to explore its contents, she began reading it that very evening and, by the following morning, had finished all 135 pages. She was brimming with excitement, eager to share tales of her past with me.

Before breakfast, I patiently listened as memories tumbled out of people and places of which I have not the faintest inkling, punctuated by her reassuring asides of, “You won’t know who they are.” I sensed it was wisest simply to let the stories spill forth.

The book was written by Sue’s former English teacher and long-standing family friend, Jean Harrison. Jean, born in Nairobi in 1930, before moving to Tenbury Wells in 1935, later trained as a teacher at Bristol University. Now in her nineties, she remains very much “all there” and still going strong.

Sue remembers her teaching with great affection, as does her sister Philippa. While the book is, in part, a biography of Jean’s life, it is her recollections of Tenbury that resonate most strongly with Sue, stirring up a wealth of long-forgotten memories.

A couple of weeks ago, we ordered two new reclining chairs, complete with footstools, from Amazon to replace the decidedly shabby specimens in the sun room. On the morning the delivery was due, I triumphantly dispatched the old chairs to the recycling centre, smug in the belief that their replacements would be arriving later that day.

Naturally, the new chairs failed to appear. They were rescheduled for the following week, which duly came and went, followed by yet another revised delivery date several days hence. Then, just to keep us on our toes, the chairs turned up a day early.

Some assembly was required, as expected. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that the base plate of one footstool had been welded on upside down, an impressive and idiotic feat that rendered assembly entirely impossible.

The following morning, I contacted the company to request a replacement part, only to discover that there were no more recliners available in that colour. I have a strong suspicion that this is merely the opening chapter of a long-running saga.

Over the previous 24 hours, I had been sporting a blood-pressure monitor at the behest of my GP. It was fitted by a keen young trainee at the surgery, under the watchful eye of a more seasoned nurse.

On my return, the device was ceremoniously connected to a computer, only for it to emerge that it had recorded absolutely nothing at all. The trainee, it transpired, had forgotten to switch it on. Adding to the farce, the nurse admitted that the other two monitors returned by patients that day had also drawn a blank.

And so, once more unto the breach: I left the surgery again, wired, tubed and feeling faintly cyborg-like, this time only after a reassuring test reading of 119/78 had confirmed that the thing was, at last, on and doing what it was supposed to do.