I'm the luckiest man in the world...

My darling wife died last Friday.

For all our married life, she'd had to deal with Type 1 diabetes, and never even murmered about the task of keeping herself balanced and active!

When I first plucked up the courage to ask her out to a party - in fact, it was just a piss-up, a get-together a week after my rugby club had returmed from a tour in Holland, and the others thought we ought to compare notes and find out who made the worst mistakes, who'd 'scored' - that sort of thing...), We immediately bonded in a gorgeous way. We'd been on friendly terms for some years, and in fact, we first met on my birthday at another party in Winchelsea, and she was with an old chum from school back then! We often met up in the pub where her mum and dad worked their socks off to make their place the best pub in Rye, 'The Bell', and when she was at home during college holidays, we'd always sit and chat.

So times went on. There we were, a couple, living and loving, and we were an 'item' from then on! I was going to marry the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen and spoken to, and she said that was fine by her! God, I was so lucky being there at a time written in the heavens...!

We raised two beautiful daughters, found our haven in our village, and after retirememt, realised we had so much more time together, and that was just fabulous.

But her diabetic issues surfaced with a vengeance some time ago. On top of all that, she'd only recently been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and she began a decline which she fought daily, sadly having to admit defeat last Friday. 

I'm heartbroken, but know now, that she has no more issues and pain, and that the above picture, taken on the 21st October, 1972, shows how fortunate I was in marrying the most beautiful girl in the world!

Laurie tells the story...

Some time ago, I mentioned that a piece of music had so much inside the words, that it was more than ...

The piece by Laurie Anderson was to me, a true definition of why and how people view art, and to be honest, I'm not really into that sort of thing, although I can stare at a Canaletto for ages, or hear some perfect music by Vaughan Williams or Butterworth until I'm a dribbling wreck!

But the other night, I was working on a quandary which was a simple miscaculation in the Scrobs Spreadsheet of The Turrets Accounts...

These accounts go back over ten years, and I built the programme for the simple reason, that I always want to know where our dosh is at any particular time, and even after 7,500 lines of numbers, it still works!

But I did a rash thing. 

I'd found a discrepancy of just over 80 quid between income and outgoings, and it was driving me mad! So I set in motion all sorts of checks and balances, which entailed trawling through each month since 2013. As the mouse finger was getting a bit tired, I started a downward scroll using my left hand, across the computer keys.

This all went well until absolute hell let loose, and the figures started dancing around all over the place, and were unstoppable! The dreaded word of 'Ref' appeared on 90% of everything, and I realised that the cuff of my jersey had caught up on the Ctrl key, and with some other key-strokes, the whole programme began to self destruct - including all my thousands of accounting lines!

Luckily, a few glasses of red had relaxed the frame more than somewhat, so I had to think more logically. It wasn't easy to find the antidote to the issue, but I kept remembering the words, 'And the voice said', from Laurie Anderson's piece above...

I just managed to restore a previous copy of the accounts, even though persevering with Chrome took several minutes, almost enough time to open another bottle before I completed the task of getting back to the present day's input.

The voice said - 'Leave it Scrobs, you'll muck it up again in your relaxed state, so LEAVE IT'!

And she was right!