Sorry about the lack of activity in the last few days. It seemed like I just went out like a light. I fell asleep in my chair on Friday night around 9 pm and didn’t waken until 3 am, despite the efforts of my family to wake me and make me go to bed. By that time I’d missed both my blogging deadline and my time for taking anticoagulants.

After that I developed a new snivelling cold, multiple aches in the joints and a need for more sleep. I managed to get to work on Saturday, including running the shop by myself on Saturday afternoon (as the other two sloped off for afternoon meeting of the Banknote Society) and slept all day Sunday.

I’m now re-launching the refreshed, but completely unimproved, new me.

It’s a modest relaunch because I’m also cooking roasted Mediterranean vegetables and, at 10.15, will be off to collect Number Two Son from work. This gives me twenty minutes to complete the cooking, serve it up, eat it (quickly) and get going.

It doesn’t give me much time for composing literary masterpieces.

Nickalls the fencer in action – we just sold his medals (as seen in the featured image) to a collector in China. He was the first fencer to win two titles in one year with the Universities Athletic Union – Foil and Sabre in 1935.