CGF Sprog 1 lost her phone sometime between finishing college and getting home yesterday. While everyone else was out doing sporty and/or scouty thing this morning I retraced her route from house to sport centre, and from sports centre to college. Wonder of wonders (and way beyond even my most optimistic expectations) – I found the phone – in the gutter, but still in one piece and working. Lucky we hadn’t had any rain last night, and it had fallen far enough in to the gutter to be out of the way of passing traffic. And in a section of road that few people walk along.

It did take a bit of detective work that Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of. At first I was looking along the cycle path but after about 3/4 mile I realised that “I crossed the road” meant that she had cycled along the road not the path. So I started looking in the roadway – and within 30 seconds of that, I saw the phone.

Later, CGF lost her car keys. I found those too. First (and last) place I looked.

I have a bit of a cold so have been propping myself up with lemsips and lockets. I didn’t switch the kitchen light on this morning, but thought the colour of the lemsip was a bit dark. I assumed that it was from the colour of the mug I was making it in. The same with one I made a few minutes ago. Then I realised it was a blackcurrant flavour. Obviously my taste has been affected by my cold.

My cousin found a calendar from the year my grandfather died, on which my grandmother had written notes of his illness. Unfortunately, not much about the illness itself, just a record of how long he had been ill and how long he had been in a nursing home. It also recorded the date he was taken ill, which seems an odd thing to mark – unless it was known from the outset that it was a fatal illness. Or may have been marked in retrospect.

He was ill for about six months, but at this late juncture we’re not really sure what the illness was. And as it was over 70 years ago, we’re not likely to find anyone who does. The family story is that he caught a blood infection through an open wound when swimming, but I don’t know whether an infection would take that long from hospitalisation to death. This was before antibiotics were readily available – I remember my grandmother once showing me a plaque dedicated to Fleming (Alexander, not Ian) and telling me that if penicillin had been discovered a few years earlier it might have saved her husband.

We’ve been to Costco this afternoon – the shop that sells large-size packs of food (or normal size if you are used to US supermarkets). Saturday afternoon is a good time to go as there are several tasting station around the store. I had some steak pie, a cake, piece of pizza, slice of apple, yoghurt … And not the tiny nibble-size pieces you get in standard supermarkets – these were proper mouth-size pieces.

We bought some Danish pastries – Bob Marley style. With Jam in.