We met up with nephew in Newmarket, where he is doing the current placement on his horse training course. He loves it – amazed to be in a town that is so focussed on horse racing. He’s only been in the country for a few weeks and has seen HM The Queen (which is more than I’ve done after living here all my life).

We went to the National Horseracing Museum, which was pretty good – even if, like me, you know next to nothing about horseracing. I would have liked to spend longer there, but we were a bit late arriving (nephew had been delayed at the horse sales where an owner he’d been teamed up with was letting him bid on a horse). There were some good interactive exhibits and interesting information. One that I remember (though I’ve yet to see it verified anywhere else) is that a stitch (the pain in your side when you exercise, not the thing that holds your clothes together) is caused by your spleen contracting to squeeze more red blood cells into your blood stream.

Wednesday we were going to Lowestoft to see an aunt and uncle (elderly mother’s brother) and I’d looked at a map a few days earlier and realised that it wasn’t that much of a diversion to drop down to southern Suffolk to visit another aunt en-route, so we did that.

We had a short walk along the river and through the picturesque village and a light lunch before heading north. This aunt is, like Elderly Mother, far heathier and fitter than her age would allow.

T’other Aunt and Uncle were also pretty well – in fact, in better health and fitness than I had expected. Uncle had a stroke a couple of years ago and is in a care home, and aunt moved to a retirement bungalow, so has had quite a lot of turmoil recently. She still has a lot of unpacking and sorting out to do, and said she seemed to spend half her life looking for things – and the other half remembering what she was looking for!

The bungalow is in a nice estate, with well-kept grounds, a couple of ponds, and a paddock with small horses (or maybe they were a long way off).

Uncle seemed well too, and in good spirits. The care home seemed pleasant and well decorated (and didn’t stink of wee) with staff who interacted with the residents rather than just see them as objects that needed feeding and taken to the toilet.

He does have problems with his memory – particularly short-term. For example, he can’t remember where he eats breakfast and can’t read books as he forgets a paragraph as soon as he’s read it, so the rest of the book makes no sense. But he recognised us, and we were able to have a nice chat. He has a good sense of humour.
“You should write down some of the things we did as children, and some of the phrases we used,” suggested EM
“What, like ‘bugger it’ and ‘sod it’?” he replied.

Lowestoft seems like a nice seaside town – or maybe that’s because it is the middle of winter. A long beach and no overt commercialism – they probably leave that to Great Yarmouth. I went for a run along the seafront before breakfast one morning.