We started the day with a short run round the park (we are so romantic), and then took a train to Winchester for a walk around. "Are you practising for when you are old people?” asked Eldest Child when she phoned.

We visited the City Mill, which is an historic and working water mill (National Trust) and went for a pub lunch. On the way back to the railway station we walked through the market and bought a loaf of bread and some veg (from different stalls) and then went to the high-class ready meals store that I’d noticed when I drove through the city earlier on the week.

Youngest child is practising her oboe while I write. It all started with the Star Wars theme that she wants to play at parkrun tomorrow, for Star Wars Day, and then went on to various other tunes. In the nicest possible way, it will be nice when she stops. I don’t want to discourage her from practising because, let’s face it, she needs to. But ...

She has a habit of varying the tempo depending on how confident she is of the music. And if she’s not happy with the way she’s played a bar, she repeats it. Which makes it very difficult to work out what she is playing.

I keep trying to zone out but she keeps asking me if I recognise what she has just played. “I wasn’t really listening” ... “were you playing all the right notes?” ... “in the right order?”

I received a water bill yesterday, that covered the last seven months. The household’s total water usage, apparently, was just 46 litres per day. And that, apparently, was based on actual meter readings. Really? That is less than one-third of a typical one-person household, and there are four or five people living here – three of whom are teenagers who leave taps running, as I pointed out to the nice lady at the water company.

“Well, I’ve never had anyone phone to complain that their bill is too low,” she told me.
“Yes, but there’s ‘a bit low’ and ‘ridiculously low’,” I replied.

Two things I don’t understand about this. 1) This low amount doesn’t seem to have triggered any “that doesn’t look right” checks at the water company. 2) based on this bill, my account is now far enough in credit to pay the next five years. So why did my direct debit reduce by only £20.

Tomorrow I will scoop the water and silt out of the meter hole and try to get a more accurate reading.

Easter weekend was good. We went to visit The Aged on Good Friday, staying for a couple of nights. On our way up, we stopped for a picnic lunch by the Oxford Canal, and took a short walk between the locks. Next to the canal was a small camp site with a coffee shop, so we went there to get a drink. It looked like a really nice friendly site – one that would be quire enjoyable to stay at, if ever I were to go camping. And the shop sold Old Hooky ale!

Saturday we (including The Aged’s) drove to Sheffield, where we went to lunch with Mrs BF’s parents, brother, and family. After lunch we walked round one of the parks in the city, and had an ice cream.

The Aged’s are well, but getting old and clumsy. They somehow managed to break the butter dish between them (“Now you’ll just have to use butter straight out of the pack, like normal people” I told them). I’m not entirely sure how – I think one thought it would go in the dishwasher, and the other thought it would be washed by hand and in the end neither was holding it.

Hey, at this rate at least when they die we won’t have problems deciding who is having what crockery, as they’ll have broken it all.

Apparently now they’ve smashed the glass in the oven door – by dropping a fork on it. How? Even if it was a carving fork.

Local elections yesterday, and the results appear to be a major loss for Conservative and Labour and a major gain for Liberal Democrats.

Commentators are full of stories about how this shows our disillusionment with the main parties, and the complete Horlicks they are making of Brexit. But what no one appears to have mentioned is that these are local elections, and are won and lost on local issues.

To put it another way: I might be willing you entrust the emptying of my rubbish bins to one political party but this doesn’t mean I would be happy to entrust the running of the country to them.