Yesterday was my Gran's 80th birthday.  We had the family round the house for celebrations.  There was Gran, Kathleen (her sister), John (my uncle) and Julia (his wife), David (uncle) and the five of us.  They turned up about 3 and we had a 'buffy' meal soon after.  Which was nice.  There was some cheese called Livarot, which I pointed out sounded pretty nasty without a french pronunciation.  We kind of hung around eating and taking photos, walking around the place until about 8 or so when we started playing Gloucestershire Monopoly.  I won, but we didn't finish, it was dragging on a bit.  I'd just put some houses up on Gloucester Cathedral.  Maybe I should suggest this to the council.  I'm sure they'd be persuaded to whack up a couple of neo-georgian huts.  I informed Gran that Rosie's parents were planning a short stay in Gloucester.  She mentioned how she was once a member of an archaeology evening school run by people in Gloucester, but which was held in Cheltenham.  She said the reason for this was that Gloucester was 'totally bereft of culture' and no on there was bothered.  Soon after this, everyone went home.

Just as everyone was arriving, Tom texted me to see if I'd like his old job at Reuters starting at the end of August.  I think he was fairly serious.  I'll get back to him about what he meant exactly soon.

Today was a rather different day.  It began with deciding to have a go at fitting Rosie's 'new' door to her car, the one I got from the scrapyard a few months ago to replace the one with a 15cm hole of rust in.  It was more a case of tomorrow never comes than never say never when it came to fitting it.  But, I decided you only live twice, so I started taking apart the new door to get a feel for how it worked.  Then I tried to take the window out the old door to put in the new door.  It wasn't keen on coming out for various reasons, not all of them mine.  So we went to the scrapyard to see if we could find a loose window.  Amazingly we did, but it was £18.  I asked for a discount and he sold it for £10, which wasn't too bad.  It had a few scratches on though.

But after a fair bit of playing around the new door is now fitted, and reassembled with winding windows, adjusting mirrors etc.  It just needs a serious polish and the interior trim pushing back on.  No problem.  It will blend in with the rest of the car absolutely fine.  So tomorrow is polishing day.  I did break the rather dying aerial though, so we will be looking into fixing that.  The wire seems a bit brittle - didn't take much.  I didn't slice my thumb open again though, which was a serious plus point.

Rosie and I went into town, but shops were shutting, and were closed due to illness, so we're going in tomorrow.  On the way into town, the headlines on local radio (based in Gloucester) were that there were 'still serious problems in Gloucester city centre'.  And it turned out that the monitor in my boot was Pete's not Faith's so I'm going to drop it in Fairford for Pete tomorrow at some point.  It's all go again.

This evening we all went out for a meal as the whole family were in Cheltenham still, and it seemed a shame not to.  Off to bed now, salle de bain, as the French say.