Camellia

I hadn’t been to an event in Tyne Theatre and Opera House before. It’s a beautiful venue dating from Victorian times. The John Simpson talk last night, Leaders and Lunatics, was really insightful. He touched on Trump, saying he felt he’d be a dead duck after the mid-terms, but the leaders he concentrated on were Bashar al-Assad, Sadam Hussain, Gadaffi, Putin and Mugabe. The latter he considered to be the cleverest leader he’d ever interviewed, followed by Putin. The 4 honourable good leaders he spoke about were Havel, Zelenskyy, Gorbachev and of course Mandela. He was a witty and entertaining speaker whose stamina was admirable - and he is 80.

We really enjoyed it but we were late home and consequently, with being awake a lot with my knee pain, I wasn’t happy to get up to get myself down to the hospital for an appointment with the nurse. It was sent from the surgery so I had no idea what it was for. Turns out he wanted to tell me the results of the blood tests done on my annual review in November. This he’d done when I saw him in December for jab updates. All is well. In addition I managed to get a phone GP appointment which resulted in me getting a prescription for codeine. I phoned the JMAP people re my referral for the cortisone injection. Apparently they are dealing with referrals from early March so it’s likely to be 6-8 weeks wait.

I met Katy and some friends at a pub in Longframlington for lunch. It was a very pleasant. We are hoping to go to Dunbar with them later in the week with our vans.

I tried to get to grips with Think. I’m finding it hard going. It was lovely to be in the sun in the garden (with ice on my knee).

I had a lovely chat with Jo on FaceTime. She is hoping to get a visa for Turkmenistan as North Korea is still closed.