Cold Comfort

 

The temperature has plummeted outside but thank goodness. At least it might kill off some of the nasty bugs that are doing the rounds not to mention those that would otherwise be plaguing the garden later in the year. I'm still hunkering down, although fortunately the sniffling is subsiding and if it hadn't been for all the black ice, might have been tempted to attempt a return to the gym this morning. 

I've only had one foray out in the last fortnight and that was to fulfil a longstanding hair appointment. I paid the price the following day with something of a relapse whilst the journey home, as dusk was quickly turning to darkness, was sufficient to put me off ever venturing out again. First a Jack Russell barking at the end of a farm's drive decided it wanted to hurl itself at my car, presumably to ensure I  kept moving which, after swerving to avoid it, I duly did. A sigh of relief, at which point two deer with a joint death wish leapt out in front of me; emergency braking and no harm done. Then, of course, there was the obligatory rabbit in the headlights that decided to lead the way back to the village, hopping from one side of the road to the other.

There's definitely something to be said about having a cold and just staying in and keeping warm!

I confess I was a little frustrated to begin with but, despite the muscle atrophy that's setting in, haven't been inclined to pick up a dumbbell yet, ignoring the set beckoning to me from the understairs cupboard. Instead, I've been concentrating on the old family tree and have finally managed to take one particular branch from Norfolk back a couple of generations further than previously, although I'm now lost once again in a mire of  base-born and too many people with the same name. 

In the process I've uncovered more facts on my Victorian forefathers including an ancestral grandfather who died of insanity leaving a young wife to take in laundry to feed her children, sadly she eventually died in the workhouse where she was still pulling her weight as a washerwoman. 

One of her daughters left her husband, following which there appears to be no further documented record of her, causing me to speculate if the Public Notice he caused to be placed in the newspaper renouncing responsibility for her debts could have been a double-bluff, if you get my drift. 

Then there was the other daughter, who claimed to have been raped by her employer at the age of 15. The court case was covered in some detail by the local newspapers but sadly the alleged perpetrator was acquitted, contrary to what appeared to be the weight of the evidence and on the basis that it had apparently happened before (a prime example of 2 wrongs making a right). Two years later she was the mother of a boy who died at the age of 4 and then just when life looked up and she married a distant cousin, a fisherman, didn't he just go and get himself drowned at sea, leaving her with another child. Obviously she did what all widows did in those days, found herself a widower and helped him out with his children as well as going on to have another 3 of her own. He, of course, bowed out before they were all of working age but stalwart that she was, she outlived him by at least another 40 years and  appears in the 1939 Register (taken for war rationing records) aged 90, described as incapacitated. Not much of a retirement there, I fear.

Whoosh, my head cold may have been debilitating but compared to the life and times of those who went before us, it's been a breeze.