Up to Bank Holiday One
6 May

It's been a quick canter through to the Bank Holiday. Easter already seems a very long way away.

It's been a pretty cold, wet spring. In fact, it's only in the last couple of weeks that we've taken the winter duvet off the bed and replaced it with the lightweight summer one. Mind you, I'm still supplementing the thermal tog value with a fleece on my side of the bed.

I've had a chance to see dad who is snoozing his way towards oblivion. He's quite happy to be given a drink but otherwise we're lucky to get one eye opened and a squint at us.

Mum is quite remarkable. She'll be 86 in a few weeks' time and has made a real new life for herself over the past nine months. Now that she's content that dad is being cared for to her standards, she's living her life with a sense of individual release. She's got lunch clubs to go to, church events, she's joined the Gardening Club, she has a set of cronies she goes shopping with.

Now that her life is no longer bounded by the whims and needs of a child in his 80s, she's quite happy to set off with a friend and use her bus pass to cruise the Wirral for free looking for a likely place to have a cup of tea. I have a great deal of admiration for the way that she's risen to this new challenge so late in her life.

Meanwhile, I'm slogging away at school. It feels as though I have hit a conspicuous plateau. The work is not longer new and, going back to school after Easter, it really did feel like returning to somewhere very familiar. So, I'm well over the initial novelty factor.

And, as a consequence, I'm no longer feeling that initial sense of improvement. Partially now, it's about learning how to manage situations so that I do all that's expected of me and yet still retain some semblance of a life.

I did make one rare excursion just before the break.

I went with Roland to attend one of the event concerts of the year at the Philharmonic. The opening work was Benjamin Britten's Cello Symphony with Daniel Müller-Schott as the solist. It's not an easy work at all without any of the immediately accessible tunes of the Violin Concerto but it is fascinating and, I suspect, will repay further visits. One this occasion, I was engaged and impressed without being totally bowled over.

The second half gave us the latest in Vasily Petrenko cycle of Shostakovich Symphonies - the fourteenth. This is a dark meditation on death but it was probably one of the most thrilling works I have heard for the first time in a long, long while. Soprano Gal James was a late replacement and acquitted herself well. Bass, Alexander Vinogradov, was absolutely superb. It was incredible how such a rock solid bass sound could come from such a slight frame. Orchestra and conductor were exemplary.

And, on the May Bank Holiday afternoon, I am sat in the back garden with my shirt off taking in the sun. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was having some proper, quiet me time.

More extreme than that... I read a book for pleasure rather than work for the first time in nearly two years. Given past histories, that may seem like an outlandish statement but, for the first time ever, in last year's review document, I was unable to name any book I had read in the course of that year. It really goes to show how my quality of life had changed to accommodate everything else that's been happening.