Seasonal Greetings!
I hope you have a Great Christmas and New Year and I wish you all the best throughout 2022.
Today, is the 9th anniversary of our move to our present house for the purchase was completed on the 12th of the 12th in 2012, just after midday. It has proved to be a very good move, not least because we have made some good friends here. I appreciate that very much because friendship is not always easy to find. I often think of one particular occasion in my early 20s when, feeling very lonely in London, my life was uplifted just because someone smiled at me on the underground. Nothing was said, it was just a fleeting human contact, but it meant a lot to me at the time. [The fact that she was pretty and about my age certainly helped but that was not the main thing of it.] Nowadays I normally try to look friendly to everyone around me – enough to show that I accept that they are human like me but not too much as that could be viewed as creepy or intrusive. Now that I am quite elderly it is easier for me to be accepted as friendly, or at least reasonably harmless, than it was when I was a young man. It is sensible to be cautious of strangers, particularly of young adults, but that should not mean that we should appear unfriendly to them. I know that my appearance gives others only the sketchiest...