4^th February 2018

Dear All,

It has been a fairly routine week plus painting! After swimming on Monday I tried to sort some of the church events we had planned the previous week: a museum visit, the Botanic Gardens and RSPB at Fen Drayton. None of them was straightforward so progress was slow. The museum is closed for cleaning, the Botanic Gardens charge the normal entrance fee (£6 or £5.50) plus £10 per head for an evening tour and the RSPB visit comes under different management from the one we are used to dealing with. My printer started chewing up the paper last week so I purchased a new one this time a Canon Pixma TS5050, going up market a little and it seems pretty good so far (as long as we can afford the ink cartridges!). As things worked out I had a stock of ink for the old printer so if anyone has an Epsom which takes BB-T2996 cartridges let me know.

This week’s “Silk Road” was better concentrating on the Chinese end and illustrated with a few photos. I had to rush from that to the U3A Garden group as they had requested a talk on “Oriental Vegetables”. On the way back I called at Oakington Garden Center to stock up on seed potatoes and onion sets plus a few extra raspberry canes. In groups that evening we talked about “Families” so perhaps your ears were burning? – actually they didn’t get round to us this week!

I continued my battle with HSBC this week trying to find out how much we have in the CEEM account: “we cannot tell you unless you quote your overdraft limit from the last statement”, “but I haven’t got a statement – that is the point” etc.

On Thursday we started walking from Brockley Green near Haverhill and took in part of the “Stour Valley Path”, it was again sunny overhead and slippery underfoot. I attempted the longer walk this week so did not move far in the evening!

Roost End

River Stour

“Biographies” topic this week was “Max Perutz” born an Austrian Jew who ended up at Cambridge and won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of haemoglobin. He started the Molecular Biology unit on the Addenbrooke’s site together with three other Nobel laureates: Sanger, Crick and Kendrew and since three others have won Nobel prizes: Brenner, Klug and Milstein. Kate of course knew three of these when she worked in the Immunology labs!

Max Perutz

Yesterday we had a “Christians Against Poverty” (CAP) seminar at church. They do a remarkable job lifting people out of debt and poverty running Debt Centres, Job Clubs, Release Groups for those with addictions and Life Skills training, It is a much bigger organisation than I imagined with a turnover of £11 million last year and after starting in 1996 is now run out of 600 churches in the UK.

The afternoon match was West Wratting 2 v 1 Cambridge University Press!

Albert started nursery this week with mum in attendance so was a bit clingy but by the second session had settled better and has already found a mate – and it’s clearly affecting his appetite!.

 

Love

Mike & Kate