What a lovely sunny day!
  

WARNING...I've just been given an 'iPhone' by my daughter, Sasha. She posted it to me from London and I took it into the O2 shop yesterday to get it set up on contract. I asked the girl in the shop if she had an instruction manual for it. She said, "It's so simple, you won't need one, just play with it". Well 24 hours later and a telephone tutorial from Sasha and I can now make and receive a phone call but still having difficulties with texts. So if you get blank texts from me, just ignore, and if the spelling is not perfect, just guess what I mean. The touch screen is so small for my fingers, it's like eating olives with a gate post!

Well 2 games into the season and I am sitting 3rd from bottom in Chantal's work's fantasy football team. The only consolation being that she is 2nd from bottom. Stick in there girl, there's still time!

Watched the South Africa v New Zealand Rugby Union game yesterday with Alan. Those guys are massive, and they wear shorts, socks, boots and a shirt! I went to an American football game once in San Francisco. There were about 90 players in the team. As soon as the match started, within one minute, they took the defensive team off and put the attacking team on; yes the whole team! They stopped the game for a commercial break, not when there was a natural break in play, but when the commercial was due to come on; which was every 10 minutes. The game lasted nearly four hours, and when I tried to leave after 2 hours because I had started to feel faint with boredom, they said that there were no buses leaving the stadium until full time. I might watch a video replay of that game instead of having a general anaesthetic next month. The guys in the team were so heavily padded that they looked like they got up still wearing their bed. Oh, except they had put the budgie cage on their head. You could jump from an aircraft at 30,000 feet and probably survive in what they were geared up in. In contrast to this, the teams playing rugby yesterday had to play 40 minutes, non stop, each way with a fifteen minute break at half time. They were covered in cuts and bruises at the end and completely exhausted. It was like watching gladiators! Well done to New Zealand who scraped a win at the end but showed the world what a physical game really is.

After recovering from a great night out with Ann & Alan, we went down to Beverley's school today to help set up the classroom for the start of the new academic year. When you walk around Penrith with Beverley you are in the company of a 'local hero'. If you're in a hurry then go alone, because every 5 minutes, a young voice will shout out, "Mrs P......", followed by mass hugs in the street. Yesterday the 'young voices' were actually taller than Beverley! All those miniature chairs and tables for all those tiny new people. 10 in her class for next term, there were 40 in mine when I was 5 years old. We had to shout out our numbers in order, for register check every morning. I was number 39, right at the back, couldn't even see what was written on the board. It was a good place to be though because when the teacher threw the blackboard rubber at you, his accuracy faded at that distance. I caught the rubber once, well it wasn't really a rubber, more like a block of wood with a wedge of rubber grooved into it. I got the cane for catching the rubber before it hit me, even though he was aiming at the person beside me. Can you work out the justice in that?

I now need to start researching, 'Da Vinci Robotic Surgery'. It is a machine that uses high magnification for pin point accuracy during surgery. The nearest one is in Cambridge, at Addenbrooks Hospital, though many London Hospitals have them. It's nicer now, researching the cure rather than the disease!