Friday 29th August 2025, 16:22
Today has been an unusually difficult day. First I dithered over what to do today. Decided to take the train to Worcester. Looked up the tickets on the National Rail website but decided to buy them at the station just in case something happened to make it impractical. I got to the station after a fairly long walk, about 3.5 km, and found that the ticket machine wasn't working. Pressed a button to ask for help and was allowed in, spoke to one of the employees who offered to sell me a ticket but when he said the price it was five pounds dearer than the price on the website. I queried it and he said to that's normal!
He suggested that I should try buying it online and that there was WiFi. But then he looked up at the departures board and said I'd miss the train and that the next was an hour later. So I decided to do it tomorrow and walked back into Cheltenham.
Had a wander about took more pictures, had a snack in the Bridge, bought some almond oil and perfume essential oils in Holland and Barrett. Did some more wandering about visiting several charity shops in the hope I might find a cheap kettle or contact grill to use in my room. Didn't find any but I did find a USB WiFi adapter that might be useful back home on a tower computer that has a poor one, it was only 0.50 GBP so no great loss if it's no good.
I also found a Wodehouse novel at 1.49 GBP. At least that's what I thought I had paid. Then I visited another café, Tres, and had a mocha and a slice of cake
I connected to the WiFi and immediately started receiving notifications from various services, email, MS Teams, and Google Wallet.
One of the Google Wallet notifications stood out, 149 GBP at PDSA. Hmm, that can't be right! So I quickly finished my cake and coffee, neither were worth lingering very long on but should have been accorded a little more attention, and rushed back to PDSA. Showed the Google Wallet notification to the woman behind the counter who quickly searched the till's records and found the transaction. She called the manager who quickly refunded the payment.
At least that's what is supposed to have happened, I'd better check with my bank to see if it really happened. He also said he had recently done the same except for 500 GBP, realized after the customer left but was unable to contact them. The customer called the next day apparently.
That's not the end of the stress for today. As regular readers will know I'm about to come out to my sister. I emailed her yesterday to say I'd like to drop in to collect post and take her out for a pizza or something. Nothing complicated. She replied that she needs a holiday before having hospital treatment and could she stay at my hotel for some unspecified period while we catch up with each other.
So now what was going to be at most an afternoon of conversation over a beer and pizza has turned into at least a long weekend.
So now what I will wear has become a bigger question than before. I had decided to leave off my bra for the occasion and wear one of the few dresses that I possess that will look right without tits. But I really don't want to wear the same outfit two days running, much less all weekend,or possibly for a whole week. So it's got more complicated.
Still, at least it's all in motion. Harder to backslide now.
