"Can you get the second set

of keys?" my friend asked me.
No, she had not locked herself out. This is the friend now in the nursing home.
Before she went in to the nursing home she had one of the systems which allows other people to enter the house by pushing a security code on a small box by the front door to obtain the keys. The box is made of heavy steel and, so far, I have not heard reports of anyone breaking into a house by breaking into such a box.
On Saturday afternoon I had accessed my friend's place (with her permission) by using the keys in the box. Her cousin's son had put the keys back in the box and put them back on the wall. There was another set of keys "hidden in full view" in the house and we had left them there as she had not asked for them. We should have rung and asked her about them. She was worried her sister, who is not at all practical, might use the keys in the box and lock everyone out. Having experienced her sister's capacity to do such things I had to agree. She had decided to pass the inside set of keys over to the real estate agent.
But I did not want to upset her sister so we arranged my friend would ring me when her sister arrived to visit her.
"Tell me you have decided on the blue one," I told her. (The keys were in a blue bowl.)
I waited - and waited. Her sister is not known for punctuality and I wondered if she had perhaps decided not to go out at all. Eventually she arrived and I got the message. It was after four in the afternoon. It is a half hour's pedal but I went as quickly as I could. I managed to retrieve the keys from the box. It took less than a minute to retrieve the second set of keys and then....I had to put the first set of keys back in the box and back on the wall. Oh. I had not done this before.
I knew what to do but it actually requires a considerable amount of manual dexterity. I tried three times...four times....push the security code...pull the little tab down...no...clear it again. I stood there and took a deep breath. Late Sunday afternoon and there was nobody around and...well I couldn't ask anyway. I tried again...and again...and again. It finally clicked into place on the eighth try. I had the other keys.
I just hope she does not ask me to enter the place again on my own because I am still not sure how I managed to manipulate that code and the tab and the slot and... well, I did it.

There was a "sale" of wool

and other yarn at our knitting guild yesterday. I am sure the craftspeople reading this will understand just what I mean by that. For the uninitiated - knitters suffer from a disease known as SABLE. This is an acronym for "stash advancement beyond life expectancy". Occasionally they convince themselves that they do not suffer from this incurable disease. In an endeavour to cure themselves they decide to "sell" some of their yarn stash.
Our knitting guild arranged to have one of these days yesterday. I pounced on the opportunity.
I think I have said elsewhere in this blog that people keep giving me yarn? Right. Yesterday I sold a lot of it as a fundraiser for my friend in Africa. I left the house with five of those red, white and blue striped bags made somewhere in China - in their hundreds of thousands (possibly millions). They were the largest size bag and come halfway up my thighs. (All right I am short cat but even so - these are big bags.)
I had sorted the yarn. I had packed it. I had labelled it and priced it.
I did not ask a lot for it - far less than it was worth. All the same I was determined to get rid of some of it.
And I did. With the help of a good friend I sold all but five balls of lace-weight. The lace-weight with a pattern attached (my own pattern) did sell. The other did not. I may put a pattern with it and try again. It is not the sort of lace-weight I like to use but it is good for a raw beginner.
It is a load off my mind. I hated seeing yarn I had been given and knew I would never use sitting there. Knitting is a relaxation for me. I am more than grateful for thoughtful gifts of yarn - yarn that good friends occasionally give me because they think I will like it and want to use it. I use it. I might pass the finished item on to someone I know will really appreciate it but, by then, I will have had the pleasure of working with it. But, I don't want to use endless amounts of mustard coloured high acrylic content yarn. I don't know what to do with single balls of muddy green. Some people can use those things. I can't - or won't.
I left to meet another friend and we went off to pack clothes and papers from the little place belonging to my friend who is now safely and happily in her room in a nursing home. The friend I was meeting is a craftswoman of great skill. She spins and weaves and does many other things as well. At the age of eighty she has just been honoured with a retrospective exhibition. I told her what I had just done. We agreed it was necessary. She was wearing a jacket she had woven herself - woven some thirty years ago. It still looks magnificent and it is still fashionable today - fashionable because it really is a work of art as well.
"Did you buy anything?" she asked me.
"No, nothing at all."
How on earth did I manage it?  Mind you there is still evidence of SABLE in the house.

I would like to rub out

yesterday and start it again. I had tricycle trouble again.
I have not been happy with the new vehicle. Although there are issues with the old one and it is prone to need repair (hence the new one) I have still been using it while I tried to get used to the new one.
It is a different brand. I did not expect the ride to be exactly the same but I thought it was me. I would take it for a ride around the block and that would be about as far as I could pedal it.
Yesterday the Senior Cat said, "For goodness' sake take it a bit further than that. You have to get used to it."
I had to deliver something to someone who lives a bit over a kilometre away. I have no problems pedalling that far and even further, much further but...not on the new vehicle. I managed to get there and found I was not looking forward to the pedal back. There was also an ominous "crunch" and I suspect a bearing has already gone . (No, I do not weigh that much!) When I did eventually get back I had a headache and an ache in my lower back. I am still having problems today.
Yes, before you ask if I am sure it was the exercise on the new vehicle, it is the new machine.
The Senior Cat and I had another look at it. We knew the configuration was different but we had set the seat at the same height. It cannot go any higher or I cannot get on and off. As it is it I can only just manage it on this one because the cross bar is much higher than it is on the old one.
The two machines are almost exactly the same length and the handlebars are almost exactly the same height. What is wrong with it?
The configuration is actually quite different. The seat is at a different angle - and the crank shaft is about ten centimetres shorter. In short, it is simply badly designed. Even if we raised the seat by ten centimetres to try and accommodate the short crank shaft it would not be comfortable because the seat would still be at the wrong angle.
Our problem now is what to do with it. I have sent the bike shop an e-mail. I suspect I will not get a reply. Even if we send it back to the manufacturer they will simply want to "repair it".  They will say other people ride these without problems. (I suspect that such an answer would be far from true but it is what they will say.) We cannot, in all honesty, offer it up for sale to some other unsuspecting human. I cannot ride it, indeed should not ride it.
And, worst of all, I feel bad for the Senior Cat. He was the one who arranged all this. He thought he was doing something very special for me. I love him dearly and this makes me angry and disappointed for him.

There is apparently just one

student studying Latin in the final year of high school this year - one out of 13, 500 final year students.
The Senior Cat did his degree in English Literature and Latin. Like many other teachers of his generation he had to do his degree part-time while teaching and supporting a young family. I can remember the lists of Latin words stuck on the shaving cabinet mirror. It was not a matter of "amo, amas, amat..." either. He did not love learning his vocabulary lists.
But, he did think Latin was important enough to learn - and so did many other students of his generation. As he remembers it there were well over one hundred students in the lecture theatre - and that was just one class. The Greek class was smaller because that contained just the students doing Classics as their major and the Theology students. Latin however was a popular choice for the minor strand for many English literature students. Latin was once compulsory for both medical and law students too.
The Senior Cat's closest friend was doing the same subject. They would travel into the city together, taking it in turns to drive a tiny three wheeled car so that they could test each other. They did not get distinctions but they did get credits - and they can still remember much of their Latin after more than sixty years.
I know some Latin -  but not a lot. The Senior Cat insisted that I learn some. He taught me outside school hours. He taught my brother some as well. My two sisters refused flatly to have anything to do with the language.
It shows. My brother and I write better English, at least I think we do. The Senior Cat seems to think so as well. And when I studied law I found I understood the legal terms that are still used. So did the other students of my generation. A member of staff once remarked to me that they should, at very least, have a compulsory unit in "legal Latin". Perhaps they should. As I remember it there was only one student in my year who was, as part of her double degree strand, doing Latin. She loved Latin. It was her passion. I doubt her peers ever understood her. She finished both degrees but never went into law. She actually found a job teaching Latin. I don't know what has happened to her since but I often wonder how many students she inspired and encouraged.
Is Latin important? It's a "dead language" isn't it?
I would say Latin is still important. It is far from a dead language. It is of course one of the official languages of the Vatican. I may be wrong  but I believe Papal decrees are written in Latin. However that is just one small way in which Latin is used. We all use it every day. We just don't recognise it as such. Many of our medical, scientific, economic and religious terms have a Latin base. New medical and scientific terms often look to Latin for their creation. Scientists around the world can understand one another more easily because of it.
And so I would ask the head of the modern languages association who dismissed Latin as being of no importance, "Where would you be without Latin?"
You would not be here. 

"I don't think it will be

very much work and it shouldn't be difficult," my friend told me. I am sure she really believed that too. I thought otherwise.
Yesterday I had to go into the delightfully named "central business district" or "CBD". I avoid this if I can. I like the side which contains the museums, the art gallery, the state's main library, the state's oldest university and other assorted buildings. They are all in a long line along one of side of the square mile which comprises the main CBD.
It is what is inside the CBD that I like rather less. It was filled with what might be best described as "footpath works and obstacles".
With some difficulty I detoured past the first one by wheeling my tricycle off the footpath and on to the roadway into the oncoming traffic and then up on to the footpath again.  I then realised that another sixty to seventy metres down the way there was another obstacle. Could I get past? No.
There was someone on a gopher coming from the other direction. Of course there was no workman in sight. We shrugged and the gopher user did a smart U-turn. I backed and did a less smart U-turn because there was now one of those double baby stroller affairs behind me.
I went around the block and then found the street I had planned to go up was completely blocked off with fencing and notices about "demolition". I did not want to be demolished. I did another long detour. 
I reached the street I needed to visit and approached it from the other end with extreme caution because there were yet more footpath works. At least this time one of the workmen saw my predicament and said, "Hold on.." and moved the pole holding the bright orange "fencing" out of the way.  
I reached the office I had to visit and - a miracle - there was a bicycle park outside. I locked the trusty tricycle to it and went in.
"You didn't ride here?" the receptionist asked me.
"Yes."
"With all that's going on out there?"
The noise of the pneumatic drill being used on the other side of the road could be heard all too loudly as the automatic doors slid open again.
I did the business I had come to do and contemplated how best to return to the railway station. I did another detour and, apart from one small obstacle reached the station without incident although it meant walking the tricycle through a shopping precinct.
I sat on the train thinking of the peace and quiet of the suburbs - and arrived at my local railway station to be greeted by the sight of workmen putting up yet more orange safety fencing.
"Hello matey - want to get through?" they asked.
Yes please!

Just how well do we

know people?
No, I am not talking about Rolf Harris here. (For the record I never did like him. That sort of slick "entertainment" style does not appeal to me at all. )
No, this is about my friend M whose funeral I went to yesterday. It was a surprisingly cheerful occasion. Her three daughters refused to let it be a sad one. Their mother would not have wanted that.
M and I go way back - to before I even knew her. She knew my paternal grandfather. He was a grown man when she was a child but she would see him around the port area they both lived in and she once told me that he taught one of her brothers to row the small boat used by many of the local children. And yesterday I heard, not from the daughter who gave the eulogy but from another member of the family, that my grandfather was the one who set her out on her first career - that of dressmaker.
It was not deliberate but M could sew and some nuns needed some habits made. It was not something my grandfather could do. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was Presbyterian but that it would have been highly improper for a male to be in close contact with nuns. (How different things are now. When our friend Polly comes to visit - alone - she and the Senior Cat hug one another.)
But, the nuns needed habits. My grandfather knew M could sew. He knew - because he had seen clothing she had made - that she could sew well enough and he suggested her for the task. She did it. I had no idea - and neither did anyone else.
I also had no idea that she was a "Master Mariner" and I don't think most people in the room had any idea either. I knew her husband had been one. He and I had discussed maritime issues when he was alive. He had been a lighthouse keeper and had known both my grandfather and my paternal great-grandfather - a maritime pilot.  But M, a Master Mariner as well?  I was aware she was highly knowledgeable about such things but I had assumed it was because she was intelligent and interested. Where and when she obtained the qualification is a mystery.  And yet it explained other things about her - particularly the way she kept her house and her use of some maritime words such as "anchor her down".
And so, did I know my friend? Of course I did. Did I know her well? Yes, in some respects I did. But how well did I know her? I don't know but I glad I did know her.

Getting a "police check" to

work or to work as a volunteer should be a straightforward business for the vast majority of people. It isn't.
That does not mean that the vast majority of people have some nasty incident lurking in their post. They don't.
I have no problem with the general idea of a police check. It is a good thing if it saves even one vulnerable individual, particularly a child, from being at risk.
But I think our system goes too far. A friend of mine is, at 76, a keen knitter and always willing to pass her skills on to others. She obtained a police clearance to work at a church craft group. Then she was asked to work at a school. She required another police clearance for that - because she was working with children. That may seem fair enough. She had to pay for both clearances although I feel that those asking her should have paid for the second if they specifically wanted her.
But she was telling me that someone else volunteered for the same programme in the same school. The other woman, a similar age, had a police clearance to work in another school - but not in the second school. If she wanted to work in the second school she had to obtain yet another police clearance. The students in both are in the same age group and from similar backgrounds.
My question is, why does the other woman need a new police clearance to work in the second school? My own view is that the system should be able to cope with such things. You should be able to get a police clearance to work in all schools of one type or another. You should not need a clearance to work in Red primary school and a new clearance to work in Blue primary school. The clearance should cover both schools.
Many organisations are exceptionally short of volunteers now. Some volunteers are working close to full time. Some volunteers are in their eighties and nineties. Often they have to do Occupational Health and Safety training as well as get the police clearance. They have to learn new ways of doing things because of new rules and regulations.
We want people to volunteer. We want them to be safe. We want the people they are working with and for to be safe. There is now a delay in the handling of applications. They want to put the application fee up again.
Surely one way of handling this is to make the application process situation specific rather than location specific?