I’m not much for public speaking, but it turns out that the crowd is willing to cut you a lot of slack on such occasions, so I was able to ramble without notes for a few minutes. That means I can’t report exactly what I said, but it went something like this:

When Mum was in hospital there was often something that needed to be done, whether it was a bed change, injection or whatever. Her standard response to being told about these, especially as communication became increasingly difficult for her, was to say “right”. I’m sure that the nurses took that as a pretty normal response, and of course it was. But it meant more than that.

‘Right’ meant that there was something else to be done. That could be as routine as making me breakfast, or doing the ironing, or one of the other hundred things she did to look after me. But it could just as easily mean she had to go to Brownies, or some outing for the old folks, or a PTA event, or any number of other charitable events. ‘Right’ meant that she could stay in her chair by the fire and watch TV, but there was something to be done, and if she didn’t do it then it might not get done.

That was the story for as long as I knew Mum. She was never involved in anything that would change the world, and indeed it’s unlikely she ever turned around the life of a single person. But she made a thousand people’s lives just that little bit better. That seems to me like a pretty good way to have spent a life.

That’s all I have to say about that for now. The funeral is next week, and I’ll be making a speech, so I’ll share what I come up with later.

So the best option seems to be assembling a divider for the tank so we can have them all in one place, but keep the savage beasts apart. More construction, oh joy.

By contrast if you need a mechanical piece, like a washing machine connector or valve, choose brass fittings (like this). Plastic is too fragile to keep working if you’re going to be fiddling with it, so the extra hassle of having to tighten up the connectors to the right level is worth it. And while you’re there pick up some extra olives to go inside the brass connector; you’ll thank me when you make a mistake (not if).

That’s the injury. The insult is that the only aerobic exercise left to me is swimming, which I strongly dislike. But if there’s one thing I dislike more than swimming, it’s swimming front crawl; I am, as those of you who know me will be unsurprised to hear, a breast-stroking man. So can you guess which stroke is not actually helping my knee, and which one I should do instead? That’s right.