A Change is as Good as a Rest!

The other evening, I glanced at the clock.  It was about ten past seven; I had been sitting at my desk for about five hours, give or take.  I told myself, 'It's time to stop work', and set about making an evening meal.  One of the blessings of a solitary life is also one of its dangers: there's no one to tell me what to do.  If I should choose, I could sit at my computer for 24 hours a day, every day; no one would mind ... no one would even know, until I failed to turn up for a social engagement, the alarm would be raised and an emaciated corpse would be found huddled over a screen still pouring out error messages!

Over-dramatic?  Yes, almost certainly, but it shows the importance of maintaining a balance in life.  I hope anyone reading this who is living in such a situation will take heed, because the underlying truth is a serious one.

What have I been doing that is so time-consuming?  In two short words, 'family history'.  The words may be short ... the task certainly isn't.  It's an addictive, if enjoyable, pursuit and, over the last fifteen years I've found cousins in the UK, Canada and Australia, and military links to Ireland, South Africa and India (but no cousins there, as yet).  For the last few weeks, I've been filling in some of the many gaps in the family of a 'cousin-of-a-cousin'.  He's technically not relative of mine; our link is that his grandfather's uncle married my grandmother's aunt.  To do the job 'properly' is painstaking; to unknit the odd detail that has come from mistaken memory is not a little complicated ... hence the long time it's taken, and it's not finished yet!

So, yesterday - for a change - I sorted out a puzzle I'd tripped over a couple of weeks ago, regarding a totally different clan, who had moved family by family, individual by individual, from rural Suffolk to industrial Lancashire in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Equally detailed, and equally complex, but refreshingly different.

Another refreshing change was a journey today on the bus to the next town, despite the delight I would have on any other occasion in driving there. This time I wanted to do some shopping, and I knew it would cause problems trying to find a parking space anywhere close to the town centre.

One thing about my life that hasn't changed is my love of things quirky; things like a road in Letchworth where the house numbers are ... strange. They start at one end in the low 200s, odds one side, evens the other - nothing strange there - decreasing steadily, until a junction on the 'even side' where the high 100s suddenly change to 58,56,54 and 52.  On the other side, they get to about 179 or 177, and then the road finishes at a T-junction!  I know the reason for one of these peculiarities, but not the other one, which I only discovered today.

Another quirky thing I discovered today is this mathematical limerick, which I found on social media:

... (in the more usual medium of words) "A dozen, a gross and a score, plus three times the square root of four, divided by seven, plus five times eleven, gives nine squared - and not a bit more!"

I wonder whether next week will bring anything more strange?