I must say that I very much hope this is the last
transmission from Newport for a while, but after two cancellations on me I
won't really believe it until we are wheels up and half way across the
Atlantic. In all my planning I hadn't thought of coming back earlier until
Number 2 son suggested it. I suppose the natural inclination when a flight is
cancelled is to ask 'Well, when's the next one ?....rather than when was the
one before ?' Also after those previous cancellations, most of my planning
was about where and how to find an alternative bolt-hole after my lease runs
out at the end of June.
Meanwhile,
the weather has turned warm and generally sunny, making my cliff-top bench a
particularly nice place to have lunch. All through the period on my rounds I
have been noticing different flowers coming out and different scents as well,
the latest being rhododendrons, great banks of them.
But I have also discovered
one of the snags of these great estates - and that is the need for constant
maintenance of the grounds. Ocean View isn't too bad and is treated with a
degree of benign neglect, so the gardeners only come about twice a week, but
Miramar next door is something else. The gardener is there every day and the
place is manicured to the nth degree.
The snag is that he uses heavy machinery
for absolutely everything and there's a constant roar nearly all the time -
except at the weekends. His results may look good but pretty devastating for
the environment I should think.
I
have finally conceded defeat to the squirrels and thrown away the old bird
feeder I brought with me. I had a cunning plan to suspend it from my bedroom
balcony using about 10 feet of fishing line (found on the beach - which I
thought no squirrel could possibly climb down) ending in a birdfeeder near the
top pane of the window in living room/library near a window at last five feet above
the ground, with no climbing points anywhere near it. The result can be seen in
the attached photo. I have absolutely no idea how this was done, but was hugely
impressed, and thought he made a nice picture, even to the little bits of apple-core
on his whiskers.
Otherwise
what I hope will be my last week here for a while with complications of packing
what I plan to bring home, leave here or return to the local library which has
just re-opened. This week should also be enlivened by some very early morning
lectures to a naval group in Singapore (where their time is 12 hours in
advance) and last struggle to get enough access to my College account to do at
least some of the mandatory training that the US navy requires of everyone
(suicide awareness, being on the look-out for trafficked persons, hackers etc).
I don't anticipate much success since after three gruelling hours with the IT
team, where they eventually got inside my laptop here trying to work out why
things were proving so difficult, it's all very shaky still. He said he had never seen before, and couldn't
understand, a message that kept flashing up somewhere in the link between my
laptop and the College system, which he managed, all the same, to work around.
But this morning when I virtuously tried it out, it completely failed. I begin
to understand why the US is so frightened by Chinese 5G.
Everything
is loosening up over here. So far the figures in Rhode Island are still
drifting in a downwards direction but there's been an increase in some of the
southern states like Texas, Arizona and South Carolina which are nevertheless
loosening the restrictions. What with that and the lack of social distancing in
the George Floyd protests I think there's substance in the fear of second spike in the US. Around here, probably
half the people you see are wearing (or at least carrying) a mask even out in
the open air with few people around. Interestingly Asian Americans (or tourists
I suppose) always do. Significant I think. The Federal Government doesn't
announce national daily figures any more, as Bolsonaro in Brazil tried to
do. There was a depressing story on the
radio about a meeting of health specialists in South Carolina. It turned out
that 80% of them had been threatened over the phone or by e-mail for supporting
the Covid lockdown restrictions. This really is a very polarised country. So much
depends on who and where you are. Anyway that's enough of that.
I'm
eating things up at the moment but was delighted when a punnet of freshly
picked strawberries arrived (together with my copies of the New York Times)
from the big house. Sounds very 'Great Gatsby' I know. Less good news on the supposed arrival of my long awaited hair clippers.
I went on 'tracking' a couple of days ago only to find they were still on a lorry in China ! Not much hope of them arriving any time soon,
by which time I really hope I will have gone.....for the time being at any rate
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