All the bases at home covered

 Just now, finally, after more than a year of tussling and waiting for the finalized corrected version of my details, a potted biography has been published by Wikipedia. Large chunks are missing because they were not sufficiently satisfied with the third party evidence of those details, including the whole 10 year episode with the SPPW - the Friends of Polish Veterans Association. However, better than nothing. At least I can let my son and my English friends have an inkling of what my past life was about, especially my work in the Polish community, with the Polish Solidarity Campaign in the 1980s, editorship of "Orzel Bialy" and the Federation of Poles in the 1990s.

Albina has been buying all the toiletries for our journey, while I was at work. Worn out with the effort, she nevertheless followed this up with getting a really short hair cut. She looked good, but she went for an early night. Kasia came later in the evening to pick up a key to the flat and a parking pass. She will spend her Thursday evenings in our spare bedroom and promised to pick up our post, while Ola, our Ukrainian cleaner will come every other Tuesday to clean the flat.

Also, I ordered a couple of sinister looking models of black ravens  to frighten the pigeons who have begun a real pain in the last 2 months. These pigeons have effectively turned our balcony into their toilet. You can ruffle the curtains, or shout and scream at them. The result is the same. They fly off for a few minutes and then they are back. The owners of the block have ordered specialists to clean up the balconies on our side of the building for February 28th. We won't be here then of course, but our lovely neighbouring Indian doctor will have a key to let them in. She suffers as much from these winged pests as we do. Even more so, as her balcony is twice as big as ours. This way we have all the bases covered at the flat in our absence. In the meantime four ravens have been delivered and they sit out on our balcony keeping the pigeons at bay and supervising the arrival of the new bridge across the Grand Union Canal which is visible from our balcony.

Final touch. I have attached a statement on my email operating from February 23rd announcing that I am away and may not even see the email. Goodbye, world. Albina and I are off at last.

Err, maybe not just yet. One more day at the London Chamber, and one more zoom meeting for the AGM of the Federation of Poles on Tuesday night.