• I had every intention of finishing these Weeknotes on Friday. It’s nice to end the week in a reflective way. Wiping the slate clean in readiness for the weekend. The girls and I decided to take Charlie down to the fields with the football for a walk and a play around. Our youngest has been practicing at school and wanted to practice some ‘big kicks’. As soon as we’d made it to the field, Charlie spotted the ball. He is obsessed with balls. When there are balls about, it even trumps food. You could be holding the juiciest steak in one hand, and a skanky tennis ball in the other and he would pick the ball ten times out of ten.
  • It was like slow motion. Nansi kicked the ball to Alys. She stopped it with her foot as Charlie ran into her at full pelt. I know he was going his fastest because his head was down, his shoulders hunched, he was really moving. She went flying as Charlie barrelled into her leg. She put it down in a funny position and went down like a Premiership footballer screaming. ‘It’s broken’, was my immediate thought. Going back to my father-in-law who broke his arm over winter, and Nansi who broke her wrist a couple of months ago, I’m becoming a regular at the fracture clinic.
  • We were five hours into our wait at A&E on a Friday evening. The last three hours, nobody had moved anywhere. Nobody had seen a healthcare professional for ages. ‘Shift change’, I thought. I told you’d I’d spent too long in fracture clinics recently. By midnight, Alys had her x-ray and she was sat waiting patiently. The radiologist had said, when asking Alys to move her foot into painful positions, ‘I love x-raying girls – you’re as hard as nails’. She’s right. Alys didn’t kick up a fuss once.
  • Luckily it was a sprain. After 48 hours of rest and regular icing, she was able to hobble around school today without any crutches. Phew.
  • Last year, we’d had enough of our wifi. Old building. Stone walls with a new extension of glass and steel, it’s a nightmare for good, reliable wifi signals. I did the research and we settled on Ubiquity’s Unifi system. I’ve been so happy with it that I’ve managed to persuade my brother to get it in his new house, and my folks to upgrade their dreadful BT system as well. I get to spend a few days in summer up to my eyeballs in Cat6 cables. There is something very gratifying about getting a new network all set up.
  • Finally, a load of concurrent sport is happening. Le Tour, Euro 2020, and Wimbledon. It’s great. Back to back, daily, high-stakes elite sport. Love it.
  • Speaking of Le Tour, there have been some terrible crashes over the first there stages. A lethal combination of stupid spectators, a nervous peloton, and narrow twisty roads. I saw a thing on tv today which went over the amount of injuries from yesterday. Four riders abandoned, and maybe 20 had broken bones – yet continued to ride! It’s not only Alys who is hard as nails.