Earlier this week I received an SMS giving me three options for a walk-in flu jab and I chose Saturday at my own surgery in preference to taking time off work and travelling miles to someone else's surgery. Even by 8:30 am the queue for jabs was spreading round the corner of the adjacent shop in the mall.
This shop mystifies me. Up until recently it was a high-end florist which appears to have gone out of business because there is nothing in Chatham that could possibly be described as “High End”. You have to go into Rochester for that.
Yet here to replace the inappropriate florist is a shop selling vintage prams for £300, electric Lamborghinis for £500 (“an ideal Xmas gift!”) and Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits without price tags.
I was reprimanded for taking photographs in the mall, but I wonder how long it will be before the shopkeeper is reprimanded for laundering drug money.

Happily jabbed I joined my pals for some fireworks.

1990: I flew from London to Toronto on my 29th birthday making that day 29 hours long. A week later I flew home on the red eye and went straight to my parents' house where I sat beside my dad and watched Nelson Mandela walk out of jail. That was the last time I watched TV with my dad because later that year he died. Later still I met the person who would become my partner, his dad had also just died and we comforted one another.