Each morning we swam with seals. RI would join us, provided that he had not stayed out too late the night before on “tom cat” excursions.

In the afternoons we liked to vary our activities. Today OC took us to his charitable venture. Under a huge dirty tarpaulin in an old church building we found his donated collection of theological texts. He planned to catalogue them when he retired, then donate them to a rare books collection, possibly at the British Library.

I wondered if I could donate the contents of my parents’ house to the collection?

I actually had three books on me, so I added these to the pile. The janitor inspected my donation. He discovered that despite the elaborate binding of the first (which gave the impression of a nineteenth century treasure) the book’s contents comprised a cartoon of a family holiday in the Highlands made out of old photographs. It also included a record of all Christmas presents received one year in the early 1980s in a photograph of all the stockings lined up next to the newly unwrapped presents in the drawing room of the White House.