Oxford ... and old people

After a leisurely breakfast, Rob and I headed to London (Bromley to be exact) to visit two nursing homes. The traffic was bad because of a big "football" game so it took us longer than we expected (about 3 hours), but we finally arrived and had a very good visit with the Director of Operations. One is a skilled nursing facility (SNF) and the other is specifically dementia care, although there are people with dementia in the former. The care is very good and compassionate but I've gotten spoiled by the "culture change" in architecture and staffing in the local Oshkosh/Appleton places I've been recently. We had lunch in the cafe of the SNF and talked at length with one resident and his daughter. This was a Black man who achieved a high post in the Army in WWII (he now has Parkinson's dementia) and we looked through the album his daughter had made. He didn't experience prejudice in England, but in India, he wasn't allowed to be with the white officers.

We left Bromley and headed to Oxford which was enchanting to me -- very old, very rich with scholarly tradition. I would have happily spent days (or months, or years) there. We stopped into a bookstore which on the outside didn't look very big, but inside, it was huge and wonderful. I was thrilled to find lots and lots of books on emotion in the "cognitive psychology" section. Wow -- thinking and feeling are finally getting back together in the 21st century, at least in this bookstore.

We stopped at a grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things for dinner and had a leisurely meal -- Tamsin, Rob, me and their two dachshunds (Myrtle and Monty). By the way, Cheltenham is kind of like Langley, VA, with a top secret facility called the GCHQ -- a "listening post" that no one is allowed to talk about. I spotted part of it from the grocery store parking lot because the elderly woman who checked us out told us she used to work there and pointed out the building. It's kind of a weird green color, but apparently there's also another building shaped like a donut and no one is supposed to know what goes one there. I wonder if they know where Osama is....