Towards Exted

It was a bright, mild morning, but I was waiting inside for a telephone call from a GP at an unspecified time, having for once struck lucky in the 8 am telephone lottery. The call, when it came, surprised me: after I had explained my concerns about yesterday's communications by text message regarding J, the doctor, who is relatively new to the practice and unfamiliar to me, responded by thanking me for my clear explanation of the context, saying that he agreed with all my concerns, and not only confirming my view that J should not take the antibiotics prescribed by someone who clearly had no awareness of her complex and inter-connected set of health issues, but saying that in the light of the information I had given, he saw no reason to repeat a test either. It's not a story I will recount in detail here, but prescribing capsules to someone who should only take liquid medication because of swallowing risks was only the first of several errors. He was a bit too effusive for my liking, but it's nice to be vindicated; I just wish I had not spent most of yesterday afternoon trying fruitlessly to get through the brick wall erected by the practice's gatekeepers, who finally forced me back into the frequently futile 8 am phone queue. 

So I didn't go out till after our late lunch, by which time the clouds had moved in; but I still had a lovely walk. I went up a hillside path at the other end of the village, one I don't use often but which has lovely views back over the point where the main Elham and smaller Exted valleys meet, and another even smaller valley behind the ridge where the hamlet of Exted stands, curls and slopes round the hill to add another layer of undulations. It's this small valley that can be seen here; the lane up Exted hill, which I walk more often, runs up the ridge and the farmhouses are hidden among the trees. I took a lot of photos with the big camera, for the first time since I've had the new phone, but this is one of a few quick phone photos I took for comparison. I was interested to see that while the camera photos need significant editing to deal with difference in light levels between the sky and the shadowy valley, the phone has largely sorted it out for me.