The best laid plans...

"The best laid plans of mice and men oft times gang astray" wrote Robert Burns with homespun wisdom. Well, it certainly came true in my life this week.

Wednesday morning I was all packed and ready to go down to London after spending the previous day with Audrey wandering around in Swaledale. But at just past 7.00 a.m. we got the news that my mother-in-law Alice Brennand had died. So the trip was off.

I have been here at home instead of London. I was supposed to go down and look at some letters written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, to his mother who lived for many years in a hamlet called Masongill which is two miles outside Ingleton. I want to write about her.

Anyway, as it happened, I had told my friend Andy Ive about this on Monday night. It was he who infomred me of their existence in the first place. He said he would be down in London on Thursday and we arranged to meet at the British Library to look at them together.

I left a message on his home answering machine to say that I wouldn't be there but he had gone by then and so rang me on Thursday afternoon to say that he had looked at them (there are 800 altogether) and that they mainly date from the 1870s and 1890s. He suggested putting a timeline of Conan Doyle's life down on paper so we can tell where he was at when he wrote each letter. This I was going to do on the train on the way down.

Ah, well. There'll be another time for that I'm sure.

At the moment I have to support Audrey and her Dad in their loss.