In The Pink

 I complemented Bethan on her corner garden this morning. I’d say she has the fourth best garden in the village behind Marion Jones, Animal Helper Pat and the lady who lives in the London Road cottage whose name has just escaped me. She told me she had just scattered her mothers ashes into a new herbaceous border filled with only pink flowers .
She always said she was in the pink , when you asked her how she was” Bethan quipped “ Now she is!”


The velvet voiced Linda at the coffee morning


The Memorial Hall was open today, the shenanigans with it’s insurance sorted by the Community Council.
It was nice to go to the first coffee morning of the year.
The first person I saw crossing the road very carefully with his wife was Mr Poznán.
Now Mr Poznán is perhaps my most favourite man in the village. 
In his late seventies, he has the most benign and friendliest faces of anyone I have ever met and with his crinkled smiling eyes and broad grin he always reminds me of a soft featured Polish Farmer ( hence the nickname).
When I separated from the Prof and was in danger of losing the cottage , it was Mr Poznań who originally proposed the idea of buying the cottage so that I could stay in it.
He is a gentle quietly spoken man, who is popular in Trelawnyd.
It is well known that Mr Poznań has a cardiac history and catching his wife’s worried eye, I realised that he was more breathless than usual so I popped over to take his pulse and to share some nursery advice.
We sat and talked for a while.
It was lovely to catch up.

I cut my visit short as I’d planned to meet another old friend in Chester. 
I’ve known Nigel, who now lives in Manchester for nearly thirty years, and we talked solid for three hours. Drinking Turkish delight tea in the Storyhouse restaurant and eating Mr Whippy ice cream by the Dee

Inside the Storyhouse

The Dee

Touching base with friends, over the last couple of weeks 
Life feels normal once more


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Babies

Baby weighing scales

Last evening we went over to Frances and Stew's house to weigh Phoebe. Shirley had borrowed the baby weighing scales from the health centre where she works. 

Phoebe was stripped naked and placed on the scales like a plucked turkey. She didn't seem to mind a bit as grandpa continued to sing to her like a lunatic. Her skin was flawless. Towards the end of the weighing process, she made a little waterfall, showing no embarrassment whatsoever about this. I would have been mortified myself.

She is a big, healthy baby that is for sure. She weighed in at nineteen pounds exactly. Not quite five months old, her current weight places her in the ninety eighth percentile of all babies. Her only source of nutrition so far has been her mother's milk. It is really quite miraculous.

Further north in Yorkshire we have two nephews - Edward and Philip. They are Shirley's sister's sons. Their "partners" have both had babies in the last six weeks. Edward is now the father of a little girl called Winnie and Philip is the dad of another baby girl called Reeve. She was only born on Monday of this week. Everybody's doing well.

It's all girl babies round here. What are they putting in the water?  One of Frances's best friends bore a girl very recently and her very best friend Charlotte is due to burst forth in the next two or three weeks. Surely that child will be a boy. If so, he will be called Casper. If the babe is a girl, she will be called Imelda.

In these modern times, new parents come up with many surprising name choices. Who would have ever thought that a British prince would call his children Archie and Lilibet?  These names do not seem at all regal and appear to deliberately cock a snook at tradition. Not so with Prince William and The Duchess of Cambridge's three children: George, Charlotte and Louis.

We are very happy that our bonny granddaughter is called Phoebe. It means "bright" or "shining". The name originated in Ancient Greece. We hope that she will always feel comfortable with her name. It's nice to have a first name that sits well with you and is never a source of unease or even resentment.



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