R's rue

 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...

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. E...