31st May 2021

Bank holiday weekends do not often come with good weather but the sun shines and it is warm.  My two have arrived and the talk becomes continuous.  So glad to have my granddaughter sort out the couple of technical problems I have with computer and phone .

She also manages to find the old silver plated tea set from the depths of the cupboard, hidden because I hate cleaning silver.  Its incredibly tarnished surface says at least give me one more clean.  No one wants it, I suggest it goes to Oxfam, and my daughter says inexplicably, so you are keeping the prostitutes in Africa in business I suppose.  Light dawns, all those male Oxfam charity people who paid for the service of the prostitutes, how a story sticks.

Sunday we go for a walk in the fields, Teddy, thin whippet type dog, now 13 years meets five other whippets and a great tangle of leads of furious whippet's barking ensue.  We all move on, the riverside field have been somewhat disfigured by the new farmer, he seems to have killed all the grass on the bank, presumably to stop any weeds invading the fields.  I note that in all the mowing of roadside and garden verges someone has carefully mown round a clump of cowslip - good.  There is a red Midland hawthorn in the hedge and I wonder how it has escaped to the cold North.

And just because we have only  just lived through a pandemic I manage to put on entertainment in the afternoon, the annual tractor run comes through the village, and Lillie and I stand outside watching the tooting little old tractors and large new tractors potter past with cross car drivers caught up in the muddle.

Jo also comes over in the afternoon and chatters away for an hour.  She has also just lost her dog Marshall, and now his urn of ashes sit by the fire in Marshall's old spot, she is sad and doesn't know whether to get another dog.  They are both getting on and she fears the dog being left although her son said he will take it on in the event of their death.

We discuss the arrival of swallows, they have given up nesting under the church eaves these last two years but she has a pair in the ponies shelter, they have built their nest on an old light, and presumably the swallows will come back to the Gospel's house and fly up and down the straight Salton Lane.  She tells a funny tale about the charity tractors annual run down Salton Lane which is single tracked.  When out with pony and trap she met the run of tractors but managed to find a spot to take Charlie and the trap off the lane.

And so, a cynical view of the latest wedding.  Was it not convenient that it happened immediately after the Dominic Cummings appearance.  Of course it was not a distraction was it??? But it was definitely a managed press affair Carrie...