Paying Respects

Jof was at work today so we made up some tasks to keep ourselves busy.

So the first thing we thought of was to go and see Grandad because Grandma died a year ago tomorrow and he was making the pilgrimage back to the old medieval village they chose to retire to for 25 years.

Now he has a fireplace that is in fact about the same size as the last one but about 500 years older, gotta love that Elizabethan brickwork.

He gave us a sackful of Xmas and birthday presents which makes all the difference given that I have already been told that all I will get for festive donations is an orange.

He was due to go and meet some old golfing friend but through the kindness of his heart he agreed to change his plans (change is bad) and fit in with ours by driving down the same road to the Botany Bay Inne which is basically a pub with abundant parking facilities on the way to Dorchester and we met there and he had Whitebait and we had the carvery and we all laughed and felt just like Good Old Team M again, which is 3 blokes spread across 9 decades but all suspiciously similar in terms of madness and length of hair.

Then we split and he went off to Crewkerne while we navigated the newly resurfaced back turnpikes of Upper Dorset to Lillington, and found Grandma in the tranquil historic lichen-encrusted churchyard.

I placed the pot of assorted plants upon her and she didn't complain because she's quiet nowadays. Then we checked out some of the older gravestones at their various rakish angles, some with little surround-fences and some without, but the older the plot, the less was legible due to lichen, weathering and illiterate stonemasons, you know the way it is. I've been up that tower lots of times, but it was closed today.
Then we drove back through that medieval village (population 26, not including horses) and saw the old house, practically unchanged apart from the cut-back hedges, and grooved on through to the other side. On Gordon's Lane we met 2 male yearling pheasants, splendidly coloured but as clever as teabags, we had to get out of the car to push them to the side of the road to avoid killing the poor little morons.
I have been reading solidly while in the car and somewhere near Bishop's Caundle I finished Harry Potter 2. Luckily, HP 3 was on the back seat. But then we met Sturminster Newton.
We do not go that way normally, but Bud had bought yet another brass shell casing off some crowd in the middle of nowhere so we had to stop and pick it up, and lo, it was taller than the 75mm Sherman Tank round and it polished up nicely. So we enjoyed the deep deep quite whiffy countryside and the way that they do take care of their little people by building some very decent swingparks and we did 2 of them.
Un-named park had a very nice wooden frame with metal tube slide and the War Memorial Park had a snake-like bench and a well-oiled roundabout.
Then we took the long and winding road back through the sleepy metropolitan conurbations of Shillingstone and Spetisbury and made Jof a cup of well-deserved tea, and watched the Harry Potter + Chamber of Secrets film because I had finished the book. This book + DVD deal is really working out for me.