Village Affairs

I spent the morning selling plants at the village plant fayre and coffee morning in a church hall in Framlingham. It's the stuff of rural life as any country dweller knows: the village church, precious beyond price, needs constant funds to keep its fabric going, and with a dwindling congregation to prop it up the money has to be found in a variety of ways. And so the cake makers brought several dozen gorgeous confections, the jam and marmalade producers and the beekeepers piled their jars high, and every friend of every one of the organisers donated things from their garden. It was an amazing display from such a small village, and I'm sure they'll have raised even more than last year's record £1,500. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and met countless members of the county's backbone. And I came home with a pot of marmalade, one of blackberry jam,six different tomato varieties and lots of lovely plants. I won a prize in the raffle too, and when someone asked how much this rose cost, I flogged it too for £4.

None of this disguised my ongoing problems with my Rayburn. A recent service showed that a metal protection plate, newly installed last year, had buckled so badly in one corner that it looked like a twisted paper hanky. The replacement part was ordered and the engineer returned to install it, but when I tried to use the oven last night the kitchen filled with smoke and the acrid smell still lingers. For supper it was beans and eggs in the microwave. They're coming back on Tuesday to fix it, so it's lucky I'm away for the weekend; there's a limit to what you can do in the microwave.

At the fayre I asked Patrick how the first Italian class of the new term went, which I missed as I was in London, and he told me it was cancelled. Cary, our Cuban teacher, was beetling to the school when she crashed into a telegraph pole, bringing it toppling onto her car. Luckily she was unhurt, and he drove past seconds after it happened so was able to help her. Poor Cary. Last winter she took away a long stretch of someone's immaculate hedge with her car. When she first came from Cuba she marvelled at the English roads, but I don't think she likes them much now.