Cats , Burials , Pigeon Babies and a Walled Garden

I slept in today .

Coffee was not brewing until seven am . I read Pat Conroy for fifteen minutes from six forty five and watched the sleeping form of D .

He looks Angelic .

Alice was under my dressing gown , sighing heavily at the pillow end , clearly hoping like me that if we stared and sighed hard enough he would go and she would be able to hang onto the gown-as-blanket ( makes a change from Blanket-as-Name which we have become accustomed to from the death of Michael Jackson news . Why are all his children called much the same name ? Why is his female child given a male name too ? It beats me as my Grandma would have said ) .

No such luck ...... he slept on , and at seven , up I got and brewed up , though I did leave Alice the blanket . Who needs a dressing gown in these soaring temperatures when its so hot I have to sleep on top of the bed ( at the foot end ) and with a fan blasting most nights .

D did however have grand plans of his own , and disappeared to prepare Alice s breakfast and then back to bed with his own second coffee etc . But an early alert requesting assistance to take a carless neighbour on a mercy mission to the vet s in a nearby town put a stop to all that . After some brief negociations he realises things are serious and the poor old cat is probably on his last journey . Indeed he is later assisting at the burial .

We take ourselves off to the country for solace and coffee and discover a new walled garden concealing a splendid coffee shop .

Everything is cream , palest green and dairy . A large poster informs that we are near Hartburn , where I once stayed many years ago and we set out in search of the house .

And there it is , beyond the churchyard , through a little gate , overgrown now with bushes and trees . I try to take photographs , wondering how closely I resemble a burglar should anyone be watching .

The woman delivering leaflets or church magazines seems unperturbed by my curiosity though and calls a friendly hello .

A man who has parked next to me asks if the silver bracelet on the ground is mine ... it seems if I am up to no good I am dropping clues all over the place .

I peer in past the car parked through the gates and wonder if the croquet lawn is still functional , recalling our summer time there . Today is overcast and damp , a fog hanging over the graves .

The back of the house which I remembered opening into an old fashioned courtyard with high walls has been opened out (below).

Gratifying that in some thirty years the front of the house has not changed one iota .

Another pigeon baby has landed in Deb's garden . After three hourly feeding sessions and valiant attempts to keep her four legged Fiends ( the furry purring variety ) at bay she finally called in a rescue organisation and the pigeon baby , named Scrimshaw , has been removed to Sanctuary . They continue to care for Squiblets ( a larger baby pigeon who landed last weekend ) who is big enough to be ignored by the cats and has the advantage of being beak fed by an adult pigeon to boot .

What Larks !