Saturday, June 30, 2007

A 'strawberry tea' on a rather wet day

The weather has been vile for the past few days, with parts of the country on flood alert. In June, how ridiculous is that?! The local fund-raisers had been working hard to raise money for our beautiful village church and had organised a 'strawberry tea' and a visit to a local garden. When I was out for my morning run I saw Jo, one of the chief organisers, who had made the wise decision to move the event indoors to the church itself - very sensible.

Mike and I dressed for the occasion as we wanted to have a look round the garden. As we were a bit early, we had a go on the swings beforehand. Check out my multicoloured poncho! It made everybody smile on what was a very wet and grey day and it kept me dry to boot.

Not many people braved the garden visit so we more or less had it to ourselves. Then we headed off to the church to claim our scones, strawberries and cup of tea. Yummy. We chatted with lots of villagers we knew, including Gordon our vicar. This is me with Micky, one of our lovely neighbours.

In the foreground are Don and Grace, our elderly neighbours who we visited the day before my birthday. It was lovely to see that they'd managed to make the journey to be part of the event.

We were entertained by a jazz trio who were very good and their music was not overpowering and suited the situation well. The stained glass windows in the church are beautiful. I tried to photograph some of the others but they didn't turn out well.

What really made me chuckle was when one of my neighbours came bounding over to see me. Carol and her husband Peter live in Kenya during the winter months and then come back to England for the summer. Back in April, she turned on the television to watch the London Marathon and the first thing she saw was my interview with Jonathan Edwards. She couldn't believe her eyes!

One very exciting thing that happened this morning was that a Turtle Dove landed on our patio. I've heard it's beautiful purring song in one of the fields but I've never seen it before. It's on the RSPB's Red Alert register which means that it's numbers have declined dramatically in recent years so we felt privileged to have seen one.

1 comment:

Linda said...

What a lovely church! Can we donate to the preservation fund?

Also, love the gloves.

Linda in Oregon