1. Write thank you letter to Alistair for inviting me to the Hotel Chocolat last week. Here’s the bar of chocolate I made. Looks like a dog mess but I won’t stress that in my letter.
In the last post John Bellew died in 1679. His widow, Mary nee Dillon, built a fine chapel in the woods above Barmeath where members of our family are still commemorated and interred. He had two sons and a daughter: Patrick, Christopher and Mary. We need only concern ourselves with the eldest son.
It’s such a relief when there is a binary decision. On Saturday evening, either listen to Elektra on Radio 3 live from the Met or open a bottle of The (Wine) Society’s Vin d’Alsace, slot in a CD and, hey presto, High Society?
1. Periwinkle, planted in 1984, seems indestructible. It has spent months buried under building materials over the years and gets trampled on by me and the bin men.
I have just finished reading Len Deighton’s spy trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. Immensely enjoyable but when I started, it was with a sense of nostalgia for all that Cold War stuff. Now two things have happened.
“It was a lonely land then, the vast frontier held by the last scattered remnants of the once great armies that fought the Civil War. To such as these, all but forgotten, doing a dirty, thankless job, without reward or glory, the army was a way of life, the only one they knew or wanted.”