Kitchen Window Sill

With the bars of his Lordship's cage having been rattled yet again by one of his close family members, I decided to escape the bad humour in the house by enjoying my own company in a nearby watering hole and waiting for peace to descend.

Although the day was grey and overcast, it was mild, and the swathes of daffodils filling every available corner of the Meadows brought cheer and colour to the scene.

As I sat nursing a cup of tea and reading the available daily rag of a paper ( oh to have a page 3 body), it was difficult not to overhear the conversation of two large ladies at an adjoining table.
It's no wonder that novelists get material this way, when one is drawn into parts of other people's lives, while leaving the rest to the imagination.

After peace has been restored on the home front, we went to the land of flowers and took out shares in primula production by buying several boxes and putting them in every conceivable tub on the patio. Last year's ones have not stopped flowering since they were planted.

Whereas people pay to walk through snowdrop woods and grounds filled with daffodils, the hoi polloi in the Meadows can admire from a distance our veritable panoply of primulas free gratis and nothing.

What passers by in the Meadows thought yesterday evening as the light was fading, when they saw a young man in an anonymous brown raincoat stop outside the Dower House and pass a package through the railings to an older lady.
It was in fact Scobes very kindly giving me his mother's copy of Saga magazine.

As we were planting tubs this afternoon another older man, without a raincoat this time, stopped to talk through the railings and tell me he had read about my article in Saga magazine and offered to take his Lordship and me on one of his conducted tours of the Mortonhall estate should my reservoir of blips dry up. His detective work in tracking me down was admirable and we may take him up on his offer.

It's only now that I think that it might be possible to start a coffee service conducted through the railings to passing blippers. What do you think?