Wet spurge

It sounds like some kind of medical condition, doesn't it? "Can you save her, Doctor?" "We'll do our best, My Lord, but as I'm sure you know, wet spurge is insidious, and the damage may already be too great."

R and I suffered a more than usually stressful Saturday morning: booked to collect the Boy Wonder from Slimbridge at 11.15 - a task that's normally easily doable - the minutes ticked past, and our supermarket delivery got later and later, while we watched on our phones as the traffic on our only sensible route to the M5 built steadily up, and the journey time got longer and longer. By the time the van meandered into view, twenty five minutes outside the booked 9-10am slot, and the driver got out in a leisurely fashion and casually said he was sorry to be a bit late, I feared that R's brain might explode out of his ears.

By the time we'd thrown the perishables into the fridge, scuttled to the car, and screeched out of the drive, we'd consulted telephonically with Cardiff, and had rerouted our collection to Monmouth. There we scooped up the Boy and all his paraphernalia, and then walked up into town with him in search of lunch. I'm very happy to recommend Coffi Lab, which I chose on the basis of it being 1. independent, and 2. busy, but also 3. having a pedestrian crossing right outside, which allowed B the interesting and important task of pressing the button to summon the green man, so we could walk across from the other side of the street. Getting inside and finding it to be dog-friendly, and therefore well stocked with dogs, was a bonus, and the food, coffee and service were all very good.

The icing on the cake as far as B was concerned was that they had one of those big hollow Guide Dogs collection boxes, nearly as tall as him, in the shape of a labrador with two puppies. He was enchanted. R and I explained as well as we could what guide dogs do (R actually knows a lot about the organisation, having done some consultation work with them a few years ago, but briefly summarising the concepts of blindness, assistance dogs, and charity, in language that made sense to a 2-year old, was interesting), and as soon as he grasped the essential point, B demanded to be allowed to go and give the dogs a coin. And then, of, course, another one. And another. I suddenly had a very strong memory of there being one of these boxes in the little market town where we lived when I was a small child, and my own magnetic attraction towards it, and I wished very much that I'd taken a camera to Monmouth with me so that I could capture B stroking the dogs' heads. I suspect though that this won't be our last ever trip to Coffi Lab.

After lunch and another interesting and important green man crossing, we walked up to Monnow Bridge for B to look at the river and the waterfowl ("Feed them? Feed the ducks?"), before persuading him into the car and setting off back home. Where, surprisingly, the rain had stopped and it was quite warm, if still extremely wet. We were able to do swinging in the garden though, and then go and look at bees, which to my great satisfaction is still one of the Boy's best things. At this point I could have taken some photos with a different slant than the wet flower ones I'd grabbed early in the morning, but I didn't. I like this wet spurge (one of my many recent new plantings) because it's a bit unusual, and it speaks to me strongly of the kind of day it was. "It almost looks like it's bejewelled for Coronation Day" was R's comment - but you heard that from him, not me.