Day Three

Thank you for your concern and best wishes over the past couple of days. I'm glad to say the lurgy appears to be in full retreat today and I even felt able to go for a short walk before lunch. Perhaps it's the post-viral meh, or simply the grumpy old bugger who lives inside me, but I couldn't avoid noticing the amount of plastic tatt that is beginning to plague the village...

Halloween is as much a commercial opportunity as is Christmas and nowadays holds about as much spiritual value for the majority. At this time of year though many birds are still in the hedgerows, and the smothering of garden hedges and fences with plastic spiderwebs has a dreadful impact on them, and on small mammals at ground level too. Pumpkins are fine, as long as you don't leave them on the ground (hedgehogs can over eat and suffer fatal indigestion).

But I guess at least the plastic tatt was intentionally placed and will be ripped away and likely tossed into landfill later. This celebratory balloon, which is caught in the trees over the Little Avon River and too far away to rescue, will simply deflate and become a destructive bit of pollution. Still, it's day three and as such this works... kind of.

Gods I sound miserable. Blame is on the post-viral meh... On the other hand and in more positive tones, our most wonderful parish council (ahem) and most of all our excellent Clerk has overseen the professional cleaning of the war memorial in time for the upcoming Civil Act of Remembrance . It's not an easy thing, cleaning a listed monument in a safe and appropriate fashion, but for a hundred year old stone memorial it looks great!

The image in extras is partway through the cleaning process before the names were re-enamelled.