Only mid August, feels like September already

We've got the Aga going again it's so chilly. The skies are leaden in colour and lumpen with cloud. Feels like the season of mellow fruitfulness is upon us already - berries ripening in the hedges and the small trees in our orchard weighed down with fruit. (Hope we get to them before the wasps do.)


You'll have to take my word for it that the melon is a big 'un - and no, it didn't come from Sainsbury's.

We spent a rainy Saturday up in Stockport, shifting furniture from here to there and assessing the number of journeys it will take to empty a garage. Probably 2. Fingers crossed that the sale of Tom's flat will go through smoothly now.

The 4 Heatons appear unchanged, same old faces in the same old places - we seem to have come along way since leaving at the end of 2003 and have no regrets whatsoever about quitting the suburbs. It does look a lot livelier than it did when we moved there in 1979 though - the onward march of bars and cafes seems endless and the major supermarkets have got their feet in the door (so to speak) in the form of open-all-hours 'express/local' stores. The chattering classes can now enjoy 2 good deli's - a visit to Pokusevski's Delicatessen at 13 Shaw Road was an exercise on how to spend £20 on nothing - the stuff I bought wouldn't make a meal - it was the sort of stuff we snarf on the side. Still, what wouldn't I give for it to be teleported down in Welshpool. It would go down a bomb here as Welshpool is ram-jam full of Polish migrant workers....and exiles like myself desperate for culinary oddities and extras. Chocolate hedgehog anyone?