Unmitigated Birthday

It's no good me making apologies, but my computer is playing extraordinary tricks and is so slow that I can walk faster with my legs tied together. And this new Blogger thing doesn't help. It's taken since Monday, my birthday, to bring you this. So, we were all in the pub celebrating the fact that I'd completed yet another year, and in comes a very lovely lady bearing the above. A big cake just for me! How is it that people know what I like? I must have gone on about post boxes somewhere, because here was a very Special Delivery. My monogram on the door, a bag full of letters, and more cut-out icing letters saying 'Happy Birthday' scattered on the stone path. I just don't want to eat it. What should I do? Anyway, it managed to get back to Ashley Towers without ending up on the pub car park, where it is displayed along with other gifts that include a Selfridges No Noise Marmite jar. I'll start blogging it now and perhaps it will appear in a year's time.

Unexpected Alphabet No 16

Well, what a day. Everything from the High Victorian visions in Westminster Abbey- red uniforms and internal green trees like it must have been inside the Great Exhibition of 1851- to our village hall with a party for the children- miniature sausage rolls and My Boys (and others, it has to be said) taking it in turns to wear my giant tea cosy that's shaped like a muti-coloured crown. And this sponge cake emblazoned with stencilled castor sugar (I think). It was a little thing, and I expect there were a few thousand like it up and down the bunting-ed and beflagged streets of the nation, but this was one of ours. I loved it all, the care and precision of everything from a military epaulette to a flag stuck in a cake. "I was glad", as Hubert Parry had it for everyone in the Abbey, but particularly for that stunning processing bride. God bless 'em.