Not Much Has Happened In Our Street...

It's been a quiet week in our street. Jonny had several loads of lime spread on his fields and Nancy has avoided incurring Tom's wrath...she had been entertaining herself by chasing his cattle and he was exceedingly cross, as well he might be...

We woke this morning to a sharp frost...the field glittered from the icy crystals and spiders webs were strung out on the hedge round our little field like so many strands of pearls...

Himself went out while it was still pitch dark, the three dogs trailing behind him reluctantly...Eilis has to have her lead on of course, otherwise she'd simply come straight back home. She sees no rhyme nor reason in walking, no matter how many times we tell her it's for her own good...

Paddy has spent the last two weeks in California with his brother...he isn't very suntanned, though he said the temperature reached 104 while he was there. He was in the US Marines as a young man...hard to visualise him as such. Now he's the same age as Himself and bent from years of toil on his farm...don't think Paddy's wife went with him...she is a lady of some size and I think it would be terribly uncomfortable for her to spend so long a time in an aeroplane seat.

Gerry has taken up the running again...he's tall and skinny and wears a skimpy singlet and short shorts...Gerry lives at the crossroads in a two storey stone house...he's best known for eating fruit while going round the local supermarket and presenting the checkout girl with an apple core or a banana skin...I like Gerry. He's weird.

Every day has seen different machinery going to and from the works on the bridge...huge earth moving vehicles' and very small ditching ones...the men go past as Himself is coming home from his walk...I hear them tooting their horns when they pass him by...one of them is fond of dogs and it is he who stops to admire ours...'There's no hunger on those critters' he says, before going on to supervise deliveries of cement and sand...loads of gravel and hardcore. I think he'd quite like to say' ye gods those dogs are fat'...

Wendy rode past a couple of times on her horse Mustapha...he's big and bold and a bit of a handful, judging by the way he dances sideways and tosses his head...our little Jack bawls at the top of his voice when he sees the horse going by...runs along the hedge as fast as his little feet will carry him. He lived with Rosie, who was a stout grey pony...perhaps he still remembers her.

Another week has gone by...