Dear All,
The second week of jury service was not as exciting as the first as we were not called into action. It started by being given Monday off, Tuesday we were summoned for 1.45 pm and sat there all afternoon waiting for a court to become vacant but this did not happen. We were then asked to phone in on Wednesday and were told that we were not needed again – relief all round.
I visited John MacLeod on Monday, a previous director of NIAB now paralysed from the waist down due to prostate cancer secondaries. He is incredibly positive and still attends RHS, NIAB and Sugar Beet research meetings in a wheel chair. They have just named the new glasshouse block at NIAB after him.
We had a Mold-Ag planning meeting in the “Travellers Rest” at lunch time and 3 or 4 of us plan to return to Moldova towards the end of April.
I did a garden club talk in Saffron Walden on Tuesday night, no two clubs are the same and this was quite a posh one with about 40 folk meeting in the wood panelled rooms of the Bowls Club.
On Wednesday John Law came and helped me sort out our computer again. We had to transfer all our files to the external hard drive and re load Windows – not a quick job, but so far seems to have worked.
I have had three walks this week, twice round Over Fen in bright sunshine (once with Kate) and the U3A walk starting at Toppesfield near Great Yeldham. This was a slog as it was very sticky mud and hard going. 10.1 miles but seemed like much further!
Over Fen 1
Over Fen 2
Toppesfield The Green ManKate was off on Friday so we visited the giant Huntingdon Garden centre at Houghton to stock up on seed potatoes, seeds for Ecuador and a few items for the South American, Costa Rica adventure.
Ray Asplin is taking over one of the allotments at the cemetery and I spent yesterday morning trying to rescue the raspberry, gooseberry and currant bushes that are already there. I watched Over 2 v 0 Ely City Res. in freezing fog in the afternoon.
We catch the plane for Ecuador early on Monday 15th so I plan to spend the night in a hotel at Gatwick on Sunday. This may or may not be the last bulletin for some time!
Love
Mike & Kate
