The post came this morning, bundled up in a rubber band, consisting of an advertising leaflet, a letter clearly addressed to the Systems Administrator, a letter equally clearly addressed to our nearest neighbour, and a third for somebody at the lettuce farm. I hate it when that happens. I have visions of my Chelsea tickets, or the SA's Cheltenham badges, or some vital letter containing a medical appointment, or a cheque, being randomly dropped through someone else's letterbox in the broad vicinity, and spending a couple of weeks sitting on their kitchen table until they decide it is too late to take it round now and bin it, or else open it and think they rather fancy attending the Chelsea Flower Show themselves. I fired off a complaint to the Royal Mail, though goodness knows if that does any good, or will simply alienate the postman, and all our Christmas cards and my next Toast order will fall into a puddle on their way here.
I was going out for the afternoon with a friend who lives up near the Suffolk border, so on the way to pick her up I was able to call at the opticians to have my new glasses adjusted. The girl said that they were pressing in on one side, and let them out. I hope that does the trick, since it felt as though they were pressing down on my left ear rather than in. Each time I have to go back to the opticians takes out a great chunk of the morning, so I don't want to end up making half a dozen return trips while they fiddle with the glasses, but since the glasses don't start hurting until they've been on for a few hours, it is very difficult to tell whether a given intervention has fixed them.
Then I called at the blacksmith en route, as I was, quite literally, passing. He didn't take a deposit for the plant support I asked him to make, and that was such a long time ago that I began to worry whether he was happy making it, or found my one-off jobs a nuisance, and was hoping that if he didn't take any money and didn't do anything about it, I'd go away. I e-mailed a couple of weeks ago and got no reply, so looking a human being in the eye seemed the best way of finding out if they were on the case. It turned out that he was intending to make the plant support, but had had some other jobs in and remembered I'd said it was not urgent. He was quite right about that, I did, and it's even less urgent now, since I've chopped the plant down. Any time between now and March would be fine. He thought he would do it before March. I was looking on this plant support as a prototype, and thinking that once we'd got a design that worked I could do with a couple more, and it turned out he'd remembered that as well, so I still have a working relationship with the blacksmith. It's great fun having things made. Rusted iron seems hideously expensive at the time, but lasts so long that it ends up being much better value than the ready made coated metal supports you can get in garden centres.
The afternoon's expedition was to a charity do. I don't normally do charity dos, but this was an afternoon of lectures on antiques and textiles, and a cream tea, in aid of a hospice, held in what looked like a very scenic barn. My friend has been plagued with asthma over the summer, and an entertainment in civilised surroundings that didn't require us to walk very far sounded just the ticket. Somebody from the hospice made a moving speech about the future good work they hoped to do. After that someone from the Antiques Roadshow talked about working on the show. I don't actually watch it, but apparently as well as the eighteen or twenty experts that appear in front of the cameras, the BBC has eighty people labouring behind the scenes. The cameras cost £1,500 a minute to run, which sounds an enormous amount in the digital age, and made £13,000 a day to run an entire hospice sound positively cheap. Then a local oriental rug dealer talked about how carpets are made in Iran, and the nomadic tribe that still weave them. She goes out there to source them, and is far more intrepid than I would be, since while I have always loved the imagery of Persia, modern day Iran sounds a hairy place to visit. Then we got scones with cream, jam, and a slice of strawberry, and I managed to snaffle a third half of scone, since there seemed to be lots left as we were taking our places for the final lecture, and I hadn't had any lunch. The last talk was about Thomas Gainsborough, always a sound stand-by for arts events in Suffolk. Indeed, the music society's annual art lecture this season is on that very subject. In a fit of brio I bought a small handbag made partly out of kilim, which I had totally not intended to do. It was all very nice, and it's just as well I don't do it very often.
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