What a grand sight to come home to

I fell asleep this afternoon after drinking a cup of tea and reading a few pages of my book. I hadn't been feeling a hundred per cent and Helena had offered to give my neck a massage after I had told her that it has been aching for some days. She had a massage patient on her return from her lunchtime job, so I was booked in after tea, but she found me fast asleep and thought it best to leave me.

I awoke to delightful aromas rising up from something baking in the kitchen. It turned out she had spent the time preparing the Christmas cake and had put in ton to bake for the necessary few hours. I had promised to cook some fresh fried tofu in garlic and lemon grass to add to some boiled rice and the vegetables in a coconut and thai chili sauce which I'd cooked previously. It was yummy.

I then had to rush out to attend a meeting of the Friends of Daisybank which was being held in our local park. Daisybank is a dearly loved small sloping park, which has a good children's play area, all of which is maintained by the Town Council's Green Spaces team. I was approached some months ago by some parents who's kids love the park, but who had some maintenance issues they wanted to raise with the council. So I helped them to form a small community group who could represent the users of the park, whom the Council could help with some funds and who could have a say in how the park was maintained and improved.

Now, after a few months, they have established a constitution, made plans, attended the Green Spaces committee, received a small grant, run a jumble sale and are ready to make Daisybank an even better place to play in and enjoy. The landlord of the pub is a keen member and is very committed to supporting the local community where he lives above the pub, which has been voted as one of the best pubs in Stroud. We are so lucky. I said I would take some publicity pictures in the next couple of weeks when his specially commissioned stained glass window of 'daisies' will be installed in the window looking out onto Daisybank, just yards from the pub.

The manager of the Green Spaces team also turned up to the meeting, as it is his local too, and he suggested that a spring bulb planting session involving local kids is held before Christmas. It feels great to be involved in the community and I feel honoured to have been elected as a town councillor for this Trinity Ward.

I only had to walk about two hundred yards back home and when I opened the door the smell of the baking had filled the house. Helena had kept the red ribbon which held the baking paper round the cake tin, when she left the cake to cool down slowly, as she thought it would make it look good if I decided to come home and blip it. She thinks of everything, and she she surmised correctly. I was surprised she hadn't blipped it already.