Papa Meilland - a very special rose

On Wednesday evening I collected Margret (next door) and Claire from the station after their holiday in Egypt. We took Claire home first to her house in Hexham.

On Thursday she appeared with a bunch of dahlias from her garden for me and this rose for Mum. The bud was tight and black. I did all the things you should and crossed my fingers hard. Roses have a habit of keeling over in this house before the buds open.

When I saw the progress it had made today, I knew that I must blip it. Technically it was very difficult. Being red meant that the red was quickly overexposed. The fragrance is wonderful.

I'm busy packing. I also needed to update Photoshop CC to 2017 on my laptop. I spent ages and had to uninstall and then reinstall Adobe CC before it would work. Now I have to sort out the Nik plugins which have disappeared with the update. Sigh.

In other village news, we have the mystery of Margret's missing dustbin. Two weeks ago I went to take her rubbish bin up to the house, but it had gone. I assumed that someone else had taken it up the drive, because it was the next day. Last Monday I went to take the recycling bin to the gate and discovered that the rubbish bin was missing. Then I spotted a rubbish bin sitting amongst a few recycling bins on the other side of the road. It had LC painted on and Margret lives at Linden Cottage, so I thought I had solved the mystery.

No, Margret's bin had no letters painted on and what's more, this bin had the lid from a takeaway in it. Oh dear. I had to confess that I had somehow lost the bin. Tomorrow we shall look with interest to see if any more funny business goes on............or will the bin come home??