Reminder

of our return from honeymoon more than 55 years ago.  We lived in a king's old hunting lodge in south east Holland, with stone flagged floors, a hollowed out stone sink with farmyard pump for water and a pot bellied wood fire (which gave way very quickly to an imported small calor gas stove.) Every morning a jug of warm milk straight from the cow was placed on the kitchen window sill for which we paid the farmer's wife.  Beside it would be a cabbage, or a cauliflower, potatoes, even a bunch of roses.  We couldn't find out who was leaving these gifts so when my husband flew to Nairobi he brought back two crates of pineapples so that we could give them to people in the village who just might have been our benefactors.  I took two to each door: the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the publican, the farmer etc. but after the first shake of the head I realised they didn't know either what a pineapple was or didn't know how to deal with it.  So to the second and subsequent homes I took a large knife and demonstrated how to cut one up and then when it looked like it had come out of a tin they were happy.  After that there were two presents on the windowsill each morning and we found out that in our village it was a tradition to give gifts to newly weds to help them on their way.

Blessings for all comments and stars - this is a bit of an emergency blip as I'm away from home.