Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four ?


I listened to Tubular Bells while J and I were enjoying our home made crumpet and poached egg brunch, because I remembered receiving it, from my parents for my fourteenth birthday, and could not quite take in that this was precisely half a century ago. It was my first album, I listened to it over and over, and after so many years I enjoyed its long familiarity. I thought about my other early albums, all birthday or Christmas presents, and realised that the one I should be listening to today was Sargent Pepper. I remember P and I laughing and singing along to When I'm sixty-four before I was twenty; now, it's uncanny how well it describes us. We even rented a cottage in the Isle of Wight a few years ago.

It was a very low-key day - we didn't go anywhere or do anything. Soon after getting up, I made the chocolate cake to accompany yesterday's butter icing; then it was time for J's shower, clearing up, brunch, all the everyday necessities. I added crushed raspberries from last summer's harvest to some of the buttercream, which was a considerable improvement and worked well with the dark chocolate sponge; and I managed to extract enough undamaged ones to arrange on the top. It tasted good, and J loved it. 

The lovely watercolour foxgloves are my card from J, which she painted yesterday with S and I thought was lovely. I must try again to establish some in our present garden; in Durham, they self-seeded everywhere and I loved them. P made a card too, to my surprise: he asked me when I got up if I felt old, and I replied, rather creakily, that I felt like an old crone. He created the old crone's birthday using AI tools; I think it's rather good. The bottle of wine followed later.