Birthday Flowers

There are some dates which are forever fixed in the memory. I have always known that 17th March is St Patrick’s Day, and that’s because it’s also Mum’s birthday. She would have been 98 today, and my sister and I have of course been thinking about her. I laid some pretty pink and white flowers from both of us at the spot where Mum and Dad’s ashes are buried in the churchyard at St Luke’s (see Extras). On the walk home I saw a ‘Best Mummy in Tiptree’ card and cushion in a shop window, which I thought was rather apt today - my sister and I definitely feel we were so very lucky to have had the best Mum and Dad in the world. We will lay some more flowers for Mothering Sunday and Easter which are both coming up.

It’s been a bitty kind of a day, with a bigger grocery run to Sainsbury’s, two loads of laundry done, and arranging for the heating engineer to come on Thursday and finish the new boiler installation (a pipe needs running to the drain outside for the condenser waste water, currently being discharged into a washing up bowl in the cupboard). I’ve also read quite a bit more of my book club novel.

My main blip is, I hope, suitably green for St Patrick’s Day - a lovely sunlit clump of natural primroses on an old Victorian grave at St Luke’s.

It will be an early start tomorrow, and I’ll be on the go practically non-stop from 8am until 9pm so I must try to turn in at a reasonable hour tonight.