It didn't rain. Apparently, it will tomorrow

We ventured out into the garden to eat dinner, it being the first fine day and evening this month (I think, please don’t take me to task on this). Pugsley hadn’t been well all day and hadn’t eaten much. They had been out for the day with friends and been to a park in Norwich and had a picnic, and he had needed a lot of jollying to remain reasonably happy, but he didn’t want lunch, even though it contained rare treats, crisps and suchlike. He skipped his afternoon nap, didn’t fall asleep on the way home and finally crashed out sometime around 5.30, as did his sister. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he was a bit fractious when they came through to eat.

When finally he was persuaded to have something, he started to cheer up, tentatively. He had sat on his mother’s lap as he wailed horribly every time she put him on his chair, so when I finished eating I took him to give her a break. He was fine by then and even giggled. Squiffany was being charming, though a bit gloomy about her prospects of sleep tonight. “He’ll probably cry and keep me awake.” We debated the options and came down to a choice between putting him in the kitchen “in the bin?” interjected Dilly or shutting him out in the garden.

Later, we went to the copse (too small really for such a name, it’s a little triangular shady spot at the end of the lawn where sapling elms grow) for an imaginary train ride. You pull aside an unprickly holly branch and the train is immediately beyond. When it stops at its destination, you have reached the wood. Just at the entrance to the copse, I found a pigeon's egg, empty, dropped by the parent away from the nest. Pugsley cheered up at once and, when we went back to the table (where Dilly was sitting on Al's knee) he told them about it.

Weeza is coming over tomorrow with the finished catalogue. It will suit us nicely if she has the baby at any time after that, she's finished the work we wanted her to do.