Z goes out and hears sad news

Today, I went to Cookham on a Stanley Spencer-related jolly. I'm not yet completely won over to Spencer but appreciation is there, at any rate. Don't care for the landscapes he called "pot-boilers", but then, neither did he.

So, had chances for chats with friends. As I mentioned in comments earlier, one person has 14 varieties of fig, in pots. Some of them aren't completely hardy so have to live in the greenhouse - I need to find more out about this, I've just got a Brown Turkey, not in a pot but with restricted root run and that's pretty large - but I do love figs.

I've discovered I've only got the rest of this week to do a write-up about our Scottish trip for the newsletter. Oh well. That's all right.

I did learn one terribly sad bit of news. You may remember, about three months ago, that I told you that the son-in-law of friends had been badly burned in a garden accident. In fact, with inexplicable carelessness, he'd lit a fire using petrol. No need for us to be wise after the event, it happened. After awful suffering, he died a fortnight ago, with septicaemia and multiple organ failure. In a last desperate attempt to save him, both legs were amputated. But in the end, there was no chance of recovery and it was agreed to turn off his life support.

A member of my family received terrible burns 40 years ago, and recovered, but it's still something that resonates more horribly than anything to Wink and me. I'm so sorry for him, and for his wife and young children of 20, 14 and 12.

Sorry to end on a depressed note, but here in blogland we all feel things together - there's a lot of kindness here, so please send some loving thoughts to Susannah and her family.