A Year of Much Bickering by Jane Ayres

    A TRIP UP TO TOWN    Up to town with Crichton this morning so an early start to walk the hounds before we left. Of course, Brexit got away from me in the copse and we were out rather longer than I expected. By the time we got back, we were a full five minutes late setting off (shocking) and Crichton was already in a stew about getting caught up in traffic on the Hammersmith Gyratory. He drove like a dervish the whole way and arrived in record time. I know which side of the family Arraminta takes after!    He dropped me at the V and A just as it opened, which was a mercy, as there was a cruel wind blowing up The Cromwell Road and I wouldn’t have wanted to be hanging about in the doorway like the kid I passed on the pavement. I dropped a couple of pounds into her polystyrene cup, thinking that in different circumstances it could easily be Arraminta sitting there. Poor thing, it was bitter.    ‘It’s free to come in,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you join me?’    The girl shook he

    Cynthia and Crichton Join the Gym Crichton’s new regime all started with the FITBIT that Arraminta gave him for Christmas.               'You’re getting plump, Pa,’ she said as she handed it over, which was rather unkind I thought.  She’s right of course, but I could never say such a thing. He’s now taken to walking to work from the flat everyday, sucking in lungfuls of carbon monoxide in the London streets, trying to get his step count up. On Friday he narrowly missed being run over by a pizza delivery boy and came home with a blister the size of a bathpug on his heel. Anyway, the long and the short of things is that  we have decided it would be safer to join a gym. So Crichton made an appointment at Lugg Leisure, for us to both go along for a look-see.    It’s ‘a gym’ in the widest sense of the word. A room in the basement does have nasty machines and young men in shorts but it’s really a  health and leisure  club, with the emphasis very much on the lei

Pancake Pandemonium  Monica and I were keen to get down to the village green early to watch the festivities. It gets very crowded and I wanted to get a good view of proceedings without Brexit getting trampled underfoot. Thirty children from the village school set things off, all brandishing their mother’s frying pans. They lined up for the start, jostling for position and were issued with pancakes of dubious origin. Some looked  were very ragged  as if they might have been used before. The little dears ran and tossed, fell and scraped their knees, got up again and toddled with their pans to the tape with rapturous applause from parents and neighbours.   Rev Colin presented a box of Ferrero Rocher (I knew they would come in handy again) to the winner, Tanya Hooper. She has v long legs and a sure grip for a child of her age.  By now the number of spectators had increased five-fold despite the rain, and even Stubbins had wandered up for the main event.  It turns out he