Green eyes

I have to say that I really am just a little envious of Buck and his Tart.  OK, Dowager Tart.  You can see pictures of her right here.  I have kept my last two cars until the mileage crept up to about 90,000 before getting rid of them but I have been sorely tempted to give up on my present car even though the mileage is still only 48,000.  It's ridiculous, but when something goes wrong I tend to start worrying that something else will happen - and happen soon.  It doesn't help that every four years or 40,000 miles (yes, that means I have a while to go yet) the timing belt and water pump etc have to be changed - at a cost of £425 earlier this year.  Then there was that fiasco back in February when the car broke down on a French motorway and it cost me £750 to have an injector replaced.  OK, so the dealers are liaising with VW to get me a refund and the other injectors are to be replaced free of charge next week, but still and all...  Then this morning, on the way back from the park with the dog, I met one of the residents who has just replaced his 7-year-old Ford Mondeo estate with a Volvo VC90, a Chelsea tractor type of vehicle.  He told me it was either get a new woman or a new car and his wife didn't like the idea of a new woman.  I assured him he had made the right decision as a new woman would cost more to run than the car.

Anyway, today I am all behind like a donkey's tail, as my old granny would have said.  Or did she say like a donkey's gallop?  Maybe that was my other granny.  Either way, I slept more soundly last night than I have  for quite a while.  I did wake once to hear rain lashing against the window but as I have found nobody else who heard it, I have to wonder if I dreamt it.

[Did you know that dreamt is the only word in the English language ending in the letters MT?]

For some reason, not only did I sleep more soundly but I also slept longer.  I suppose the extra couple of glasses of wine yesterday evening might have contributed, but I somehow doubt that.  So today is likely to be a Lions day.  I will make a start on the minutes of last night's meeting.  That was where I had the extra glasses as I wasn't driving.  (We have a licensed bar at our meeting room.)  I just hope I made enough notes during the meeting!  This should be the last meeting with me as minute secretary.  I have done the job for two years and it's someone else's turn now.

I must also make a start on the July issue of Jungle Jottings.  I have been producing that for eight years now but am happy to keep on for a bit longer.

Then I have four dozen Message in a Bottle bottles to deliver to a local community nurse.  If you don't know of the Message in a Bottle scheme, you can go to the Brighton Lions Club web site, click on the "Our Projects" link, then "Service Projects" then "Message in a Bottle".

~~~~~

The weather having been kind for the last couple of days, I walked across the fields beside Upper Lodge Wood in the afternoon a day or so back.  When I go that way I always look across to the west at the Chattri.  Standing high on the South Downs behind Brighton, this is the site of the funeral pyres of some of the Indian soldiers who died in Brighton of wounds sustained on the western front during the First World War.  I reflect that those men, nearly a hundred years ago now, travelled thousands of miles only to die as a result of the senseless slaughter of the trenches.