Catching My Tail!

I spent last weekend at the annual conference of Wycliffe Associates and I'm longing to write about it but instead I'm trying to catch my tail to catch up with all sorts of things - not least finding prayers and pictures and various types of crosses for our Prayer Day 'Wayfaring', to help participants coming through the room
'homecoming' (after 'the Fall' in the previous room). Our housegroup is responsible for the 'homecoming' room. Then I've got deadlines to meet in my capacity of media publicist, and I will also need to press on with drafting the Prayer Guidelines for June or they won't be published in time.

My spirits have been lifted today though by the tremendous amount of work that the gardening team of three put in to clear away the debris left by the early bulbs and plant out all my geraniums that have been wintering in my front porch. (Oh,dear! All the front garden will need watering tomorrow - unless it rains.) With the back borders weeded and all the lawns neatly cut, I catch my breath at such beauty whenever I look out of the window, back or front. It's my favourite flowering time of the year just now in the back garden, which is a mass of multi-coloured aquilegia alongside the blossom on the Cox's Orange Pippin tree.

The greenhouse hasn't been doing so well this year. Perhaps it's been too cold, but at last the runner beans are big enough to be planted out next week and the peas that we'd almost given up on are just peeping through. There are three very good tomato plants and two marrows (all given to me by a neighbour) but my own sowing of tomato plants are much smaller than they should be for the time they've been
a-growing! However, I have some magnificent broad beans outside, with tiny beans and lots more flowers so I shall have a surplus of broad beans soon. I cooked three tiny ones in their shells today to celebrate.

I'm also being pressed to search all my cupboards and drawers for old church magazines and photographs (as soon as possible) so that one of our members who is the archivist at the main Reading Library can write a book for the church's Millennium next year. This always takes longer than you think it will. That's one disadvantage of having lived such a long life!