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Today I bought Madame a tea and cake as a birthday treat for her 85th birthday. Last of the big spenders, me.

Perhaps Tony ought to check if any tickets for the Moot have been bought by MI5.

During WW2, women made underwear out of parachute silk their menfolk "lberated". My mother asked my father if he could get her some and he duly obliged. Perhaps she should have been more specific. The parachute silk he brought her never became underwear but came in very useful over the years for...

I'm on an R M Ballantyne splurge at the moment having discovered freebies on Kindle. I last read him as a child about 75 years ago. The underlying ideology reflects the 19th century values of their time and the plots and characterisations are simplistic. Nevertheless, the subject matter and...

When I trained as a teacher in 1966/69, my subject, Art , and PE were both highly regarded because "In the world of the future, most of the work will be done by computers and robots leaving a large amount of leisure for people to engage in cultural and sporting activities". I quote from a...

Thanks for that: an interesting read. We eventually installed a chicken wire fence along the hedgerow adjacent to the copse where the deer live. It seems to have done the trick despite not fully enclosing the garden. This would suggest, as does the article, that disruption of the deer's...

It's just a reminder of everyday life eighty years ago.

Can you give yourself a certificate like the qualified and accredited sweeps do?

We did it during ww2 and I knew nothing else growing up with war time and post war rationing and shortages. I didn't eat a banana or an orange until I was eight years old. We ate what was in season unless it came from tins or had been home preserved. Frozen food was unknown and we had neither...

Daughter-out-law couldn't do vital work from home, granddaughter missed two days of school, son carried on as usual on his off- grid finca.

You would like "Ill met by moonlight" by Bill Stanley Moss, Paddy Leigh Fermor's lieutenant. It is the version of the Kreipe operation on which the film of the same name starring Dirk Bogarde was made. When I was in Crete in 1966 before mass tourism, I met some of the locals who had been with...

I hope the police don't visit while I'm preparing dinner.

I read this with interest. Every summer for the last 26 years, I've collected dead ormer shells during my snorkelling expeditions from the seabed in the bay of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. They have never been common but I used to collect half a dozen or so every trip which we used for...

Our local rat man really does have two very prominent large front teeth set in a thin but whiskery face. Whether he'd become like that after years of association with rats or whether a long-ago employment officer or careers teacher had a wicked sense of humour, I didn't dare ask.

Check if he's wearing two-coloured clothes and playing a flute.

Loved the interactive learning. I used to tell my pupils I learned as much from them as they did from me. Country kids have a lot of knowledge.

Looks as if it's carved in bass-relief. Must have cost at least a tenor.

And was it taken with a 'phone or a camera?

Do you have a friend with a terrier?

Deer have eaten all of Madame's tulips. Consequently a wire fence has now gone up inside the hedge abutting the copse where we know the deer hang out. Irritatingly I am just two meters short of fencing and am loath to buy a whole roll as it's too deer for this OAP as I lack the necessary bucks.