On Extended Saturday Lunchtime Sessions

As usual our Saturday lunchtime table in the pub grew from the original four to about ten of us eating and drinking and eventually talking rubbish until seven o'clock in the evening. Strange how drinking makes you hungry because on the way home we bought fish and chips.

Sunday afternoon we joined up with family and sat in another pub's lovely garden and that table grew to about a dozen including Moroccan Joe and Cosmic Ken. For a small town we really do have an interesting mixture of people living here. Once home I produced a pretty good roast pork dinner so today I'm busy gardening and working off the excesses of the weekend.

The sick teacher still hasn't returned to work so Morty has another month booked as supply in the same school. A mixed blessing, as the guaranteed money is good but the three hours a day driving and keeping up to scratch on the History means he's really having to earn it. The kids are taking to him as they missed their teacher at first and gave him a bit of a hard time but now they think he's OK because of his taste in music and the fact that the eighteen year olf Peugeot rag-top seems to have given him some street cred!

We've booked up for a city break in Kracow as soon as the Summer holidays start. This is my choice as my paternal grandmother was Polish and I like going back to my roots. I shall always remember how I felt when we went to Russia eighteen months ago and I located the area where my grandfather was born. It was a village that had been drowned by Stalin's huge engineering programme to link up the Russian waterways using forced labour to construct a reservoir with thousands of lives lost. As we sailed over it I felt very moved imagining the past. My grandfather was a cooper and we visited a reconstructed wood cutter's home on an island and I could see how he must have lived when he was a boy.

I used to ask my Dad why he never felt the need to visit Russia amd Poland and because he knew his parents stories he would always say 'What do I want to go there for?' I am just the opposite and felt complete within myself in Russia and look forward to going to Poland.