Blog break

Just to let you know I am taking a blog break.  Youngest son will be home from university soon, and I need to prepare the fatted calf, and spend time with him and with all the family.  Sometimes you really do need to put some things on hold while you concentrate on the most important things.  I'm going to be doing plenty of this - spending time with family!  This picture of my beautiful granddaughter Poppy and I was taken on Friday.

I will still be reading your blogs, and leaving comments, just to let you know I am still around!

Does anyone speak potato?

I consider myself a fairly good linguist, as I am a fairly fluent French speaker, but try as I might, I cannot speak potato.

In the interests of growing a few potatoes on the patio, I have been doing a little research.  Now, I'm not thinking  of self-sufficiency or anything like that, just a sack of home-grown charlotte potatoes would be great.

But I am bombarded with potato-language like 'earlies' and 'second earlies' and 'maincrop' and 'chitting'. Is there a translation manual I could buy?   Or could my lovely, knowledgeable readers help me out?  I don't know how early and maincrop relate to a normal non-gardening calendar.

I really don't intend for this blog to become a book blog.  I want it to reflect everything that interests me, books, knitting, christianity, home, garden, everything, I don't want to specialise.  However I have read a really good book this week...................

It's a story about the bad old days of psychiatric hospitals, Esme Lennox is incarcerated into an institution at the age of 16, basically for being a bit odd, for not wanting to get married, and for not wanting to cut her hair. She ends up staying there for 60 years.  The story starts with her release, and her first taste of freedom.

The ending was a bit predictable and disappointing all at the same time, but that didn't spoil the book.

I am now in the middle of a very intriguing book called The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall....

about a man who decides to break away from his past, in his sixties, and live in a caravan on a big traffic island.  I've got a feeling someone really did that once, and died a few years ago.  Maybe that was her inspiration.  So far it is really good.  And it is in English, not potato-ese!