Saint Sue lands on Planet Addiscombe

Been a bit busy lately and very enjoyably so. Sue's Aunt Sue arrived for an 11 day stay last week. She is a real treasure - an American lady with a great sense of humour and a very gentle attitude to life.

Sue and I have been showing Aunt Sue the sights. Aunt Sue's nickname in the family, "Saint Sue," comes about because she is very religious and has a genuinely saintly demeanour. This is charming but can occasionally cause problems if like me one allows the occasional expletive to emerge unchecked from one's lips in the odd unguarded moment of frustration. However so far I have not completely blotted the Apianus copybook. To avoid complication I will refer to Saint Sue as Saint Sue and the younger unsaintly Sue as Sue-chan.

I've discovered that Saint Sue is the roving ambassador from the Republic of Essex Junction, Vermont. She is great at making friends wherever she goes and rarely has a bad word to say about anybody. She sometimes wanders off and all you have to do is look for a smiling face or two where she will be spreading the ambassadorial good will. In a moment of quizzical curiosity Suechan asked her if she actually loathed anybody and she said "no" as if the word had never occurred to her.

I was greatly amused in Bath Cathedral when she "visited with" (ie. got talking to) a lady chaplain. Standing some distance away I murmured to Suechan that she was probably trying to convert the good chaplain to Catholicism.

At Stonehenge Saint Sue "did" the rock-pile whilst Suechan and I stood like East Berliners outside behind a chain-link fence both being too tight-fisted to pay the admission charge. As Saint Sue wafted past us on a narrow pathway I offered to take her photograph against the backdrop of the henge for which I would only charge her five dollars. She replied that she had "visited with" a Canadian couple (naturally) and they had already taken her photo with her camera - and had also wanted five dollars.

We have had a lot of fun and I will be genuinely sorry when Saturday comes and we have to take her back to Heathrow for her ascent.

None of the above is an excuse for the fact that we have been rather lazy with our allotment plots in the last few weeks and we will have to really knuckle down to some hard work. One of our numerous empty excuses is that we have been waiting for both of us to get our scythes and find out how to work them.

So the two Sues and I went to South Petherton in Somerset after staying one night at a B&B in Glastonbury. The Scythe Shop is in a converted potato store on a farm and is run by Simon who is a gentle, rather absent-minded man with a life subscription to Oxfam's clothing club. He was the man who taught me in Brighton. He provided Suechan with a scythe and a short instruction session. She was just as delighted as I was with sheer peacefulness and satifaction of using the scythe and since then can't wait to come round and scythe your lawn for you. Simon stated his crusading intention to convert the whole of London to scything and consign a million lawnmowers to the great horticutural scrap-heap destined to bury some unattractive eyesore like, for example, the current occupant of no 10 Downing Street.

I could see Suechan's eyes glaze over at the thought and wait with considerable curiosity to find out just when she will single-handedly bring about the re-structuring of Croydon and Bromley in the said crusade. This year Penge - next year, who knows, Washington DC?

Apianus