Yom Kippur and Harvest Festival

The reformed Jewish group who do not have a synagogue in Winchester, have been here for a Jewish festival:Kol Nidrei and Yom Kippur. It started last night at sunset with prayers and chanting and then began again this morning at eleven and lasted all day till sunset It was a total fast for twenty five hours, so it ended with a slap up meal, and then more singing. It was chaos in the kitchen here this evening with us all cooking and all the hungry fasters wanting their special soup and chola bread warmed up.
I also haave two perfect B and B guests who arrived on Friday, and leave tomorrow, Tuesday who have done non stop high quality gardening. They have pruned things within an inch of their lives, climbed trees and sawed off branches, mowed the lawns, the garden is transformed. All this and paid to stay here!
Also it is Harvest Festival time again and the lovely people at the alms houses along the road arrived with theirs: basketsful of apples, potatoes, carrots, Marks and Spencer tins of soup and baked beans, and nothing past its sell by date at all. I shall distribute it to the Family group tomorrow, but couldn`t resist a few well blessed baby carrots for our supper.

I have been writing, writing, writing the last few days. It is far more tiring than digging the garden or hoovering. I was asked to write an article for The Friend about my job to encourage someone to apply for it when I leave next Spring. It was hard as I could not write in my usual slightly jokey style yet I did not want it to sound too serious or noble. I also have been doing stuff for the Colebrook Courier, our local Quaker mag and I have several poems in the gestation stage, though that sounds rather too grand for what they are.
It is a good thing to have a sedentary activity as I have stabbed my leg with a sharp thistle stalk whilst cutting back in the garden, and it has gone nasty, so I am on the penicillin. I am limping about in a decrepit manner.

scones and raspberry jam again

I had a busy time as it was the Heritage weekend so the Meeting House was Open to the Public along with Winchester Cathedral, St Cross Hospital, all the local sights. We are included because this is an eighteenth century house in the middle of the city We did teas which I think was one of our main attractions so there was a sort of Mad Hatters Tea Party all afternoon by the Aga and once they got stuck in there with the scones and rasberry jam they didn`t want to leave. But the Quakers were there is force and plied our visitors with Quaker literature so it was a good chance for people to know that we are not all dressed like the bloke on the Quaker Oats packet and are quite normal really.
I over booked with the B and B`s so gave up my room to a lovely artist lady and I slept downstairs on the sofa bed. I must buy a new one! So lumpy and uncomfortable. So it will be a treat to get back into my flat tonight. There is also a chap sleeping out in the garden room, so three cooked breakfast each morning, which I find very satisfying to cook, bustling about in my white apron, trying to look like a proper catering person.

Feeling sleepy all day as I went to the Oxfam shop yesterday and bought a novel by David Lodge, Paradise Lodge (I love his books) I started reading it after supper and went on till 2am, or later. So good. I am like an alcoholic with a good book, just can`t stop.
Eeerily quiet here this evening no one about. But I have beds made up in the sitting room and the garden room and the proper guest room upstairs, all three arriving late, so I can sit up and start reading again.
There`s been terrible news of the sudden death of one of J`s contemporaries, only forty one years old. I keep remembering her as beautiful seven year old with shining eyes and pink cheeks, in and out of our old house in College Street. Such sadness.

Just back from day off in Brighton. Before I left I went for a walk in Stanmer Park with my lovely friend J and her two dogs, Madge and Dotty. They had just had a perilous escape from death as they got on the railway line and disrupted all the trains. They eventually had to be tunnelled out. J and I always talk and talk when we meet and never seem to have enough time, but she will be my nearest friend when I move to Ditchling so that is a plus point about going there. I have been feeling anxious about the whole businness of uprooting myself and leaving everything and everyone here.
Ever since I got back home at it has been one thing after another: moving sixty chairs for meetings, cooking red cabbage and crumble for Quaker lunch tomorrow , welcoming an extremely talkative B and B .He showed great interest in Quakerism, so I have done my best to make a convert. All in the space of a couple of hours. Roll on retirement I say to myself,