No, nothing to do with séances and spirits, but rather my old hat.  Back in August, I mentioned that Elsie had found my old festival hat and I posted a snap of Stoner wearing it.  In response to numerous requests since then (hi Carol), here’s a picture of the other side.

Since you ask, the one in the middle’s the badge from Led Zeppelin’s gig at Knebworth on 4th August 1979, on the left is a Morris Federation badge, and on the right it’s Morris Dancers Against The Bomb.  Which presents me with the ideal opportunity to tell you the ultimate Morris dancing joke, as told to me years ago by a very righteous Morris dancer indeed

Q  Why do Morris dancers wear bells?

A  So they can annoy the blind the as well.

Moving rapidly on, it’s been a bit busy here recently with one thing and another.  We had a major panic last week when I was told that because we have stuff for sale on here, I needed to shift the blog to another web host.  The more I looked into doing that the less I understood of what I’d be getting into, so it was a huge relief when a nice chap from WordPress eventually emailed back to say we could relax because we’re totally kosher as we are!

We’ve been busy taking advantage of the good weather to get the main allotment ready for winter.  Now the sweetcorn’s demolished, the pumpkin patch is cleared and seeded to green manure, and the dried beans are in (Elsie’s in the kitchen podding the last lot as I type this), so all we have left to do there is take the bean poles down.  They were forecasting a proper frost last night (as opposed to a grass frost, which until very recently was a ground frost), so yesterday afternoon we put cloches over the four short rows of lettuce in the garden which we hope will see us through into November.

We’ve had the woodburner in the kitchen lit in the evening for about a week now, and I guess it won’t be long before my first job of the day is to light it before Elsie descends for her breakfast.  Last year we scrounged vast quantities of timber from the building site down the lane and spent ages cutting it all up, so we’re really looking forward to sprawling on the sofa in the kitchen watching the scrummy spelt scones baking on the griddle on top of a woodburner burning free wood while the apple rings dry above it.  And in case you’re wondering, yes we do have gas central heating, but it’s expensive to run and it’s no fun.

On the sewing machine front, today I’m sorting out a good motor to put on a lovely 201K which we’ve just sold (and which will be the second machine we’ve sent down to Cornwall this month!), and once Elsie gets back from the dentist, she’ll be finishing the final clean of a beige/brown 201K2 which used to live in a horrible treadle cabinet but will very soon be a nice portable electric.  I can’t move in here for machines patiently waiting their turn, so for the time being we’re ignoring the pile of attachments on Cleo’s coffin-top that are waiting for us to tickle their tappets.

Finally for now, two things.  One is that if there’s anything you’d like to see covered in a blog post, all you have to do is leave a comment on here and we’ll see what we can do.  The other is there’s a free sewing machine in the offing before much longer.  No, honestly.  It’s not a Singer but it’s a full-size all-metal hand-crank, it’s hardly been used and if nothing else it’d be a great Christmas present for a youngster who just might appreciate it.  If there’s a catch to this, it’s only that you’ll have to collect it from the Tunbridge Wells area because we’re not going to be up for packing it for courier pickup.

More details later, but we’ll be giving it away to celebrate when we hit our target average number of visitors here per week.  Right now the number’s increasing a lot faster than we thought it would, but if you want to speed up the process, why not spread the word for us on Facebook, web forums and such?