Preparing the Lag B’Omer bonfire

We will light it tomorrow to celebrate the festival of Lag B’Omer which commemorates the end of a plague in which 24000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died in about 100 ce. May the lighting of our bonfire tomorrow mark the end of the thousands of deaths due to the modern day plague of Covid 19.

No names, no pack drill!

Someone left a gate open and when I went into the garden I spied three creatures eating greenery in one of the raised beds. They looked a bit “sheepish” and went back into their field without too much of a fight.

Little Miss Pretty, Toffee and Another (the Gang of Three). Click below

Let’s play musical chicks!

We’ve moved Mrs Silkie and her six to the beautiful, green painted hen house handmade by Tor in Bedford. He and his family gave us the house when they gave us some hens a few years ago.!

We then moved Mrs Bantie and her 11 chicks to the run vacated by Mrs Silkie.

Click below

VE Day – she was there for the celebrations but doesn’t think she met the dancing princesses

I just spoke to mum about her memories of VE Day. She was 18 years old and working as a clerk in a factory and living in Finsbury Park.

Mum and a girlfriend from her youth club took a tube train up to Piccadilly Circus where they joined thousands of others to dance and sing and make merry in the streets of the Capital. Mum said there were American GIs and British soldiers and everyone laughed and talked and danced through the streets.

During the war mum had regularly visited her school friend Joyce in St Albans. They went dancing at the Victoria Hall in Saturday nights where they met American GIs from the nearby base.

One of the soldiers was an Italian American and he and mum became friends. She knew that he was engaged to an Italian American girl back home in New York but he was lonely and missed his fiancée and family. He wrote to mum when he was sent to France and in our photo albums there is a photo of him in uniform walking along the front in Cannes. Mum was convinced that he didn’t make it out of Europe as his letters suddenly stopped. She still feels sad at the thought that he didn’t get to marry his girl back home. However, on a happier note, mums school friend Joyce did meet an American soldier at one of the Saturday night dances in St Albans. After the war they married and Joyce went to live in America. Mum and she continued to write to each other until just a couple of years ago. I remember Joyce’s granddaughter visiting us in London when I was a child. It was a lifelong friendship by letter.

My mother met my father in Southend at the time of the next allied Victory – VJ Day in August 1945.