Dinan, in search of lost glasses, bag wash.

Deadline cleaving as ever, though this one is entirely self-imposed so no one but I will give a monkey's if I make it or not anyway.  In order to reach exactly one thousand published posts in exactly seven years of blogging, I must now produce one a day for the next four days as of today.  So it's really a question of making myself sit down for a short time and come up with something, just like I did when I first started, only I think I can safely say I I will not be getting up at six in the morning, plugging in the dial-up connection, making tea, going for a walk round the block, reading the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu etc before the connection was made and Blogger Dashboard, in its dear old chunky black and blue format appeared... ah, those were the days.

So, when daily blogging calls, and inspiration falters, what else is there to do but the time-honoured and always handy Three Beautiful Things! In my preferred format of two written items and an illustration.

1:  Tom is stir crazy from resting his Rabbits' Revenge twisted leg, and decides it's better enough to drive to Dinan and eat Indian.  The New Delhi is fairly new, and the menu is good enough to assuage our yearnings. The nan breads are especially good, the right balance of puffy and light yet still chewy and substantial, and they bring us a vindaloo strength sauce, savoury and tomato-ey, in a separate dish, so we can add it judiciously to taste.  I beg a stop at Fil de Lune, get an extra ball of one I've already got on the needles to be sure, and some sea-green bouclé on clearance which I'm not 100% sure about but think I can do something nice with. It's a glorious sunny day.

2: On the way we are passing through Moncontour to go to the bank and a large elderly man in a wheelchair is stuck in the middle of the road on a very steep hill, holding up the traffic.  We pull over, Tom goes to the bank, I join in the effort to push the man out of the road into a safe parking place in the sunshine until his carers can come and get him.  Much later, in Dinan, I realise I've lost my nice new reading glasses which were hanging round my neck in a case on a string.  Did they get caught up in the wheelchair?  Who knows.  I retrace as many steps as possible, including the site of the wheelchair episode, but without success.  I call in at the retraite where the man comes from.  The woman at the reception is so kind: 'Oh he's a pain,' she grumbles about the old man,' he's always going into town and he knows her can't get up the hill again.  And you were trying to help and now you've lost your glasses!' I add that I don't know for sure that it happened then.  She promises to ring me if they do show up, but I trail home drearily and without much hope.  Tom urges me not to wait around feeling rotten about it, ring the opticians in England now, get them replaced.  All the paperwork is still together, and I find a voucher with it for 50% off if I buy an extra pair.  A quick 'phone call to the always lovely, cheerful, helpful people at Specsavers in Bishops Stortford and the request is underway and an identical pair will be in the post shortly, for not much more than the cost of the Indian lunch. Till then, I've got the older ones, which are still OK.

3: Molly is smelling rather sousty.  'Put her in the bag wash!' says Tom.  The what?  But he can't really say what it was, it's an elusive childhood memory, his mother putting a bag of dirty clothes in an old push chair and it coming back all wet and crumpled, perhaps having been washed still in the bag.  Hooray for the internet! Not only was it confirmed that such things did take place, but there is a photographic work in the Tate Gallery collection about it:

It's by Nigel Henderson, there's more about it here.  But we won't send Molly off to the bag wash really.