3BT: Good intentions; sisterly; crunchy bits - and goats

Didn't post yesterday as I thought Sunday night's link would do, and was, I'm afraid, too confounded by heartache, anger and despair which I don't want to spill out, or indeed seem to be fishing for comfort for, here.

But I'll turn to and come back to the daily postings, if only not to give in. Maybe some 3BT for a bit would be helpful, and for pictures, if I don't take any, to have a trawl through the web albums and even the external hard drive, on which languish many thousands of old ones.

Here's yesterday's for today, a pattern I might follow.

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Monday yoga being postponed, but needing to get out after the weekend anyway, I drive out to Lamballe to shop. On one of our frequent resolves for a dietary spruce up, I buy wholewheat loaves, unsliced, and cut them into doorsteps for freezing, and now the fruit and vegetable stocks are also satisfyingly, but realistically (we probably will be able to get through them), replenished. Better still, I persuade Tom to turn the 400 gram bag of spinach into a curry for tonight.

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While I was out, the 'phone went, and rang and rang. Tom doesn't usually answer on the land line when I'm not here, as he can't understand the caller if they're speaking French or hear them anyway even if they're English, and he gets in a state trying. 'I wondered if it was Doreen.' he said. This is a bit odd, since his sister doesn't ring often and he's unlikely usually to think about a call being from her. She is a kind and courageous woman for whom I have always had a great deal of time, not least because she loves her brother with an open, generous, persistent affection despite his rather offhand gruffness with her. I do the redial and it is indeed her number, so I call her back.

'I've been so worried about you,' she says 'I know you're nowhere near, but still. And I've been reading what you wrote on that Facebook thing you do.'

I don't do Facebook.

'Huh? Oh the blog?'

I am surprised and touched. I gave them a link to a post about their beautiful dog Lara, now sadly passed away, which I wrote much earlier in the year after they'd visited, but didn't imagine they'd follow here after that. I tell her Tom had an inkling it was her, which pleases her, and we talk about her new adopted grandchildren, the brave, sometimes hard, but loving road their parents have taken. They are not to spoil them with toys at Christmas, she's been instructed, but rather give them games for sharing, perhaps tickets to a pantomime, and - here her daughter is going back on her initial refusal of hand knits - could she perhaps knit them a traditional Aran sweater, in natural wool to go with everything? We talk soothingly about wool and cables, then end the call easily. We, Tom and I, are both warmed and heartened.

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As often we watch Nigella, not quite sure why we do; the food isn't really our kind of thing, and the lifestyle porn aspect and her awful friends get up our noses somewhat, but it kind of rounds off Monday evening telly after the quizzes, and we did like the her quoting of Terry Pratchett: something along the lines that chewy burned sticky crunchy bits were a separate food group.

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Photo: Goats

A patch of scrubby woodland up the road was cleared a while back, perhaps as a future building plot, and sown with grass. These girls, there are up to half a dozen of them, are sometimes to be seen maintaining it. Though of course any goat worth its salt would rather have had the trees than pappy old grass.