Monday, September 26th …..

It’s been a quiet week; I’m pretty well confined to the house and the days pass without incident. I haven’t felt like writing a half-page of drivel about birds or the flowers in the garden, so the blog has been neglected.

However, I have to go into town this afternoon for an appointment and the focus has returned.

I was sad this morning to read of the plane crash in Nepal. 19 people died. It’s the third crash in the past twelve months and we feel a connection with this one in particular. The plane was from Buddha Air and was on a sightseeing slight around Everest. When we were there, we took the same flight with the same company.

It was surprising that it was this flight which went down. Buddha Air has the best safety record in Nepal. Only their most modern, pressurised planes are used for the Everest flight; other flights are covered by ancient, rickety aircraft held together by duct tape and hope. I would not have been surprised if the plane had been lost on a flight to Jomsom; when we did that flight, we held our breath all the way. On the other hand, on the flight around Everest we felt perfectly safe.

More work has been done around the house this week. We’ve cut the long grass back a bit into the trees and are opening up some very nice sitting areas which we’ll use in the summer.

We put some gravel at the bottom of the front steps as a temporary cover over some broken concrete and mud, and the resident cat, CB, thinks it’s a personal cat litter box. Jamie goes off his brain every morning when he has to clean it up. The joys of cat ownership.

There was a fantastic new show on ABC TV last night, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, based on the books by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s a very gentle, humorous look at life in Botswana. The author was interviewed on Compass after the show last night and impressed us as an intelligent man with a great sense of humour. I downloaded one of his books, which are extraordinary popular with ‘ladies of a certain age.’ This one is called the Unbearable Lightness of Scones and grabbed me immediately with its wry look at life. He describes a wedding and a group of children from a local school. Their names are: Merlin, Pansy, Lakshmi, Tofu and Hiawatha. Wonderful!

One of the fellows who built our shed was telling me that daughter’s name is Phoebe. I commented that I loved the old-fashioned names and he agreed but said that, to be different, they were going to spell it F-E-A-B-E-E. Oh, well!