“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We had several visitors today, with our fortnightly Lincoln contingent (who brought cake), Ibrahima (the exchange student), one of the ladies who staffs the cafe, and Dave, one of the Quercus directors. He’s been ill recently and has been confining his activities to doing admin from home. I’ll be sad to see him well again, as while he’s doing the admin I don’t need to, and we don’t have any trouble with mud from his tyre treads.

Yes, I know it’s not very charitable but I never claimed to be a nice person. I suppose I’ll just have to get used to doing more sweeping.

You can see the calibre of people who I have to work with…

He’s had a new wheelchair since he last visited, a rather fetching chariot in bronze metallic with alloy wheels and purple shock absorbers. It wasn’t a great success to be honest, as he chopped up the edges of two doors before he got the footrests adjusted and then got stuck several times.

Looking flash but it could do with  a decent set of off-road tyres

To be fair, the getting stuck wasn’t all the fault of the chair. With an adventurous driver and poor surfaces you are going to get any chair stuck. The fact that they use gravel traps to slow down crashing F1 cars should have been a clue that six inches of gravel wasn’t a good finish for a wheelchair path, but you know what builders are.

Gravel trap!

The apples are looking good, and I’m looking forward to starting the pressing. However, we’ll need to do something about the wasps. With one nest in the sedum roof and one in the scarecrow by the back ramp it’s a bit tricky running the cafe, with several people being driven inside by the wasps this Saturday. Add nice sugary apple juice to the equation and you can see why I’ll be glad to get rid of them.

I know we should live and let live but there are limits.