I have done the first six pages of my display about paper fund-raising flags. It’s neither scholarly nor insightful but it does have a few interesting points in it, and anyone reading it will know more than the average person about the beginnings of Flag Days and the fund-rising of WW1. To be fair, of the six pages, half is photographs, so it’s not exactly heavy going. I will try to add a few more pages over the weekend, ready for Monday night.

This morning I printed the pages, found a spelling mistake and decided to ignore it. On Monday I will print the rest. My plan is to present part of it in a display file and have other topics covered on one sheet each, which will  be laminated so people can pick them up and take it all in at one glance.

Or they may do what they generally do, and ignore it. That doesn’t really matter, what matters is that since I started doing it on a consistent basis it has been encouraging other people to bring stuff along and the meetings seem, in general, to be a bit livelier.

I will then, because I know you are all longing to add to your knowledge of such things, edit it and use it as one or two blog posts. In writing, I have seen over the years, how it’s possible to use the same material more than once. I know several people who have actually made a career out of writing what is essentially the same book. It’s like mince. You make curry one night, Bolognese the next, chilli, lasagne, mince and tatties, cottage pie . . .  But it’s all just mince when you come down to it.

The actual talk is about Edwardian Postcards and we are lucky to have a local expert who used to edit a postcard magazine and run postcard fairs. For once, I am confident that a visiting speaker is going to be good. That’s the trouble with visiting speakers, they often come and turn out to be a disappointment. I remember one coming, with top class recommendations and falling completely flat.

He wasn’t really a speaker on coins and had added half a dozen poorly focussed coin photos to a regular family history talk. It wasn’t his forte and the only good bits of the talk were the bits from his core talk about the things that really interested him. I’d rather have had that. I am always interested in learning new stuff and don’t mind if the talk isn’t about coins. However, as the only member of the society who doesn’t collect coins I may be in a minority here. It was kind of him to add coins but it was clear where his real interests lay, and those bits really came alive. Unfortunately, the overall impression was poor.

Monday night, however, will not be like that. The speaker will be good and we are now getting various additional displays done by members.

However, for now, I had better finish this and get a move on. Julia will be arriving at 7.50 (currently running twenty minutes late) and she is likely to be quite scathing if she finds the washing up bowl in its current state.

And the bean pan. I put a drop of water in the pan last night after serving my second beans on toast meal of the day and then left it on the hob. I should have checked that it was switched off. It boiled the water dry, crusted the pan with what looks like bitumen, and alerted me to the problem by spreading an acrid smell through the house . . .

This is likely to confirm her view that I can’t be trusted to look after a house on my own.

Pictures are just a random selection. Poppies are slightly topical and the pie was deliberate but the rest are just what appeared.but the rest  People like chicks and lambs so I thought I’d give them a go.