A slightly early 93rd birthday celebration – a trip to the National Trust’s Ashridge Estate, preceded by an enormous pub lunch. There’s a monument to the Duke of Bridgewater, Father of the Inland Waterways, with 170 stone spiral steps to the top, which Gwyneth immediately decided needed to be climbed, so we did. A little scarily.
After that, a shortish circular walk around a lot of scouts doing scoutish things like semaphore, and then birthday cake made by Hannah, with a splendid wigwam of matches in place of the candle which had escaped on the journey.
And finally the present-giving – we’d found a clock which shows the day and date as well as the time, and which manages months and leap years automatically, ingeniously and mechanically. Hannah had constructed a perfect garden for the top of it, complete with camel and fishpond; we contributed a rather large spider, a very small tomato, and a bicycle…
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