lunch with eleven women

in a sun-drenched-wisteria-ridden garden,  a laburnum tree burgeoning with yellow flowers took up most of the air above us, tiny bits of cobalt sky peeped through the blooms. We ate salmon in dill sauce with Jersey Royal potatoes then summer pudding with cream and raspberry cream roulade with extra cream. We were celebrating a scratch-card win.

Our host is an undertaker, four of the guests were either undertakers or 'in the business'. The host didn't want the lunch to become 'too-death-ey' and kept trying to introduce other topics of conversation but death and it's complications are too much fun; one guest had been asked to bury a large man in a wardrobe - there was a problem getting the body into the chapel, another guest was in the process of converting an ex-Carphone Warehouse into a mortuary ...

in other news

French Boy lodger has found his culinary groove - breakfast is fizzy pop and chocolate biscuits. For supper he has found a never-ending supply of reconstituted chicken-in-breadcrumbs, he fries as many nuggets as will fit on a big plate every single evening, I'm hoping he gets home to his mother before scurvy sets in.