Lovely Lola lost

This young, elegant little cat, an adventurous beastie, has been living next door to us for nearly a year, getting bolder and bolder, tripping across our patio every day to leap over the next wall, into the court and out to the street.  She caught a pigeon on our lawn earlier in the spring, taking it down to the bottom of garden to eat it.  Twice I've found her in my hens' run, causing a lot of clucking, fortunately hens 1:Lola 0. Initially she teased our old cat Cheeky by pouncing on her sleeping, but gradually they reached a truce so Lola would pass without the pair of them spatting and she would eat Cheeky's food only when Cheeky had had enough.  Yesterday evening, Lola was surprised by big black Torres passing and they had a cat fight, which she lost, being trapped between two large plant pots. This morning I watched Lola chasing the flies on the lawn in the sunshine, and later sitting lady-like on the patio, perhaps smelling where she and Torres had been.
This afternoon she was knocked down in the street, and then run over by two or three more cars.  I've seen a squirrel killed in the same spot. I wish the council would put a speed bump just at that angle in the street where it bends slightly and if you go too fast you can't see quickly enough if there's an obstacle.  One day it'll be a child runs down the steps and under a car.

Gliding weekends (sunny Sunday with friends)

Gliding incidents used to be the staple of my social conversation.  Sunday evenings would be spent in the pub reviewing the weekend's gliding activities: who'd gone solo, who'd earned a medal, who'd landed out.

My gliding club friend, having finished her Open University studies, is returning to normal sociability.  She invited husband and me, along with several others from gliding days for lunch on what must have been the first warm Sunday of the year.

Her dog, Hendrix, hid in the shade beneath our table, while we compared notes on our now grown children, our waning careers, and pension prospects. the mortgages we've paid off, and the 16% interest rates we started with.  Gliding we hardly mentioned, apart from remembering the scandal when an early solo pilot misjudged his height so badly that he failed to return to the air-field, attempted to land on a local parade ground, yet was so low he missed that too, and as he glided into a street, wrapped the K7 glider round a lamp post so that his cockpit nose ended up in the first floor  bathroom of a local house, whence the owner dragged him to safety.

It was a memorably embarrassing incident at a politically difficult time because the MOD was trying to sell the airfield, and despite a question about our airfield's safety consequently being asked in Parliament, the incident was effectively hushed up, forgotten and the airfield sold.  But, though we didn't know the culprit, we were all ab-initios or early solo pilots too at the time, and we remember it.  I expect culprit and house-owner remember it too - a talking point for their Sunday reminiscences.

Photo (by Terry Morgan) from the local paper 1982.

Safe vehicles, safe riders

A cyclist was killed on Exchange Street, Aylesbury this morning. They say a lorry driver has been arrested and charged with dangerous driving. People tell me bikes are dangerous, but I reckon it's more the bigger faster vehicles that are dangerous.

But I have two men in my life who insist / insisted that they are /were safe and know /knew what they were doing. One is still alive and confident in his ability to control his vehicle, but like the other man, doesn't realise what prats other people can be, doesn't realise that someone else can make mistakes. People

• load their van with a loose ladder that will fall off in the street (as I witnessed this week),
• not tighten their car wheel nuts, so it could roll along the road and into your car,
• overload their glider, so spin onto you
• get distracted by barking dogs, so drive into you (as happened to this family in 2005)
  

You need three mistakes to have an accident. That was Ann Welch's assessment in her book, 'Accidents happen'. She's right.

Baby all right, and mother too

My mother skyped me to ask how baby was; I didn't know.

But then today, Sdaughter#2 rang to tell me, since she was there at the time and helped with the ferrying to the hospital 15 minutes away, and minding big sister. Her mother did stay in hospital with her, and fed her and looked after her in the children's ward, while her daddy and aunty minded BS. Hospital did various checks and scans, and found a cracked skull and a bruised brain, but nevertheless baby is perky again, and happily enjoying the attention.

I think her mummy and daddy are working out how to make the floor less slippery and hard.