The Castle Malwood Card Making Factory is in production. A very pleasant morning was spent producing forty seven cards from the pictures I printed a few days ago. I print the photos and inscribe the finished cards after Jackie has Pritt sticked them onto blanks bought from Hobbycraft. This has the benefit of her sometimes rather inventive cropping of those that are the wrong shape or size for the range we obtained at the shop. Sometimes she has managed to make more than one card by chopping up a print – something I couldn’t have borne to do.
If we don’t sell any we should have enough for quite a few birthdays and special occasions to come.
Margery and Paul joined us for a salad lunch. Jackie laid on an excellent spread for our visitors. Margery, a professional artist, will be exhibiting at The Firs Open Studio, so it was natural that our respective works formed one of the topics of conversation. Coincidentally called The First, their gallery has regular exhibitions. I was therefore flattered when our guest suggested I submit some of the greetings cards at one.
We had forgotten to take the bread out of the freezer, but fortunately the sun’s rays were hot enough in the garden to provide a reasonable defrosting facility. When she presented us with a gift she had made, Margery said she could have saved us the bother of the defrosting. 
It was a small loaf embossed with our initials. This of course can never be eaten. It is not every day one is the recipient of a Margery Clarke original.
Incidentally the container in which the bread was transported is a Carte D’or one that had originally held vanilla ice cream. 
I’ve always thought it pretty smart marketing of the descendants of Tom Wall to rename their product giving it an exotic title and a new lease of life. I wonder whether the consultants who came up with the name and the rather effective logo cost as much as those who produced the angular design and weird mascots for our 2012 Olympics.
It was a shame to have to bring our party to a close because I had a GP appointment in Lyndhurst for another attempt to burn a wart off my left shoulder. The very gentle young doctor who had tried a couple of months ago thought that she possibly hadn’t been severe enough last time, so I invited her to inflict more pain. There was certainly a little extra piquancy this time.
I had arrived ten minutes late, because of the usual traffic congestion entering the village. She had been held up in the same jam, so it didn’t matter. Actually I was a little more tardy than necessary. We took the Emery Down route which is always less blocked than the A337. The tailback did in fact start quite early. We seemed to be getting nowhere so I decided to disembark, walk up to St. Michael & All Angels church and down through its precincts to the surgery. I would meet Jackie later in the car park.
Readers could probably write the next few sentences for themselves, but I would rather like to do it myself. After all, it is my blog.
After a few yards, the vehicles started moving again and I soon watched Jackie drive past. We both imagined she would be held up again. She wasn’t. The next I saw of her was the car in the doctors’ car park. She wasn’t in it. She was standing at the reception desk explaining that I had been a little delayed, but was on my way.
This evening we dined on battered haddock and unbattered chips, and shared a bottle of Prestige Calvet Semillon Sauvignon 2011.