22nd April

Happy Birthday Great Uncle Stanley

The highlight of our day today was the fact that we were going shopping.  John doing ours and me doing Isobel and Davids.  David is still awaiting his stent operation and to make matters worse he has picked up or developed a kidney infection which has floored him and he needs to build up his strength as he is due to go to Limassol shortly for that long awaited op.  We are so concerned about them both - it is such a horrible time for something like this to have happened.  Anyway I digress.  We gloved and masked up, put in our request to go out and headed off to Polis and were stopped on the way by Eleni, Savvas the Tyreman's wife, who flagged us down and handed us a massive bag of fresh free range eggs which we decided we would share between Di, Isobel and ourselves.

At Paps there was, incredibly, absolutely no queue at the Supermarket.  We managed to get everything on the list - in fact it was a really pleasant shopping experience - no queue at the butchers department and a very amiable butcher serving me.  We dropped off Isobel's shopping and then the eggs to Di and then returned home.

We tackled the lights in the gazebos today, swapping over the star and the basket and redoing the solar fairy lights inside - some of them had gone on and luckily I had enough spares to replace them as I am not able to orderand receive them at the moment.  We are planning to cover the gazebo in Wendy and Bill corner with some wire netting and then will let the Passion Flower and the Morning Glory clamber up and provide the shade. We could order the wire from SuperHome Centre but not any of the fixings so this is something that is going to have to wait.

I was so excited to see and hear the Bee Eaters today - they mark the arrival of Summer and are so beautiful - you cannot but help to feel uplifted by them.  Let's hope their arrival is also marking a turning point for the island.  We are expecting to hear something at the end of the month about easing of the restrictions - a lot will depend on how well people adhered to the rules over Easter.

We also started to tackle John's shed which needs a massive tidy as the plan is that, in the future, the wooden shed will go and be replaced by a permanent structure but that is going to be a massive undertaking which we are going to tackle slow time.  Whilst tidying up the dust sheets and rags I came across a sheet and duvet cover which I have earmarked to make a 'shabby chic' cover for the brolly outside the kitchen which I repaired last week - the repairs are good but the original material is disintegrating as we speak.

From the Ration Book...
By the end of the war rationing included all meat, tea, margarine, jam, cheese, eggs, rice, dried fruit, tinned tomatoes, peas, sweets, chocolate and biscuits.  Sausages weren't rationed, but you didn't always know what the Butcher might had had put in them - sometimes that included Whale Meat!