Friday 10th November 2023 - Nearly Gone, As Far As Praise Goes, Armistice and Remembrance Days

That’s another week nearly gone! Apart from ‘things’ we do as part of our usual weekly routine, I have enjoyed tea and cake at the Music Room Café on Wednesday afternoon with our ExWI group and more tea and cake on Thursday morning at the weekly village Coffee Morning in the Sports Pavilion. Going back to Tuesday, I was going to the Gardening Club in the afternoon to hear a talk about, soil. However, the Belfry School contacted me; they needed more snap bands for the Poppy Appeal, so restocking them was my priority. Since then, I have taken more items to the school for their ‘Kids Pack’ and poppies too, as well as providing additional pins and poppies to the shop plus a member of Sidestrand School’s staff, kindly replenished their box with poppies for me. Yesterday afternoon I went to see Laura Parker in the village who specializes in making memory bears and at this time of the year, Christmas themed items. Laura showed me her very impressive sewing room and examples of her work, after which I ordered assorted gifts for our grandsons. I have added a link to Laura’s Facebook page on the Professionals and Hobbyists page, here on my website. The weather has behaved itself, reasonably well, enabling me to get out in the garden again and at last it was dry enough today for Peter to put the mower across the grass at the front. It’s been a full and busy week.

We do our grocery shop online and, as I have mentioned in the past, we visit the butchers and the greengrocers in Mundesley on Fridays. This morning we continued to Morrisons in Cromer to buy flowers and some items, not stocked in our village shop. We have been to this supermarket a few times over the past months, on different days and times, generally after visiting a friend who used to live in Overstrand. Morrisons flowers are outstanding and those we’ve bought have lasted two weeks, sometimes longer. That is as far as praise goes for this store because, each time we have visited the store it’s been a shambles, with half stocked and empty shelves, long queues at the staffed check outs and always problems, if we choose to self check out. Management needs to get out on the shop floor and resolve the problems or, as Peter suggested, recruit Michael, owner of our village shop, to go and sort them out.

Tomorrow it’s Armistice Day when traditionally two minutes silence is observed at 11 a.m, to remember all those involved in World War 1, especially the ones who never came home. As mentioned in an earlier blog, the Poppy Flag will be flown on the Parish Council’s flag pole in the car park on Pauls Lane. This will be followed on Sunday with a short service at St Martin’s Church for Remembrance Day, when wreaths will be laid at the War Memorial. Finally, today’s photo was taken on Tuesday after the crab boats had launched and the sun was rising.