The decapitation took four hours, yesterday.  Although when it came to it, a lot more brambles lost their heads than thistles.  Yes I know, they were nicely in bud and would have been full of blackberries in a couple of months, but it was starting to become hazardous to come through the gate in the dark.

Weeza and Zerlina are going to spend the morning here, while Phil and the Sage go off to deepest Essex to pick up an edifice – with a platform, with steps up and a slide down, and a playhouse –  which has been bought on eBay for z’s birthday.  The Sage and Al built a similar construction a couple of years ago for Squiffany and Pugsley; although the Sage already had the wood for it, some of it was soft wood and he reckons that buying enough hardwood for it would cost at least £200 and the slide was £80 – the equivalent now, new, costs £400 and they got it for less than half that, so it looks good value.  As long as it can be deconstructed, brought back and put together again.  It isn’t Zerlina’s birthday for another six weeks, but I don’t expect they’ll wait that long – the summer will be nearly over by then.

Next weekend is the village festival, complete with fête and beer tent.  Well, strictly speaking, beer village hall.  In the church, there will be a photographic competition – actually, Dave should enter that.  There are decent cash prizes.

Under the circumstances, I do hope that JonnyB (this newfangled “Alex Marsh” nonsense is quite beyond me) will excuse the triple exclamation marks that are his by right of conquest, but if you haven’t yet ordered  his book, you don’t have to pre-order it any more, because Amazon are posting it Right Now, as I write.

I am going to cut the heads off thistles to celebrate.  With apologies to any goldfinches that are looking forward to eating the seeds.

It makes  me realise how much of this job is just turning up and smiling and being interested.  I arrived at school as usual on a Friday, but only three pupils turned up for music, one of whom didn’t belong there anyway as the others were all involved in the sports.  So I thought, rather than just slope off home, I’d go and show an interest.  And do you know, five teachers all came up separately to shake my hand and thank me for coming.

It was hot and sunny, but the breeze was refreshing this morning, which one couldn’t say this afternoon when the wind turned warm and humid.  This evening, I picked broad beans, courgette and swiss chard and then went to cook dinner – with both Aga lids up and several pans simmering, the kitchen was dreadfully hot and I felt extremely hot and bothered by the time dinner was ready.  Afterwards, Dilly and I walked round the village to put up posters for the festival next Saturday – it was still too warm to refresh but I did cool down to an extent.

We had our first tomato from the garden yesterday, by the way – most of it, at any rate.  A blackbird (I suspect) had sampled it first.  I picked it to eat anyway – I’m not concerned about germs from a tomato shared with a bird.  I’ve caught a lot more diseases from people than I’m ever likely to get from any other animal.

Mago is absolutely right – it’s so often the earliest examples that show the most care and are particularly beautiful.  Sometimes they are technically excellent too, sometimes not, but that isn’t always what matters.

If I were to start again with more knowledge and a better eye, I’d buy early printed books and early Chinese porcelain.  If I were starting again with English china, I’d still go for the 18th century softpaste (or ‘artificial’) porcelain, but from more than one factory, so as to broaden my knowledge – though not from every factory by any means, because some of them don’t do a thing for me.  Mind you, I’m not a collector by nature.  I don’t have the need to buy or collect a lot of examples of something.  And, like Mago, I don’t take the view that something old and precious is owned – one is simply the custodian for a while.

I’ve mentioned that I particularly love the earliest Lowestoft.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t love individual pieces from later in the factory’s life (it was a going concern for a little over forty years, which doesn’t sound long, but it outlasted many of the early porcelain factories in England), but that there’s something about the care and time put into the earliest pieces – it wouldn’t have been economically possible to take so long over every piece in the long run.  And the early glaze has a warmth that is very appealing – you might not notice it unless you saw it against a later piece, when it would really stand out.

Something that most collectors of Lowestoft would mention is its charm.  It’s a provincial factory and doesn’t pretend to be grand, like Chelsea.  The specially commissioned pieces, like the flask that we would have loved to buy which has a scene of shipbuilding painted on it, may be unique or restricted to a single tea service.  The amazing little mug that the Sage will auction in a couple of weeks is a pastoral farming scene (the catalogue can be found by clicking on the ‘day job’ link to the right).  Lowestoft was a comfortable, assured town with a boatbuilding and a fishing industry, surrounded by farms.  The river gave access to wherries to transport goods and it must have been quite a prosperous place in those days, and the comfortable middle classes bought fashionable china, locally made, much of it in the Chinese style but sometimes with typically English scenes, and often specially commissioned to one’s own requirement.

Part of its charm is in the imperfections.  A saucer may well be slightly out of round.  An inscription (I think more Lowestoft was inscribed than any other factory, often with a name, sometimes a date too, sometimes the name of a place (“A Trifle from Lowestoft” – or another nearby town – showed a burgeoning tourist trade) might be inside a cartouche that wasn’t quite big enough, so the last two or three letters are squashed together.  We’ve even got a mug with a large semicircular chunk out of part of the handly, glazed over in the factory and sold anyway – “that still work, dunt it?” and “thass all right” – you can still imagine that being said in Lowestoft.  Damage is less regarded as a handicap to value in Lowestoft than in any other factory (not English Delft [tin-glazed earthenware], however, where the glaze almost always chips round the edge – what do you expect in something more than 200 years old?  It wasn’t necessarily perfect to start with.  If it’s appealing, then the odd chip or crack only adds to its individuality.

Anyway, it’s promising that the Sage likes this sort of china.  It means that, the older and more cracked I become, the more he likes me.