Aged Ps

My mother tells me she is going to do a parachute jump. I asked her if it was revenge for all the times we've made her worry, and she reacted with surprise at the idea that we might worry. I said surely she would worry if me or my brother did a parachute jump, and she said that since it's very safe she might as well worry about me crossing the road in Cambridge. Then she paused for thought and admitted that she does worry about me crossing the road in Cambridge. So I had to reassure her that I am always very careful when I cross the road. We left the conversation at this point, by mutual consent.

My father is involved in a court case and has had to swear a legal oath about a hermit. This is very much the sort of thing which might have happened in the eleventh century, and got recorded in passing in one of the charters I work on. My dad was friends with the hermit through their mutual love of trees, but whereas my father somehow lives in the world, the hermit had retired to a hut in the woods somewhere and made an amazing garden or arboretum. Now the hermit's dead my father is involved in trying to save the garden, which means proving how long it had been under cultivation. My father is able to provide evidence about this through his records of the plants he had donated for the purpose, and the oath was specifically about the rosa cymosa named after me, which apparently flourishes there, somewhere hidden in the north of Cornwall.



In other news, apparently if you want a cigarette you should ask someone in their right ear. Also from boingboing, a leech-powered barometer. And I have broken my toe, but not badly, just enough to hobble about for a bit.