Barton

Machete and an omlette

6.45 am

Toby is up. To give Darlingest some rest I get up too. As she has gone downstairs with him I take the chance to put my eyes in and dress. l then I take over.

We venture into the garden to pick wild strawberries. I pick things from the car. I pick my way through papers and intersperse several mugs of coffee sitting in the sun.

6.15 pm

In the garden, Zozo (age 4) in pyjamas, is stuck behind a path of drooping plants. She wants to be lifted out. ZAP suggests she imagines it is a jungle. It works. As she picks her way through the plants I suggest she needs a machete, to which she replies ‘and an omelette’.

8.30 pm

Dinner

ZAP tells how as a POW in a German concentration camp they spent four days in the company of human skeletons. The POWs leave to find a road where the ditches are full of bodies.