…..a pile of white poppy seeds!

One of my friends from Oxford remarked on my poppy photo from a couple of weeks ago that she’d like some seed from them. I told her I didn’t need to go back to that field near Henley because the same poppies grow in abundance in my own garden. They seed themselves freely around the garden and I just let them get on with it – they are way too nice to pull up if they germinate in the ‘wrong’ place.

Mel and I have been friends for somewhere in the region of 15 years – we met when she joined the client service team at Nielsen as the team’s assistant, preparing charts and answering client queries. She and Susie (next weekend’s house guest, along with her hubby Tony and Jules) were the backbone of our team and such a pleasure to work with. She’s (Melly) got such a bubbly personality it’s hard to imagine her cross although I have witnessed it on one or two occasions! When I met her she was living in a squalid flat in one of the student districts in Oxford with a miserable, uncommunicative man who was her husband at the time.

She, like me, took a decision that to be alone would be better for her self-esteem than staying with her husband so she left him and struck out on her own. She too has since met a much nicer (well, so she says, I’ve yet to meet him) man and remarried a couple of weeks ago. We couldn’t get to the wedding so they are coming over to spend a night with us next weekend, with their baby son who spookily shares a name with my ex.

I can’t wait to see her – it’s been a few years since we last saw one another although we have been communicating by phone and email since. Each time we speak it’s as though we saw one another only days before, it’s one of those lovely relationships that just pick up where we left off. Anyway, she wanted poppy seeds so while I was picking a couple of heads for her I decided that the ripe seed head, dumping its load would make a good PotD for today.

We have a whole batch of ‘engagements’ coming up over the next few weeks because I’ve been busy organising and so many things have all come to fruition at once. It’s going to keep us very busy so we won’t have time to worry or fret about things at the new house until we get there – that’s probably a good thing!!! I am panicking about furniture and removals etc already.