I dropped Lou off right over the fence from his garden so that he didn't need to walk far. I say that literally. If dad thought my dismount from the tractor needed a telling off, I think Lou deserved a gold medal in acrobatics with regard to his. After rolling around on the ground for a few seconds he picked himself up, dusted himself down and confirmed that there was no harm done. He then hopped over his garden fence, which gave a wobble in protest, and I set to baling up the three fields that needed doing. The only interruptions from then on where the seemingly endless cups of tea that Lou's wife Alice and daughter Margret kept on bringing across the field every hour or so. It got to a point that I was so far away that they must have had to set off back again straight away with their next offering. I also got to wondering if all the effort they were putting in was actually some way of making sure there didn't turn out to be a Miss Luckygirl.
At lunch time, both Alice and Margret came across together, one with tea and the other with two massive ham sandwiches made with homemade bread. They could have adopted me for more of those! It was easy to see who was responsible for Lou being such a big guy.
I was done by four thirty and drove over to Lou's place to close up the baler and say that I was leaving. The announcement was greeted with the longest faces of disappointment that I have ever seen before. So much so that I couldn't bring myself to leave before taking the offer of the specially prepared dinner that they said took them a good part of the afternoon making for me. We had what they called a potato pie, which was vegetables and chucks of meat in gravy with a most lovely pastry topping. Alice put a great heap on a plate, which I assumed was for Lou, but instead she passed it to me. I thought I'd done well when I just managed to squeeze the last piece in to my mouth. Now my stomach knows how my tractor felt when Lou and I squeezed in to the cab on my arrival. My celebrations were to be short lived however because no sooner was the table cleared and out from the streaming oven comes this huge Rhubarb Crumble, alongside which was placed a large jug of custard. All of this was home made, it was easy to see, and the flavour of which absolutely telling the truth of this fact. I requested a small portion just to be polite, as I was already bursting at the seams. She looked at me with surprise but agreed to my desire verbally while physically piling up my bowl, before pouring on so much custard that it was spilling over the side by the time it was handed to me. Again, it was absolutely lovely. By the time I'd forced the last bit inside me and absolutely flatly refused some homemade chocolate chip cookies to finish, of which they handed me six the size of small dinner plates! It was getting on for twenty to eight. Thankfully they relented when I said that I need to get going as people would be starting to worry about me. Margret brought me a bag in which to bring the cookies home. Before leaving they insisted I pop in and have dinner with them whenever I'm at Uncle Ken's. I'm hoping that by the time I feel the need to eat again so much time will have passed that the invitation will be long forgotten.
I phoned dad on leaving who said to park up at Ken's and that Carole would run me home. Because I had to leave my tractor at Uncle ken's over night, I didn't have so far to travel back with the tractor and baler. I didn't meet anything down the narrow lanes either which was good.
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