Things are now back to normal.

As usual this term starts slowly where work is concerned: schools do not like taking the children on trips in January, and who can blame them?

Parish Council tonight was very efficiently run by Garry while Geoff, the chairman, is in South Africa so that it ended at twenty to nine instead of the usual half-past or later. Geoff is a lovely chairman, but has the teacher's habit of explaining everything just in case we didn't understand the plans, minutes, notes etc. the first time.

Soon we will have PCC with the thorny subject (literally as it is surrounded by hawthorn hedge) of the churchyard. Some people want it mowed to being lawn perfect throughout the year while others of us prefer to leave large swathes of it unmown until late summer as a haven for wildlife, but this (cheaper) option is the less popular so we will have to work out how to fund the necessary mowing now the probation service rules have changed so they can't bring the community payback people to do this for us. They also trimmed the hedges round the playground and looked after the gardens of several aged residents. We will miss them: it was an excellent system which worked brilliantly.

They are still throwing money at the village hall - Kath's fundraising and ability to get grants is amazing - and are now replacing the comfortable but unstackable brown upholstered, wooden-framed chairs with stackable metal-framed chairs probably with burgandy upholstery. I am sure that there is a community hall somewhere in Lincolnshire which will snap up our comfy old chairs to replace their hard wooden ones.

At Swallow Bookworms we are reading (re-reading) Eats Shoots and Leaves. Preliminary chat suggests that most of us take issue with the view that a second s is added after the apostrophe in such phrases as "Mr. Jones'(s) hat". My elderly Fowler notes this as a usage in the process of change: modern editions may agree with Ms Truss, but that second s looks wrong to me, and is certainly contrary to what Mr. Waite taught us.