We have been out to lunch three times this week.

What? After months of staying at home every day? It certainly feels like we’ve turned a corner, even if the increasing numbers are causing enough concern to delay the last stage of removing restrictions. We’re still wearing our masks and maintaining all our own precautions and have cancelled our plans to spend a week in Sicily to celebrate my Hero’s birthday, but life is slowly returning to some kind of normal.

After lunch with the newly weds in one of their locals last Sunday, we’d earmarked Wednesday as a good time to get a few bits for the garden, thinking we might give the nearby American diner a try for lunch as well.

An outdoor table at a roadside diner doesn’t have the best view, but a shady table on a very warm day more than made up for that!

We had arranged to meet friends at Whichford Pottery on Saturday, for their open garden day. I looked forward to being able to thank them properly for their support with our cracked pot and hopefully, find some inspiration for the planting.

One thing is never in short supply at Whichford - inspiration. The gardens are glorious and the rain which passed through in the last couple of days left everything looking lush and green.

It was interesting to see their repair of a pot in the same kinzuki style as ours, too. It’s almost worth buying one of their seconds to make a purposeful repair like this!

A potter’s garden contains all kinds of quirky details - projects created over the years like these edging tiles around the lily pool.

A garden which looks haphazard and almost overgrown, except it’s been artfully planned and very carefully cultivated.

It was a most inspiring garden with plenty of corners and places to enjoy with artful touches here and there, added over the years. Nothing quite perfect or too ordered, but lived in and all the more comfortable as a result.

We loved it.

My favourite part was found as a result of chatting to Jim, the potter himself, who was raking the gravel by the pond into a Japanese style pattern. “If you sit in that seat over there, you’ll see how the reflection works”. So I did - I wandered over to sit in the rustic chair and looked back and sure enough, the reflection of the tree was perfectly framed in the pond - an ideal illustration of how much thought has been put into the design of the garden and how easily all of that careful thinking could be overlooked.

Our friends had booked lunch at The Wheatsheaf in Northleach and finding this particular room empty when we arrived, I couldn’t resist taking a photo. I always think of it as the “Headmasters’ Room” with all of those portraits (including at least one Headmistress 😉 ) Anyway, great lunch, great place and another fine reminder of the lovely times we’ve been missing.

There was one other “almost return to normal” event on Friday afternoon, recorded in the Court Circular of yesterday’s Times newspaper. My WI has been zooming for the last eighteen months, keeping up with the news and enjoying a weekly chat with the occasional speaker, but we so looked forward to getting together again in our village hall “for real”. We’ll have to wait until July to do that, but in the meantime, we received a rather lovely invitation from our Royal neighbour, HRH The Princess Royal to have our first meeting at Gatcombe Park. She joined us for almost an hour and a half, had a lively conversation with everyone in the most relaxed circumstances and made our delayed 90th birthday meeting very memorable indeed. Thankfully, Albert and Sidney (and the pig) behaved themselves impeccably throughout.

One last image for today, Fathers Day. Happy times and very special memories of my lovely Daddy.