There`s been a lot going on in Ditchling the last few days:  There was a play in the village hall:The Lady Killers based on the Ealing comedy which has always been one of my favourite films, about the dotty old lady and her elderly crook lodgers pretending to play string quartets while planning a bank robbery.   It was a coincidence that there was a real robbery in the news, also done by a group of aged criminals who were eventually caught. Apparently they had trouble hearing the charges read out to them in court. It must have been upsetting for the people who lost all their jewels but there is something comic about those elderly blokes getting it all slightly wrong.
On Thursday we had our monthly film show also in the village hall and this was a brilliant film:Blue Jasmine directed by Woody Allen  and that was a tale of a woman (Kate Blanchet) who also got it wrong all the time.
Then the next night we had a concert with our Ditchling resident old jazz musician Herbie Flowers plus some other great jazz players also  past their first youth (plus a wonderful singer) performed to a  hugely appreciative audience of villagers.   As I`ve said before, there is never a dull moment in Ditchling.

Last weekend it was grand daughter M`s birthday so with daughter J and grand daughter T, we went to Hampstead Heath where J and I went the day before M was born twenty three years ago. They had an icy swim in the Ladies Pond as we did then, though I felt it might finish me off if I did it too, but we all walked and walked and it was simply beautiful, completely unspoiled, just as it used to be.

I`m getting ready for the trip up north for Julia Darling`s Anniversary Event with poetry and  plays at Live Theatre on Quayside and a general get together for family and friends. I am a bit worried that we will all spend our time racing round Newcastle losing each other.