Gloucester guests

Caroline's Godson, just off to start his first year at Newcastle University, his father and sister all came to tea, for which a cake was duly baked. They went away with home-made bread and chutney.

Six of Hearts

A rather beuatiful Lisa Calnan card and a dish of six heart-shaped bread rolls awaited me at breakfast time. And the Guardian gave its front page header to Chaucer's Valentine, a clever new poem by Carol Ann Duffy!

Slow Sunday

These days, the Fourth Commandment isn't one we seem to worry too much about breaking. Of a Sunday morning, the temples of commerce are many times fuller than the temples of worship, are they not?

So, wellcome to Resurgence's Slow Sunday idea! The first is this coming Sunday 27th: we are urged to make bread - and even provided with a recipé. As Satish Kumar says, only 4% of bread is baked in local bakeries: "Lorries full of factory bread," he writes, "rush up and down the country on our motorways, polluting the air so that they can provide the nation with cheap bread. But we have paid a very high price for this cheap bread in CO2 emissions and climate change. This mass-produced bread is stale and sterile."

(I spotted these delicious-looking rolls - they were baked locally - in the window of Barber & Manuel's, Leominster: we visited it earlier in the month.)