The village in May 2012...

In May the bunting goes up in the village and stays until the end of summer.     
This year, 2012, it serves two purposes, firstly as decoration for the village festival and also to celebrate the Queen's Diamond jubilee. So I need to find it from it's hiding place somewhere in the garage!          An easy task you might think, no. Unfortunately the inside of our garage is like the inside of most people's garages, full of boxes almost floor to ceiling in some places. After all, who bothers to put their car in a garage? The only time we ever garaged a car was when we had two garages and one of the cars was the sort of car that gets stolen to order, which it was, but that’s another story.                                                                                                   

Ooh I tell a lie… at one time when my husband was going through a funny phase he bought a mini moke, which was so small it could fit into the garage of the house we lived in and still leave plenty of room for boxes and a lawnmower down the sides. I remember it was blue, and only came out a few days of the year in the summer. Sometimes he would drive it to work with the roof off, but was puzzled by the reactions of the other drivers. People with huge grins on their faces would stop and let him out at junctions and bus drivers would wave to him, something unheard of when he drove the hated gas guzzling Jeep. The final moment of truth dawned when our lovely 90 year old friend and neighbour asked him if he played a lot of golf, "No not at all" he said "why do you ask?" "Oh" she replied "because I often see you driving your golf buggy up the road". 

Strangely he decided to get rid of it soon after and didn’t have any problem selling it, there were plenty of buyers happy to look like Noddy driving his car.
 

Our lovely elderly neighbour had herself only recently stopped driving, she had owned an immaculate classic Morris Minor but didn’t drive far, just off to the book club or to visit her sister, which is probably just as well as it was a frightening experience to see, the top of her head was practically level with the top of the steering wheel and it looked as if the car was driving its self.

Liz Macgregor http://www.etsy.com/listing/90159283/morris-minor-car-drawing-print-bw

One day my husband came home and said he really didn’t think she should be driving any more, when I asked why he beckoned me to follow him outside. There across the front lawn of her house just missing the stone sundial in the middle, were clear tire marks where she had obviously come off the road and cut the corners to park in her driveway. I think she must have come to the same conclusion herself, because just before her 90^th birthday she gave the car away to one of her nieces.