Mystery solved

I'm walking in the garden with a friend, showing him my agrarian labours. Max, as usual, is excited and bounding around. The next thing I see is Max flying through the air, grabbing an apple, and the branch that it is growing on, from the puny apple tree, and running off to play ball with the apple. Whilst we all know that we should eat more fruit, I'd rather we all had the same choice, at the same time, and particularly when the fruit is ripe. I'd been wondering for a while why there was so much fruit on the floor which was not yet ripe, and now I know. This would appear to be his new game. He has tired of jumping up at the clothes line, grabbing Jan's knickers and running around with them on his head.

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Sitting here in the south of France, without any of our children in or near London, you can't help but feel very lucky. You feel even luckier when No 1 daughter emails to say that her planned business trip into London had been postponed until the afternoon and that three of her colleagues were on one of the trains that were bombed.