Monday 7 June

THAT MAN is determined on hijacking my blog!  I nearly choked on a baked bean this morning when he announced his culinary journey was about to move forward as he progressed from victoria sponges to scones.  No, no, that wasn't the cause of my choking.  It was when he said he might need me to find him the ingredients because "....you need bike 'n' car soap or summats don't you?"  And THAT was what creased me up - I am still cackling.  You couldn't make it up could you?  He meant,of course, bicarbonate of soda.  Even as we speak he is poring over the Be-ro book.

Oh, and lunch is going to be fish pie........I'm keeping out of it!

What I really wanted to mention was our day in Boston last Wednesday.  Yes, America, I'm taking you all with me to Boston.  Boston, England, that is.

When I look through the pictures I took, not one really does justice to this beautiful town.  Fortunately Motherhen at My Simple Rhymes has gone there for a few days so she'll probably do better.   Meanwhile, here's one or two of mine............

This chap in the hat, standing on a box with a little table balanced precariously on top was auctioning plants.  I constantly expected either him or the table to fall off!  Another stall was auctioning bikes.  I HOPE they were unclaimed ones from the police station!   This whole bit of the market had lots of auctions going on.

If we hadn't known in advance that there are, in fact, 2 markets going on we might have been a bit disappointed with this titchy one.   I didn't take any photos of the other one because in my chair I was too low down to snap anything but people's backsides!  It was very big and very busy,  crawling with people.  The sun had brought them out.  Surely the kids should have been in school?

There was a lovely memorial garden devoted to military and civilian groups involved in WW2, the Korean War, the Falklands and right up to the present day.  No-one, it seemed, had gone unremembered.  Quite right too.

This is the place we were really after:  St. Botolph's Church, known the world over as Boston Stump.  It's probably the most famous landmark in southern Lincolnshire and, it being so high and the terrain being so flat, you can see it from miles around, long before you reach Boston.  In fact it's the highest tower of any parish church in England.

You could be forgiven for thinking you were in a cathedral!  No-one really knows how it came to be called 'The Stump'.  One theory is that the tower was meant to be finished off with a spire.  More likely the name reflects its appearance from the flat surrounding Fenland.

The Cotton Connection:  John Cotton became Vicar of Boston in 1612.  His Puritanism and criticism of the hierarchy drew hostil attention from Church of England authorities.  In 1633, following the earlier colonists, he set sail for the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ministered there until his death in 1652.  The smallest chapel in the Boston Stump is now named the Cotton Chapel and has benefitted from support both by many Americans and from Cotton's own descendants.  The links with Boston Mass go even further:  several of the early governors of Massachusetts were former citizens of our Boston, and Anne Bradstreet, wife of one of them, became the New World's first published poetess.

There now, not a lot of people know that!  Ta-ta

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