Monday Mumblings (second attempt due to AOL)

The village of Stock in Essex is a delightful place with its duckpond, its village green and its pubs.  Only the ever increasing traffic is doing anything to mar it.

The Bear pub has stood for four hundred years and has changed little of its interior.  Oak beams, low ceilings and open fireplaces. where the flames crackle in winter warming  the drinkers.  It is these fireplaces and chimneys that hold a story, a story retold by generations, a story that is hung on the pub wall for all to read

Charlie Wilson was the Ostler , one who works in the stables looking after the horses, at this old inn during the closing years of the 19th century. He was a small man and had a peculiar sideways walk, something like a crab. This strange gait earned him the nickname “Spider”. Spider had a particular party piece. He had the peculiar habit, when drunk, of crawling up the tap-room chimney and emerging, soot covered, from the fireplace of the next bar. One Christmas Eve, he climbed the tap-room chimney as usual but never emerged again. He apparently decided not to come down and just sat in a bacon curing loft at the junction of the two chimneys. It could be that Spider was taken ill or had maybe died up there but nobody knows. All pleas from the Landlord and the other customer failed. Exasperated at his not answering they lit a small fire in the grate to try and drive him out. As nothing happened they assumed that the smoke had suffocated old “Spider”. It is said they never retrieved him and his well cured remains are supposedly still up there today! His ghost, though, often descends at night. Dressed in white breeches and shiny leather boots, he does no harm, and is content to flit about the nooks and shadowy recesses of this timeless and little changed old inn. Many people have seen him, often sitting in a chair by the fire or sometimes glimpsed as a fleeting shadow from the corner of the eye.

Mike and I have visited the Bear on several occasions and it certainly does have an atmosphere about it.

Well, another gloomy and dismal day today. When will the weather improve?  It is a sobering thought that we are nearly into May and once that comes it is only four months until Autumn again.  Roll on some sunshine.    It is so quiet around here even for a Monday. No people and hardly any cars. It seems as if everyone has hibernated.

I have ordered some plants and hope they arrive this week.  One of them is a tree for our front garden to replace the one that died last year. I so long to look out of my bedroom window and see a tree.  As long as the rain keeps off so that we can get them in I shall be happy.

Before I go here are the latest pictures of Jack. He is almost four months old now.  It seems like only yesterday he was just a tiny scrap, now he is all legs and growing apace.

Wishing you a happy week, dear readers.