Thursday, April 26. Set out to drive to Bower Hinton in Somerset where we were invited to lunch. As usual, L and I had different ideas about how long it would take, and high words were exchanged. She said 3 hours, I said no more than 2, so we agreed to allow two and a half, and to leave at 9.30. In the event it took 2 and a quarter, but we didn't get away till 10.15 due to the incompetence of the car hire people, who claimed to have lost the booking due to a computer glitch. Somehow it's always hopeless people whose computers play up. Left my hat behind in Oxford, having parked it on top of the wardrobe on the grounds that wet cold Oxford was not worthy for the display of such a fine piece of headgear. Through Beedon, maybe - quite likely, I think - the site of Mons Badonicus, past Stonehenge, and to BH at last with faultless navigation. Barely arrived when Maureen and Michael B (old Dorset friends) asked us to spend the night, which was not a thing to refuse. Lunch of melanzane al forno and many glasses of red wine, in the evening a freshly made soup of fennel, cauliflower, broccoli with many more. Their garden full of spring growth - forget-me-nots, bluebells, daffodils, tulips, and a big rosemary bush all covered in blue flowers. There is a kind of small tree we see everywhere covered with pompoms of rose-pink blossom like a flowering plum, but it may be something quite different. Maureen and Michael took us to the top of Ham Hill where the warm yellow stone is quarried that so much here is built of - a hill-fort originally, but much obliterated by millennia of quarrying. From here you can probably see as many counties as your imagination can find names for. Then to their church, v small and plain complete with musicians' gallery right out of Under the Greenwood Tree reached by an outside staircase. Slept in great comfort.