Garden, family

Alice and Pam have been busy planning and preparing a couple of new flower beds, reducing the lawn. One of them is going to be designed mainly for winter interest - cornus with coloured stems, and other things with evergreen (or ever-purple) foliage. They've also bought some plants for the little patches of soil outside the front gate. There are also vague plans to extend the patio round the corner, so we can have a table there in the summer evening light, but that will have to wait a while. Overwintering plants have been cleared out of the greenhouse, and we have tomatoes germinating to go in. I have some chili seeds I meant to plant at the same time, but I'll do them this weekend (all our seed trays were full).
We don't have any tulips, and the ones outside the boys' school are looking very nice, so I think we'll have to get some. The daffodils are fading, but the cherry blossom looks splendid.
Both Alice's sisters phoned. Bea is planning to go to Paris at half-term and wanted to know if we would like to come too - current plan says Rory and Nana will go - and Julia is worried about my niece's choice of college. So I have to persuade her that she can go to a "good" college and still be a nice left-wing liberal instead of becoming a well-paid-but-overworked-with-little-time-for-children banker or similar like her mother. Or something. And Julia's invitation to Nana Pam for Christmas has apparently changed from "if the new house is ready" to "we'll book a motel for you", which was a bit of a surprise as we didn't know about any Christmas invitation - so we'll be dogsitting, which rules out a friend's suggestion of joining them Youth Hosteling, but we weren't too sure about that anyway.

Cycle Helmets

Eric Martlew's Private Members Bill to make cycle helmets compulsary (for under-16's, but compulsion campaigners admit they intend this to be the thin end of the wedge) hasn't been defeated, but it has at least been set back which is a good thing.
The BBC's reporting is rather misleading here. The British Medical Association, for example, is also opposed to compulsion, and the campaign hasn't won the support of "Formula One star David Coulthard" so much as "promoter of his own brand of cycle helmet David Coulthard".
The real problem is that the measure is likely to increase the accident rate for cyclists. See http://www.cyclehelmets.org for example.