Going up

First, apologies, Sannie T - when I put in the bit about Burnett, I forgot that you'd already used that one.  Great minds think alike.  I am very J M-Barriessed about this and Will Shakespeare try not to do it any Hannah More.  (That last one is a bit of a cheat.  Hannah More was a social reformer and educationalist and I assume she wrote a book, but I'm not certain.  If she didn't, she should have.)

If you are new to the blog, the comments will explain what we're talking about.  Basically, it's getting as many author names into a sentence as you can.

It's Ascension Day today, so I called the blog post 'going up', and it was an uplifting evening, standing in the village square for a communion service with the green hills above us.  The birds think it's nearly summer - there was a skylark overhead, the house martins are about, and a dipper was having a bath in the river.  Or may they're just here to drop into the chemist's shop and get something for pleurisy.

I was on my way to the village centre yesterday when I saw something else that made my heart lift.  Four children in a tree. There are lots of new families living near us, and there they were, four of them, all perched in the branches like a flock of finches.  Brilliant, I thought.  You're not sitting in front of a screen, you're not slaving over homework, you're exactly where you should be at four o'clock on a May afternoon.  Up a tree.  The only thing better is up a tree with a book.