Soup Night 3, and a tribute

Tonight we're hosting another Soup Night at our place. Still only the vaguest idea how many people will show up, but we'll see. Three full-on soups, one bonus leftover offering, and who knows what else. I have great hopes for a good time.

We'll also raise a bowl of soup to absent friends, specifically to Gretel and to Andy Macauley, whose remembrance service was held today in the Shropshire hills.

Through correspondence, blog-reading and package-swapping with Gretel over a few years, Captain Midnight and I also got to know her partner Andy. He was a tall, gentle-natured Northerner with a fondness for crime novels and local pubs, alt-rock and punk bands, and Dove Promises (and a tendency to make them disappear from packages). Gretel's blog revealed him as a backyard gardener, a long-time member of the Eynsham Cricket Club, a game tea-lady for charity, a meanderer through the English countryside, and quite obviously a man who loved her to distraction.

Back in art school.

Tuesday would have been his 42nd birthday.

Tonight we will imagine him here, seated near the window, long legs stretching out under the dining room table, with a bowl of chicken corn soup and a chunk of bread, listening to the babble of conversation and occasionally making wry comments. I think he might have enjoyed that.