Mama came up from the country this morning. Marjorie’s flying in from Madrid tomorrow. The other six bridesmaids are already here. My sister won’t make it ‘til the evening before the wedding. I’ve assured her that I understand.

Deep down in the bowels of the Ministry, the research team are celebrating. After three long years of trials and failures and test-runs and tweaks, they’ve finally managed to deliver the goods.

All contact was forbidden for the first three months. No phone calls. No letters. No visits or play dates. The children needed time to adjust to their new families.

The hypothetical children have been at it again. This time they’ve managed to ruin Christmas.

Leonard was only four when Mrs Mellinghurst began to suspect he was not like her other children.

Miss Lemon kept a small, but perfectly functional, library arranged in alphabetical order in a bookcase in her sitting room. The bookcase reflected its contents. It was a solid, unshowy number made of good quality wood. The kind of bookcase purchased from an old-fashioned furniture store and lugged upstairs by a delivery man. It contained approximately four dozen volumes, spines intact and pages pristine, for Miss Lemon did not believe in dog-earing, neither would she lower herself to break a book’s spine.

In the winter Hillside is jolly dull. The evenings feel unbearably long. They do not have a television and the wireless signal is somewhat erratic. It cuts in and out every time it rains.

Alison has long since quit wondering whether she’s been typecast. Fatal Bliss is her seventeenth onscreen appearance. In fourteen of these movies, she has played a corpse.

Nurse Collins is looking even more sheepish than usual. She asks if the office is warm enough, whether I’d like a cup of coffee and how my morning’s going so far, and I know there’s something she doesn’t want to tell me. Something upsetting.

The Gables sits on the edge of the village in two acres of its own grounds. If you angle your gaze correctly when walking over the village’s only bridge you can just about make out its roof and chimneys peeking over the top of the hedge.

She was wearing her Sunday hat the wrong way ‘round. The tiny stuffed robin which usually perched coquettishly just above her left ear was now presiding over the back of her neck which, Eunice noticed, was not as clean as it could have been.

Last week, after yet another unpleasant run in with the couple who live in the flat below, and two vicious reviews in the Sunday papers, and a snarky letter from my mother, and the news report about teenagers putting cats in bins, I decided I was done with people.

So, yesterday I finished reading “After The Funeral” which was Agatha Christie’s 44th crime fiction novel of the 66 she managed to write and publish. This means I’m officially two thirds of my way through reading all her novels in a year.

Pickie had expected him to ask a little sooner. The men she dated usually did. She could hardly blame them. It was the sort of question you asked to get the conversation going when you first met a girl.

“At her age one does not have birthdays,” announced Susan, “it’s such an inconvenience.”