2006-04-17
Thanks to my guests! Yes Kate, I’m blushing at the nice comments you made.We had a reasonably relaxed holiday last week. My brother and wife and baby (feeling poorly) were only there for the first couple of nights and my sister was away the next day so it was mostly just us and the ageing parents. Simon and Catherine were there for half the time, and then they flew back because Catherine was in a show (Lynne and I went to see her Friday and Saturday in case you think we’re neglecting her!), and Jack flew down on the same plane so he was there for the second half week.
The parents are getting slower and more deaf, but still just as prone to bickering and intolerance as ever, but I think from their point of view it was a success. We went to both of the villages where the ancient relatives came from but there wasn’t much trace – couple of entries on a war memorial for distant cousins was about it. I guess neither family was sufficiently well off to be able to afford gravestones. We did get to see the font my mother was christened in, back in 1929. My father couldn’t see the point in photographing it..
The war memorial was sad though – especially when I came back and looked up where and when these young men had died. Two brothers – one aged 31 and married, died in 1916 in Flanders, and then his parents must have thought that their other boy had survived when Armistice Day came in 1918 and he’d been posted away from the Western Front. But unfortunately not – he died of wounds six days after the war finished – in a long forgotten skirmish against the Turks in Beirut.
It’s a nice part of the country and off the main roads really very quiet, but there isn’t really much to do around there. About the only claim to fame is it’s where Constable did most of his paintings and once you’ve stood on the site where the Haywain was painted there’s not much else. So it was mostly just quiet mornings followed by a short trip to somewhere for a pub lunch and then back to the house to light a wood fire. That seemed to be what gave my father the most pleasure - going out into the woods and looking for dead branches to burn and breaking them up and carrying them back. Well I enjoyed that too as you’d imagine.
Does this posting entries by email thing work? – I think I may need to resort to that in the future.