Home . .

This is my last night for a while, I've been cooked the last supper (roast pork chops, roast parsnips, roast potatoes, peas, brocolli, peas, sprouts and allotment rhubarb creme brule) but there are so many things that I'm going to miss about home:

1. Waking up in the morning

My eyes gently flicker open to the sun tiger striping my room as it penetrates the blinds. Outside on the pagoda below, the birds are flitting through the rose bushes chittering the morning gossip to each other as they work. Over the fence the neighbours hens are clucking contentedly in the weak morning sun, a sound as soothing as bubbling porridge. A sheep might bleat in the distance. If I am lucky and the time is right, or if it's Sunday morning bell practice, then the cathedral bells will start to add thier tinkling to the cacophany of the world waking up as the distance mellows thier imperious resonance as time would mellow a wine.

2. The weather.

It is always properly sunny. The sky is always fully blue. There is never a haze of pollution. There is always a breeze, sometimes tickling playfully at your skin, sometimes gusting and tugging at the washing on the line, but always there to ensure that it's never uncomfortably hot.

3. The locotion.

Few places are as fortunate to have such a compilation of extravagantly beautiful locations within such an easy distance. Even the city centre, so commonly a decay of weary concecrete, is a jumbled mismatch of unique coloured facades, bleached to milky colours by the sun. You can spend an entire afternoon looking up and never be bored.

4. Going to sleep in the evening

The blossom on the cherry tree in the neighbours garden begins to fluoresce as the sun goes down. The smell of the jasmine and roses that drape the pagoda below my window become intoxicating. I lie in bed drowsy under thier heavy scent listening to the ornamental waterfall tinkling into pond. The occassional plop of a frog into the pond and thier accompanying deep bull frog croaks. The feeling of complete and utter safety.

The Resurrection Dinner

This, is us.

I like this picture, it has captured the our essence.

Though it's pictures like this that would realy benefit from sounds and smells. It really is noisy at gatherings like this. Unbelievably so. Especially as this isn't all of the family, oh no, only a few of us have houses with enough squish room for that, this is only one strain of us. No to realy get the full effect of this picture you need to be hearing clattering cuttlery, argueing, the smoke alarm going off at periodic intervals accompnied by much flapping about with the tea towel, lots and lots of laughter, giggling and general joviality, teasing about everything, incessant offering of food, the mmmmmmmm noise that the 2 year old makes whenever she's eating something nice, background music and in one corner of the table my nephew is quietly cooing as he recieves a running commentry and explanation of what's going on.

I marvel at how big he's become. He's trippled his birth weight in under just 4 months. I think someone's producing super milk!

But back to the main event, the food:

Roast beef, roast pork, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, stuffing with sausage meat, stuffing without sausage meat (for tehe veggie), mashed potato, cabbage and leeks, cauliflower cheese, cauliflower and brocolli cheese, carrots, mushy peas (throw back from Pappi's meals - now totally essential), gravy and sprouts.

Yes sprouts. Deemed totally gratuitous by some and utterly essential by others. Mine found my way on to my sister's more appriciative plate next to mine.  

I love the family pictures that come from such occasions, I know that we'll look back at them in the future, when the children and babies are fully grown with children and babies of their own and we'll remember the fun and laughter and food, just as we do now of the times gone by from when we were young.  

I'm so intrigued to see how my nephew grows, I can't imagine him at 5, let alone 10, yet it seems like only yesterday that I was cuddling the two above when they were new born.  

  

 And once again it's the often unseen things that stick in my mind, and that I choose to leave on:

the total detritus of toys left behind by the children

the boy making her laugh like no one else.

the two year old deicding to sleep on the floor,

and finally the shortcust pastry substitute for play-doh.

The Bluebell Woods

Dell Quay

Low tide at Dell Quay.

A Box of Paints and A Sunny Day

Today I felt like Mole from Wind in the Willows:

'Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below, around even his dark and lowly house, and suddenly he flung down his brush, said ''Bother!'' and ''Oh blow!'' and also ''Hang spring-cleaning!'' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat'

I, have had enough of revision, I am not going to sit looking at a text book, sitting at a desk for another day. And so for today, we took to the hills.

At another local landmark, the trundle, for a picnic

and a spot of painting.

My picture wasn't perfect, it doesn't look like the scenery and has the addition of numerous of my thumb prints, but darn it I enjoyed it!

It soothes the soul.

I love both of the pictures above and below.

The addition of the horse statue I do not approve of. Why put a man made blot on such a beautiful natural landscape. It ruins the spine of the hills. The addition of grazing sheep I do approve of. It seems a much more gentle reminder of the shepards and sheep who would have trodden these very same hills for hundreds of years rather than the intrusive mark of commercialism. It's a shame that the old and the new can't blend so seamlessly as they do elsewhere across the downs.

Stunning in it's infinity.

Today

Bosham

Another little harbour village in the evening spring sunlight.