Changes.

You go away for a few days and come home to find chaos has ensued. How do these things happen? I came home yesterday afternoon to find that someone has dug a trench all the way along the pavement and that we have a kind of drawbridge arrangement to get to our garden path. They’re building houses (far too many for the space available, in my opinion but then, that’s only my opinion and I won’t be living in one of them) on a patch of land more or less behind our row of houses (a patch of land that might possibly be liable to flooding but, once again, this has nothing to do with me and I won’t be living there). The trench is going to carry electricity cables and such like to those houses. So until the work is finished we live on the other side of a moat. It’s just as well the rain has stopped or it truly would be a moat. This is going to play havoc with putting the dustbins out tonight ready for emptying early tomorrow morning. 

I have been away visiting our number one offspring and his new little family. His wife gave birth to a little daughter a month ago and it was high time I went to inspect said little daughter: very fine, all the necessary toes and fingers and so on and gives every sign of being alert and intelligent. All very satisfactory! 

Our son has spent all his post-university working life in the London area, moving out last year (or perhaps the year before) to the more rural/semi-rural surrounding area, off at the end of the Metropolitan line. It’s all very civilised and pleasant with the station 10 or 15 minutes walk from home in one direction and nice open countryside about 5 minutes walk from home in the other. 
  
While my son was at work, my daughter-in-law and I went off to visit Amersham, just a few miles away, taking a stroll with the new baby in her pram up and down the main street of old Amersham. We didn’t bother with new Amersham but the old town, which has been around forever, well, since pre-Anglo-Saxon times according to old records, is very pretty. There’s an excellent old church and lots of fine coaching houses. In front of many of the houses you could still see sandbags. They had been threatened with flooding recently but apart from the odd cellar had managed to escape it. Lucky them! 
 


My visit to more southern parts of England coincided with the (unofficial, of course) start of Spring, which was excellent timing on my part. After months of rain and grey skies we woke on Saturday and Sunday to blue sky and sunshine. Excellent weather for buying fruit from the open air market on Saturday and then having tea and scones in the garden. 

Yesterday, before I set off to catch the train back to Manchester, we went for a walk up the hill not far from my son’s house. At the top we found an appropriately named bench for us to sit on. In the absence of an apostrophe, we decided it was not Adam’s bench but a bench for the Adams family. 
 
It truly would have been an excellent day for striding out over the hills and far away but I had a train to catch. 
 
 The sun was still shining when I got back to Manchester and rumour has it that we are in for a week of good weather. However, I am whispering that; if I shout it too loudly they may change the weather pattern on us. 

In the meantime, my washing is hanging on the washing line in the back garden. 

This is a first for 2014!