Today five little Canada Geese were born in our garden. They’ll be gone by the evening, but I managed to take a few photographs this morning. Gently nurtured by their mother the male goose kept guard – and hissed at anyone who came too near.
Luckily I was photographing two of my great nieces – Genevieve and Annabel – for their miniatures at the time so they had a chance to see the chicks, and as Genevieve’s ambition is to be a professional travel photographer, she took a whole lot of photographs
On Easter Sunday all the Mundy family gathered at Val’s for the day before going for lunch. This year we chose The Maltsters Arms as our venue. It’s an old pub just next to the church in Greys village. As the weather has remained hot and sunny throughout the weekend we could all sit outside at a long table.
And here’s Evie, chatting to her cousin Ellie.
After a really good lunch we drove the couple of miles back to Val’s, where we played ‘the money game’. Throughout the year I save up all my 5 and 1 pence pieces (due to inflation this year I added nine £2 coins and nine £1 coins to make it worth while) and scatter them around the garden (avoiding the flower and vegetable beds) for the children to find on the word ‘go’. It’s a game I started when I used to come home on leave from the Far East. Originally played for my nephews and niece, it has now become a family tradition for their nine children. The youngest, Kate, collected the most. Here she is with a daisy chain she made.
This time of year gives me the opportunity to take a picture of all the family together. I’m normally mot in it, but with the use of the timer on my camera, managed to sneak in this year. Mind you it took 4 attempts to achieve this, as the few seconds the camera gave me wasn’t enough time to race back to the group. But finally, with a superhuman sprint I managed it. So here we all are in dappled light under the apple tree with an array of fallen blossoms on the ground framing the photograph.
Tea in the garden on such a balmy day was a real treat. The boys went up the lane to play football in the field, while the girls stayed in the garden. Here are five of them – Kate, Ellie, Genevieve, Annabel and Charlotte.
Because spring has been so marvellous this year with wall to wall sunshine, all the flowers are blooming early - especially the bluebells. So on Wednesday last I walked through the woods at Greys Court where they were thick on the ground.
Over the years I’ve taken thousands of photographs on digital cameras, and they are all still stored on my computer – well over a quarter of a million! The other day I installed a programme called Picassa. Amongst its many applications it has a facility for face recognition. It somehow finds all the people I’ve photographed over the years and asks me to name them. Then it automatically plonks each face in its relevant folder – magic! It even recognised my face at 15 years old in black and white and added it to my own folder amongst the more grizzly older ones. It’s not finished scanning the files yet, but so far I see it’s found 186 Rolf Harris faces. Trouble is there are so many people who I recognize instantly but for the life of me can’t remember their names.
Talking of Rolf, I called in to see him and Alwen last Saturday morning. I’ve said it before but he is by far the most prolific artist I know. He’s working on about six paintings currently. Here he is against a fascinating willow tree in the garden.
Just to bore you one more time, this is my renovated dinghy finally ready for launching tomorrow. Cross your fingers it is totally watertight once more.
Yesterday evening Jane, Brian and I went up the river on my boat. Just past Leander Club we saw Jilly and Bob so stopped to pick them up. Tragically as Jilly clambered aboard she dropped her mobile phone into the river! It's now under 12 feet of water, and as the battery will probably last for another few days does anyone know of a diver in the Henley area? If so we know approximately where the phone is and while he's under the water we could ring it as it still works - or did last night.
