our hosts and their other guests

hello again

i know that some of you get quite excited about things being in a correct and indeed chronological order. that, alas, is not going to happen with this post. the excellent new format for blogger makes changing pictures around on it more of a young man's game, and i am quite frankly not too good with a laptop. do bear with me, then, and please don't stop bearing with me!

we are not the only visitors that the Harlo gang are getting from the corners of the world at present. well, Chez Harlo is a most excellent home, so attracts all of us at some point. it was wonderful to find, then, that David and Joan were in town! they came over for a most excellent tea yesterday, along with Gran and Auntie Maureen!

absolutely brilliant to see them! we didn't get told that Auntie Maureen was coming along too, and it was one of the single best surprises ever. it's been far too long since i last saw her, and hopefully not too long before i see her again!

yes, by the way, that is indeed Michele in the picture too. see, i told you she was OK. but you want for and crave a picture that includes the more ultra, or if you will "hardcore" element of the Harlo gang, do you? well then step this way!

lovely for us all to be together! it seems to be particularly lovely, splendid indeed, for Colin, who appears to have used the occasion of our visit as an excuse, if not all the reason he needs, to develop a very, very good friendship with practically anything that has alcohol in it. or near it, even.

 

glad we could provide such a great motivation and source of inspiration, Uncle!

now, i did tell you that these were not really in any particular order, did i not? on that note, here is a picture from earlier in the day when i tried to get a picture of Great Grandma with at least one of her two visiting great grandchildren. as you can see, i could not really get a more traditional pose!

never mind, there shall still be a good deal of time to get some good photographs done. the above was taken after the walk through the fields, bothering sheep and ducks, earlier in the day and posted here earlier too. i have to be really careful writing of ducks. i find these laptops somewhat fiddly and the d key is dangerously close to the f one.

moving on, and indeed moving back to Chez Harlo, here are Michele and William watching with a certain sense of awe as Colin and Andrew indulge in one of their top hobbies; staring at a camera and seeing if they cannot clock how it all works.

attempting to work out how the camera works, with specific emphasis on the timer bit, happened after we had tried to use it to take some big group pictures similar to those as seen above. i am sure what came out instruction free will look class anyway!

Andrew has featured in a few of these pictures but i have not said much of him yet. other than being excellent in letting me use this laptop thing, he has been great in that James and William have taken a major, massive shine to him. they seem unprepared to leave him alone (unless Colin is around, who William just adores as, well, pretty much everyone does), and to his credit Andrew really does not wish to be away from them for too much!

this doesn't always pan out as well as it could, though. Andrew, alas, needs a new knee or hip or something like that, and thus it probably was not his crowning glory of ideas to get on the trampoline with the boys. but he did anyway, because it is immense fun!

you will note that, unlike the one at home, the trampoline here does not have one of them safety nets around it. this gives Michele and i a wonderful sense of adventure as we watch them play on it!

just to hammer home the point of how out of chronological order these pictures really are, here comes another one of Auntie Maureen, Gran and some of us!

you are probably wondering where Angela is in all but one of the above pictures, are you not? mostly in the garden with Michele, as it happened. but not necessarily having speaks with Michele, as it happens, when there was the ways and the wiles of how the magic of a camera works to be studied!

righty-ho, i believe that this covers the best or perhaps most important quarters of the pictures i have taken thus far on our travels. as James is getting a touch overwhelmed with it all at the moment - these long days and it staying light has not done much in the way of wonder for his bed time - we are taking it a bit easier today, so probably not too many pictures for a day or so. unless i take the camera to Tesco with me, of course......

so long as Andrew lets me use this laptop, so long shall i do my best to keep you updated here!


be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!