Intex: A bigger splash

Now in its third year, the splash pool is turning out to be the best £150 we ever spent on eBay. With clergy family barbecues coming on, our whole family extends a cordial welcome to its other afficionados, hoping the weather this year will be up to it. With new solar heating the water has reached temperatures of up to 32 degrees recently, four or five degress higher than it ever managed with its original 7Kw electric heating.

With school friends etc,. it gets hours of use many days. One first this year was adoption and families workers on a staff day here using it for a teambuilding game with paper boats. On a cloudier Sunday, I just wanted to try and convey the full solemnity of the naturally Anglican way our children have been interpreting the instructions printed in six languages on the side, about not jumping in:

Mothering Sunday back at ye ranch

Long day out around Buckinghamshire, with Catherine i/c Mothering Sunday back home. Nick and Stewart spent yesterday whilst we were out baking (Left) and Stephanie ran up a slightly graphics intensive card, based on our tribe (Right).

And, for the family log, Catherine left this evening to move into a London flat for six months work in a homeless day centre — 9-5’s with every evening and weekend off....

Going bananas round London

At lunch Anna tells us with great conviction that Nick “is 75% made of Bananas” This surprising assertion is probably something to do with the amount of genetic material Nicholas and a banana have in common — a slightly different proposition. meanwhile...

Stephanie’s back from Uni, with an illustration project she did with her left hand (to see what happened) based on family days out in London. Resolve to be amazed by yet another distinctive Stephanie illustration style:

Driving Away

This is the day Lucy drives Stephanie down to begin her illustration course at Portsmouth University. Having her at home this past year on a foundation course has been bonus for us all. Stephanie's always been somewhat magical, with her infectious sense of fun, easy talent at art, zany way with words. I'm sure we aren't the only rather sappy proud parents in England this week.
So here, just for the record, is the original and best poem about this sort of thing, that came vividly to mind when Catherine went to University, and does now — Cecil Day Lewis’ Walking Away — for Sean:

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-

A sunny day with the leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play

Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show-

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.