Welcome to Britain...

...here's your cold.

Yep. Snuffling, snorfelling and moaning for two days. Ah well.

Sorry about the sporadic quality of the blogging lately. I really haven't forgotten y'all.

It's just that I only have dial-up and I'm trying to spend as little time as possible tying up the phone here, so I'm restricting myself to just work-related internet time. And dial-up really requires much more patience than I'm used to exercising on the net, especially for posting pictures, of which I have collected many.

Also, I really never realized how much time gets taken up just sitting about chatting and doing family and household-related things when one has a family around. It's new to me, you see.

I was going to apologise to those people whom I have chastised in the past for neglecting their bloggosphere duties by citing "family" concerns and busyness.

I say I "was" going to apologise, until I remembered my all-important blogging rule:

never apologise.

Anyway, blogging will, unfortunately, continue to be light-to-intermittent for some time to come, I'm afraid. I will say that I'm having a ripping time. Went to Nantwich yesterday for a couple of hours. Wandered around St. Mary's church there, built in the early 14th century, and v. beautiful. Got lots of pics.

Attended choral evensong at Chester Cathedral on Friday. Sat in one of the ancient choir stalls of the monks and listened to the 12 girls singing the Anglican chants and pondered how we will be redecorating the place when they finally admit their occupation forces are spread too thin and we can have it back, much as the Romans did in the 4th century when they left Chester. (Things continue to go rather swimmingly for our prospects of retrieving our purloined property.)

Have decided that Durham is too far away from relations and that Cheshire is just too damn beautiful to leave. I've discovered the canals and am looking forward to retrieving my bike and introducing it to the tow-paths. and there were many ducks.

We spent some time going through family photo albums. I have to say that I was somewhat weirded out to see the photo, taken in Alexandria Egypt in 1924, of my great grandmother, holding my grandmother as a newborn baby, standing next to my great uncle Laurie (the infamous family blacksheep and rake) who was dressed in some kind of scouting costume; he was standing next to Uncle Mike's mother, Joan, who as a middle-aged woman had looked after me when I was little and my mother was out at work and who was a little girl at the time the photo was taken and was wearing some female version of Laurie's outfit. Behind her and next to Great Grandmother Doloughan was Mike's grandmother Nan, whom we lived with in Manchester when she was an old lady. We have had copies made of this and other pictures and I will be contacting some of the remaining Doloughan relatives to see if we can fit some more of the geneological puzzle pictures together.

Took the young cousins out to the fields to collect rosehips from the hedgerows on Saturday. At least, I collected rosehips and Sophie and Millie held the bucket, until they discovered it was more fun to jump into cowflops. It was Sophie's tenth birthday party after that, but we managed to de-stem the rosehips and I'll be trying a traditional recipe for rosehip jam this week.

More, much much more, to follow.

HJMW