Over halfway through

. . . and we are all EXHAUSTED. This blimmin' weather means that, rather than enjoy the beach, we are dashing from pillar to post having a LOT of adventures. This being Cornwall, of course there are a lot of lovely things to do.

J and I particularly enjoyed the chance to visit Trerice again - for both of us it is the most perfect house, and we indulge in wild fantasies of what it would be like to live there. This visit I even mapped out the route the children would take to the nearest school, and d'ye know, it all looks perfectly do-able. Now all we need to do is find the £5mill MINIMUM that the NT would ask, and you can all come visit for as long as you like.

The gardens at Trevarno were pretty spectacular, particularly as Management had mapped out a canny quiz for the children, which drew them happily around a fairly long walk. (And the playground at the end was very satisfactory too.) I found the bit about how they came to do it pretty astounding too.

And what with the hotel having a small but perfectly formed indoor pool, which we have visited almost every day, and four times as many stairs as our own home, (and exactly as many lifts!) we are all plumb tuckered out by the end of the day.

And guess what? The weather looks set to brighten up the day before we leave.

We're off. See you in August.

The lilies Marie brought me last weekendAnd a card Julia got for her birthday.

From our Moscow Correspondent

. . . and I quote,

What a beauty* (your blog), and the car's not bad either. I love the dancing children's photos on the front page.

It is extremely hot here in Moscow today, about 29 degrees, there is no air conditioning in the office and I had to walk back to my apartment this morning on discovering I had left the keys to a cupboard in my jacket pocket.

Meeting this afternoon probably until late. . . . I shall try and get out on Thursday rather than Friday. . . . I'll let you know.

*my bold, italics and colour.

Poor man - and he says Moscow is horrible too. I bet he's wishing that he had been chucked out along with the diplomats, but hey - he's there with an oil company, and the Russians aren't even remotely that capable of shooting themselves in the foot. (He says he actually wanted to post a comment, but as his screen is displaying in Cyrillic, he has no idea what he is doing. No smart remarks, please.)

We had a bit of a facer last week, in the 14 seconds Jeremy was home in between foreign trips, when he rang our holiday hotel to check on the status of something-or-other, and told them we were booked in from the 28th July to 8th August. 'Ho no sir', they said, 'we have you down from the 21st to the 1st'.

Argh.

Just as well we phoned, eh?

As our plan had been to put the children in the car at 5:00 on the morning, to avoid the horrendous traffic, this would now give Jeremy about four hours in between getting home and setting out on a five hour car journey. And in that time he would have had to unpack, put a wash on, pack, load the car, and take the MLC** for a spin (he only had it a few hours before he had to leave the country for days. Ha ha ha ha ha!).

So, unless he gets home a day early, we will leave on the Sunday morning, and maybe he will have had time for several spins.

**Mid Life Crisis

'I've booked a test drive' he said. 'Do you want to come?' As 'appens I was busy, and came home to find THIS on my doorstep.

'I didn't think you'd mind' he said. 'It's an Audi after all.'

How well he knows me.









In other news - my sister took Ma into A&E late last night, with a suspected heart attack. Turns out it was just a hiatus hernia. She came out in time to cook us lunch, then went back in again to have more tests tomorrrow. What some people will do to gain attention.

And Sid, who is very happy with MUH being for MUMMY! and kicking KUH being for KIT! isn't quite getting why we tell her that YUH is for 'lellow'. Where's the logic in that?

What a way to start the week

Stuck in a lift. With two small children. With a third due back home and me not there. And a chicken simmering on the hob. Oh yes, and one of the small children needing to pee.

The Infant School has an outside lift for wheelchair access. (It is so out of the way and round the bend and at the end of a very twisty path that I don't know quite how wheelchairs are supposed to get there at all. But once they do, There Is A Lift.) It's a platform secured in a steel case, and works by keeping the button pressed. Quite hard work for a small child. Not to mention boring. But rather than using the flight of six steps to leave the school premises, over the last couple of weeks we, at the request of Beri, have taken to using this lift. And yesterday . . .

We called the lift, got in, held the Down button, and waited for the 'click' of the releasing door. In vain. The Up button worked fine, but once more, no 'click'. Down again, and up, and panic was definitely setting in. Did I mention that this lift was a tiny bit out-of-the-way? And that the playgound was now fairly empty? And that Beri was now introducing his bladder as a legitimate topic of conversation? It was beginning to look like the plot of an early Stephen King novel. Think 'Cujo' without the dog. Think 'Christine' without the car. Better yet, think 'Panic Room' with me as Jodie Foster. Oh c'mon! You are just not trying hard enough!

But I digress.

Luckily Vash (who has the most beautiful twin girls in Beri's class) passed, and after she had stopped laughing, went off to the school office, and we were deluged by giggling women, pointing out that there were no keys in the lift lock (thanks) that we may have to call the school handyman who had gone home (thanks again) and that the emergency key didn't look like it actually fitted the lock (thanks once more).

Of course the key eventually fitted, we effected egress and scuttled off, without even a proper (if somewhat ironic) thank-you because of the chicken and the third child. Did I mention one of the giggling women was the headmistress? That poor boy is doomed. Doomed I tell you. Forever, Mrs Peal will identify him as the boy with the mother who broke the lift.

UPDATE. My friend Marie, who taught for many many many years, (and was very recently awarded her PhD, hooray!) reckons that if Mrs Peal ever reads this, she might well feel that I am calling into question her professional detachment, and that OF COURSE her opinion of my younger son will be based solely on his performance and deportment at school, and not on spurious consideration of his inept family, and that she will be offended at the implication that she is swayed by such minor concerns. I'd like to take this opportunity to say NO-OOOO-O-OO-O! Mrs Peal's professional detachment is everything it should be, please like him, please, and anyway he takes far more after his father than me, in fact my parenthood of him has been called into question (not only be me) so that's all right then.

Isn't it?

Sports Day's On. No, it's not. Oh wait, yes it is . . .

As the weather here has been, for the last two months, ABSOLUTE RUBBISH, Sports Day has been cancelled, rescheduled, rescheduled again, cancelled and rescheduled.

TIMES THREE.

Playgroup, Infant School and Junior School. Oh oh oh, not forgetting the Triathlon that the Juniors are doing AS WELL as the blimmin' Sports Day. Argh.

Well phew for us, because one of those events has finally been crossed off the list. (Only three to go. Unless they are cancelled of course. And not rescheduled. Argh again.) Sid had her Sports Day - or to be more accurate, her Sports Half-Hour With A Break For Rain. It was SO CUTE! All these two- and three-year olds, with the dimmest grasp of what they were doing, some fatally distracted by Mummy, others having to be led along the race track by the hand, and all of them so excited by whatever it was they thought they were doing.

There was a Running race, a Pairs race, an Egg-and-Spoon race, a Shopping race, and a Motorbike race. Sid took the Egg-and-Spoon so carefully that she barely appeared to be moving at all, and by the time the others had finished she was practically in a different time zone.

But she won the Shopping race. By streets.

Uncle John

OK, so it's not tomorrow, but here's Uncle John anyway. He is one John Fortey, who in 1458 had bequeathed £300 to finish building the church. (Jeremy and I reckon that's about 1.5 to 2 million quid these days. Yikes.)

'Fortey' was Ma's mother's maiden name, and a hitherto undiscovered english cousin had done the genealogy.

So we dropped by St Peter and St Paul in Northleach to pay our respects.

And found Christ Risen.

Time Off for Good Behaviour a deux

The children ignored our going. Off we went, Jeremy and I, into the sunset, he with the maps, the paperwork, the extra-quick-drying trousers, and The Boots That Saw Him Through Ten Weeks In Greenland, and me with far too few pairs of socks.

Sadly, no twinkly lights - - - - - - - but oh, the magazines! And the his'n'hers hangers!

A delicious supper (by delicious, I mean someone else made it, brought it to me, and took the plates away when I was done. And also, extra points for actually being delicious.), a comfy bed, a warm husband . . .

On our seven-mile walk on Saturday we passed the Augean Stables,

bumped into three sisters (Valkyrie? There's a name due for a comeback, dontcha think?)

and nothing happened.

Discovered the ur-sweetshop, and bought some socks. I suspect, with socks like these on offer, it wouldn't have mattered how many pairs of socks I had brought with me.

I'm going to stop this post here, because managing all these pictures is proving EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING. I'll tell you about Uncle John tomorrow.