You win some, you lose some

Having persuaded Jeremy's parents to join us for the day, and Jane having offered to look after the children while Jeremy and I saw the house, we missed Audley End. Extremely irritatingly, it was shut. Ha - I knew we were right to join the National Trust. Those English Heritage dossers are an idle bunch.

To Jeremy's and Ian's delight, the next possibility was Duxford Air Museum (the children didn't care, as long as it involved lunch). Being as how the major exhibits are all aircraft, the place is huge. We got to see inside a prototype Concorde, and ride on an electric train from one end of the museum to the other.

I found myself profoundly disturbed by the Land Warfare exhibition, which concentrated on WWII and the Normandy Landings. (I know. At my great age.) I know we weren't in there for that long, and certainly didn't see absolutely everything, but nowhere in all the diagrams and pictures and video footage that I saw was there any mention of the lives that were lost. No idea at all of the scale of human destruction. Yes, I understand that small children would be quite unjustifiably frightened by graphic representations, but no mention of the dead at all? It seems such a blatant omission, and such a cynical one. I don't understand why veterans' groups don't make a bigger deal of this.

Anyway.

All the Valentine grandkids were there for Sunday lunch, so the children had a ball, and on Tuesday the five of us went for a swim. Sid was so reluctant to get out that she yelled and stamped her feet and refused to get dressed. Luckily she had changed her mind by the time we got back, so she dressed before getting out of the car. (Hadn't changed her mind about yelling and stamping her feet, though.)

And for the first time ever chez ValentineSr., the little ones were independent enough to amuse themselves and eachother, which meant Jeremy and I could spend some time just sitting. (I vividly recall the Christmas Beri was just two years old. The call to lunch came, and I found him sitting in the middle of a great pile of games. He had found the boxes of Ludo and Scrabble and Halma and Monopoly and and and and, had opened them all and tipped their contents out onto the sitting room rug. Oh how I laughed. Ha ha ha ha ha.)

And the big news - Jeremy has a job!

Not just any old I'd-better-take-it-because-I-have-a-family-to-feed job, but a real, proper, senior senior JOB. A general managership at E-on Ruhrgas. Thank goodness. Now we won't have to sell the children for experiments.