Back home for six weeks

I had already enjoyed a few hours sleep in the cabin but now preferred being stretched out on the blue painted hot deck of the MV Bretagne using Bev's handbag as a pillow whilst trying to read my book. The sun was high, the sky blue and I felt like a cat stretching in front of a roaring fire. I was totally relaxed and contented. Today I feel more tired than at any time in my life. Perhaps its the past week or so catching up with me but I'm totally zonked and wasn't much use at work.

One of our last acts in Brittany was a walk in Yvon's woods. We bumped into him and he thanked us for the photographs and chocolate. He personally planted over 50,000 trees here and is one of the most incredible people we know on the planet. As a pathetic comparison we planted a single silver birch in our own garden which we brought from England. At the moment its only a foot tall but hopefully will grow tall and strong between the hedge and dove.

Its been an eventful and happy two weeks even though a day didn't pass without a thought for Joel. We were saddened as the facts became apparent of his last days as he struggled to come to terms with loneliness and disappointment. We'll miss him.

Thanks for your comments on the posts of my first ten years of life. It has given me encouragement to get more thoughts and incidents-as well as accidents- onto paper before it all becomes too fuzzy.

I've been hanging dates around memories and have realised that a particular vivid thought I have about an actual hanging means that I wasn't in care as early as I thought, so I'll have to re-visit my posts at some point and slip in the correct dates.

I feel quite proud to have been born in the very month a King died and a Princess became Queen, even though it would be 16 months before the formal coronation.

I feel proud to have experienced gas lights before electricity, the birth of transatlantic flights, black&white to colour TV, steam trains, horse-drawn carriages to cars, a world without plastic or computers and remembering what it was like to hear the likes of the Beatles and Stones as they were unveiled to the world.

It has been a very good life and, in the words of Annie Lennox, it ain't over! What an incredible age we live in.

This tired old man is off to bed.

The silver birch...new life.