big feet, little feet

I love this picture from a recent walk I took with my friend E and her small daughter E minor.

The focus isn't sharp and the angle's a bit off and maybe the negative space should be on the right instead of the left, but I love the feel of it. E minor loves standing, though she can't do it without help yet. Her mother held her up and let her stand on mummy's feet to see the ducks she loves.

Love.

Things my Granddad knows

Photo by Rob

The breeds of dogs and cows
The names of plants
The names of butterflies
The taste of wild rabbit and pigeon
The habits of birds
What a buzzard looks like in flight
What a Spitfire looks like
What a German bomber looks like as it flies over your back garden
What a German machine gun sounds like as the gunner spends spare bullets on your neighbours
How to be right handed, though if you're really a left-hander
How to mend aeroplane engines in the heat in India
What happens when you gorge yourself on bananas
How to make lumps of wood into beautiful things, even if his hands shake too much to do so now
What it's like to be a rural policeman
What it's like to buy a house and know you've only got £100 in the bank until next payday
What it's like to wait a long time for a child
What it's like to see your children succeed and fail and get hurt and get up again
What it's like to lose your wife
How to cook dinner for one
What it's like to be gradually frailer and more shaky and realise your brain and body are letting you down
The names and concerns of his children
The names and concerns of his grandchildren and their partners
The names and smiles of his great-grandchildren
The love of his family

summer haze

Goodness, is it September already? Where did the summer go? Well, it's still here really, but somehow, even without kids it's hard to lose the feeling of a new school year beginning.

We're busy and happy and taking plenty of photographs. Yesterday we took over 4000, but that's a story for another day. Life this week feels a little like this photo - a bit blurred but full of colour and movement.

This is lavender in my parents' garden in Walthamstow. I went down to London on Wednesday and paid them a visit. My sister and her cute kids were there too and we had fun in the sunny garden. It's a very small patch (well, probably standard for London) but in the summer it's always full of plants growing crazily well, making it a mini jungle.

Late summer in my parents's garden is a green tangle of plants, the smell of lavender and rosemary and the taste of sun-warmed blackberries, straight off the bush. Sophia and JJ and I looked for frogs in the pond (I saw some but I couldn't get the littles to look hard enough). JJ threw things in the pond and ate too many blackberries until he had to be dragged away from the bushes. Then he had fun filling a toy jeep with grass and driving it into corners, getting covered in soil and blackberry juice in the process.

I like summer. Long may it continue.