After spending many hours on the plane getting to London, I spent many hours trying to get away from it.
Thankfully, it was a spectacularly freezing summer. But unfortunately that did nothing to deter the hoardes of tourists. Staring at the Egyptian mummies in the Bristish Museum together with a hundred people loses all the mystique and awe that ought to accompany it. And while on the topic of awe, since when did Topshop on Oxford Circus become a tourist detsination?
Luckily I have relatives who live in the sticks. Penn and the area of around it is where I spent many of my impressionable teenage years. I remember the wide open commons fringed by trees, to which we sneaked out of school in the evenings to meet boys (or rather, stare at them from afar). I remember picking wild blackberries and eating them on the railway bridge. I remember chilly summer evenings lying on dry grass, rolling them into 'joints' and trying to smoke them without much success or pleasure.
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| Duck feeding - a must in the sticks |
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| Country walks cook up huge appetites and the need to eat, al fresco! |
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| The fruits of our hard labour. |
Good times. I'm glad I got to relive them again and to share them with my son.
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| Wide open space! |
