Shrinking world
I was thinking — as the plane from Atlanta to San Diego was buffeted by strong winds and the pilot steered a course between one layer of storm clouds beneath us and another on top of us — that my world has become a whole lot smaller in the past couple of years.
Just this year, for example, I've had two trips to Australia, visited Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Yosemite, Palm Springs and Los Angeles, and now here I am, back on the ground in San Diego again after two weeks in England.
Only a few years ago, my world was vast, and I went very few places other than Perth and Eagle Bay, with the occasional trip to Melbourne!
Anyway, I'm home again, and am unpacking and washing and trying to organise all my pics as well as my thoughts about having been back in England, the country of my birth.
Seeing my family again was brilliant, and they all made such a fuss of me and Lily. It was just wonderful — and we had a gorgeous wedding in an old converted barn right in the middle of the Sussex countryside, with views of rolling farmland and meadows across the South Downs.
Here are some pics from Saturday. Lily and I, her boyfriend Nick and her dear friend Alice, who was at primary school with her in Perth and is now working in London, hired a little VW and went tooling around the countryside. We saw two mediaeval castles, at Herstmonceux(above) and Bodiam (below). And in between the two, we relived the 1066 Battle of Hastings at the actual site, just outside the small village of Battle that has grown up there since.
Next day, I was in California!