May
02
It has been more than a month since I wrote an entry for Wrightaboutnow. I think one of the things that surprised me the most has been the reaction I got from so many of my regular readers. To those of you who wrote to encourage me to write again, who sent messages about how much you had missed reading it – I just want to say thank you. Writing this blog has become an important task for me. It’s about more than what I believe my readers get from it, it’s about the sheer pleasure I get from writing.
It has been an incredible month weather-wise, and even though the blog has not been written, you can be sure that we have been active and busy, so sit back, and get comfortable as you plunge back into a trip through the past month.
This blog starts back at Easter weekend. Somehow I still like to mark the time here by “the firsts”, like “the first Christmas” and in this case, “the first Easter”. We celebrated Easter with Tracy and the family. The cousins all enjoyed an Easter-egg hunt on Ken and Lauren’s farm. 
Ken and Lauren are another ex-South African family who live on the most beautiful farm next door to my sister-in-law. The farm has a lake, the most amazing gardens, views over a small valley, deer and geese abound, and the weekend that we were there, the garden was covered in daffodils.
We ended off the Easter-weekend with a trip to Aldeburgh in Suffolk on Easter Monday, with Steven, Melanie, and Duncan. Aldeburgh is a beautiful, typical UK seaside resort, with a long pebble beach, ice-cream vans, and colourful shops, old washed up fishing boats and quaint little stores tucked away down narrow little alleys. It was a cold, windy day and we walked to the Martello tower at the end of the pier. Jenna loved the time she got to spend with Meg. Meg is Duncan’s Springer spaniel and Jenna absolutely loves the time she gets to spend with that “personality filled” dog. 
After lunch we drove from Aldeburgh to the ruins of Leiston Abbey. Leiston Abbey was founded in 1182. The beautiful thing about this abbey is that you can see exactly how the old building may have looked in its glorious heyday. So much of the ruin is still standing and you can really get a sense of people walking through the arches and doorways, all those years ago. 
From Leiston Abbey we drove further north to Southwold. By now it was really freezing. Standing on the Southwold pier felt as if the wind could slice right through you, and then we saw a youngster strip off to his costume and head into the sea. Nothing like a little bit of perspective, I tell you. This beach was wonderful because Jenna got to bury her little feet in the real sea-sand. So many of the beaches here are covered in pebbles, so when you do find those treasures of real soft sea-sand you just want to run to it and feel it against your skin.
During the final week of the school holidays I took Mitchell and Jenna to Hastings, on the south east coast. It was a beautiful sunny day and we managed to fit in a trip to the 
Aquarium, a trip up the funicular railway with a breathtaking view from the top of the hill, a walk through the smugglers caves, and a real “junk-food, slap-dash, burger and chips at a seaside store” lunch. The smugglers caves were an absolute gem. The stories and the way they are presented, the realism and the true sense of how it must have been in those days were just incredible. I can’t wait to go back to Hastings, there is still so much that we still want to see and do there.
I also took Mitchell and Jenna into London during the holidays to visit the Natural History Museum. Jenna had not seen been there and she had also not seen the Science Museum. We wondered through a truly packed museum with so much to see and experience. The one benefit of the Natural History museum however, is also its biggest draw-back. Almost every exhibit in the museum has an interactive station where the children can play and do activities to learn more about what they are seeing, but this slows down your pace through the museum. The hall with the exhibition of mammals was undoubtedly my favourite. The massive blue whale which stretched from one side of the hall to the other was just something incredible to see. After we had been through the museum we met Melanie and Duncan for a walk through the science museum. We didn’t have all the hours in a day that it needs to do a complete walk-through, so we took the children straight up to what is called “The Launch Pad”. 
Here the children are free to play and experiment on everything from magnetism, light, heat, water, building, air, forces,…. you name it. I was so surprised with Jenna’s reaction to it all. She absolutely loved it. Mitchell has been to Launch Pad before, but for Jenna this was like a magical world. We ended our day with a walk through Hyde Park, once Steven had finished work. From a beautiful stroll along the Serpentine, to a game of frisbee on the lawns, and even Mitchell sitting down on a wet duck-dropping, it was a perfect end to the school holidays. The Hyde Park gardens are a most incredible sight at the moment with colours and patterns that you just simply have to see to believe.
The return to school meant a return to the daily routine of sport and activities. Mitchell’s cricket has got off to a big start for the season now and he is captain of the team at school. He also plays for the Bidborough Colts team. I enrolled Jenna at a horse-riding school in Hildenborough and her first lesson is on Saturday. I think the excitement it will bring this week, will mean that she will probably not sleep a wink. On the flip-side, the parents of the beginner-riders have to walk the horses on the reins while the children are riding, so I may have unwittingly enrolled MYSELF there too.
We have had weeks of the most pleasant, sunny, blue-sky days. I had started to wonder if the rain would ever come back, then this weekend the heavens finally opened up. I have seen flowers and colours in plants in the past few weeks that I never dreamed existed. Purples and blues like you have never seen before. In the forests, the blue bells have opened up and created a carpet under the canopy. The crocuses gave way to the daffodils, and the daffodils have given way to the tulips, every tree, and every shrub has come alive in the warm sunny weather. Parks have filled up with people again and tables on the pavements outside the pubs are filled with people enjoying the late setting sun. The sun sets around 20:30 at the moment.
One of the funniest things to have come out of the past few weeks was a story Mitchell related to me about school. It started off when he was eating a sweet (similar to a wine gum) in the canteen at school and he dropped it on the floor. He simply did what he would have done back home and bent down, picked it up, dusted it off and ate it! At Hudson the children had what was called the 10 second rule. As long as they picked it up within 10 seconds of it landing on the ground, it was considered edible. Well! This was just like the end of the world for the British kids sitting around him! He simply looked at them and said there was no greater number of germs on that floor than on anything else they had touched and then used their hands to eat their food. But this was not to be the end. Mitchell has been asked repeatedly by some of the boys to give them his treats from his lunchbox, like the yoghurt-covered biscuits that I pack for him. So now his strategy is simply. When they ask him for his food, he looks at them, says nothing, calmly bends down and touches the food lightly to the floor, stands up, and then says: “Is this what you want to eat?”. With screams of “you savage” they run away. He has now decided to do a presentation to his class on the way children from poor, disadvantaged countries will eat the food from a tip-site in order to survive. I have never stopped my children from putting things in their mouths that had been on the floor. When they were babies they would crawl around and pick up everything from the floor, the soil, the back garden and eat it. They have survived, they are incredibly fit and healthy and they have strong immune systems.
In a few weeks time Mitchell will be spending a week in France. I can’t wait for him to experience this. The owners of the house we are living in have decided to settle in Australia and are putting the house on the market, so house hunting has begun in earnest again…
Here’s to the long days and the late-setting sun, to the flowers and the colours and a true sense of the circle of life.
