Memory evoking chat

Three cheers. It’s a gloriously sunny day for a change – the first time in ages. Of late you’ve been only too aware of winter’s fast approach. The nights are definitely getting dark earlier, the mornings later. We’ve even had to put some heating on for a while in the evening. Soon the central heating will be going on full time.

After doing the food shopping we went along to our village pub, for an unwind before making dinner. We ended up talking to some of the tourists visiting here, one lot from Kent, another from Sydney, Australia. They both seemed to appreciate our rather quaint village centre & its 10^th century church, one of the oldest in Europe & still in regular use.

The Aussies were struck by how many beautiful stone buildings there are around here. They can’t help thinking it must have taken a lot of brawn to dig it all up to use in building. In Australia a lot of the buildings are wood built. It has to be admitted I think before you could contemplate farming around here, you would have to clear a vast amount of stone to have land you could plant. Even cows prefer something a lot less stony. I suddenly realised why, in the past, so many people raided unused buildings for stone to incorporate in their own houses – it’s just so much easier than digging up new all the time,

We found, too, our thoughts going back to our own visits to Australia. We have fond memories of our two trips. Both times we went we spent some time in Sydney. If we had been younger, and healthier (I was already a wheelchair user by then), we may well have been tempted to emigrate there. The Kent couple had also visited Sydney so there was an overlap in our knowledge.

I often find myself thinking back to our Aussie trips, partly because we have a print entitled “Three Sisters Birdscape”. We bought it in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. Happy memories. These days the idea of such a long flight is too much for us. I don’t expect we will ever visit again except in our imaginations.

The Three Sisters at Katoomba