Because we've all had enough of...

...the white sh*te stuff I thought I'd have a rummage through the albums and see if there were any cheery sunny images.

Hmm. The trouble with living in this sort of climate is that were one to rely on sunny days the album would be very thin indeed. That narrowed the selection process down considerably. (I've got lots of us all looking huddled, soaked and stiff-upper lipped under glowering skies.)  Next exclude the pictures of those folks who might not wish to find themselves winged for all eternity into cyberspace. Ditto buildings, vehicles, flora, fauna and assorted dogs, cats and hens and well - the choice is meagre. I'm also a little concerned that some of the pictures after only a quarter of a century in a seldom opened album are looking very washed out. While they are not ground-breaking photographs they are a personal record and I for one value them - perhaps our lads will, one day, too.

So what do I have to brighten the hour? Ah yes - the boy in a bucket:

Paxos certainly. Probably 1987. Why he got the hump I can't remember, but it was so bad he had to put an olive oil can on his head. I've just enlarged and enlarged and enlarged the picture to see if I can recognise the fruit on the tree behind - and no I can't. How lovely though to have my little boy so big again I could almost hug him. Happy days.

Next up: New Year 1987. Can't go to the tropics? Then bring the tropics to a cocktail party near you. Here the Glam.Ass. is having a good time. Out of shot he is also wearing shorts. We did know how to have fun and get momentous hangovers....Somebody out there will remember the occasion. The borrowed palm tree was made for a primary school production of Joseph - and somebody else might remember making it. Again, happy days.

Fortunately children are no longer dressed like this - or perhaps if they are a little more attention has been paid to the styling and cut. Here I am getting a taste of poultry keeping in 1955 at Moreton Hall - at what was then the Warwickshire Institute of Agriculture - in a field known as The Park. I appear to have elven ears but blowing up the photos reveals the tails of two hens which must be pecking at some interesting spot some distance behind. (A photographic faux pas similar to the tree apparently growing out of the subjects head.) Hardly a sunny idyll but I've no reason to suspect that these were anything but...happy days.

Come summer and a sunny day the garden of our old house would invariably look like this. This must have been a fantastic summer because the grass of the lawn is brown and parched; the weather warm enough for a boy or two to sleep out at night. Bicycles and a 'soap-box jallopy', tent, climbing frame, rope, ramps and general detritus - the stuff of active lads. There is a pen with hens too which housed 3 or 4 birds which had been hatched out at school. I see our garden growing too - it's relatively young here. I could step into this picture with ease and even after all these years find every inch familiar to all the senses. For all its ordinariness I find it most affecting, it being so close and yet no longer within my grasp. Gone forever.  I'm not sentimental or nostalgic; wouldn't go back to the suburbs in a hurry - but the thought of no return to these golden afternoons tears a hole in my heart. What appears to be a picture of a scruffy back garden is for me the sunniest of images.

Ah well. Slam the album shut. Here and now is good and the crazy conflicting weather systems which are jostling for position over the UK will eventually sort themselves out. Spring will come and the swallows soar once again over the dingle.....