An unlikely survivor

It's been another beautiful, sunny day.  I caught up on some gardening in the morning. Then Richard and I went for lunch with two friends a couple of streets away.  We sat and ate and chatted... it felt very relaxed.

This evening I'm babysitting for Ruth and Josh, while they meet some friends in a pub nearby. I can't remember the last time they had a chance to go out together without the kids - so this feels pretty special! Richard has stayed at home, as he's hoping to have our regular weekend videocall with Nik, his eldest
son, in New Zealand.

The cup? It's a "Pakistan Railways" cup that I brought back with me after a visit to Pakistan in (gulp) winter 1980/81. I went with Graham, Ruth and Jack's Dad, from whom I separated about 10 years later, when J and R were 7 and 3.  The whole visit was built around the job I was doing in the early 1980s, as a community worker with Mirpuri families in Rotherham.   Those families were very generous in arranging for me and Graham to travel around the areas where their relatives lived, staying mostly in small villages. I've never forgotten that generosity, or the ways in which it changed some of my thinking. 
One family we stayed with in Rawalpindi had connections with Pakistan Railways, and G and I got a ride on the footplate of a steam engine in the shunting yard there.  With the cup as a memento.  Amazingly the cup has survived the ensuing decades of domestic hurly burly.