Meeting up with my cousin Tony

It is has been very busy all weekend. Helena finished work at tea time on Friday, and we went to celebrate with a Winstones ice cream up at their factory on Rodborough Commonher. We joined the throng sitting on the ancient grassland beside the shop as many Stroudies have been doing for decades. Apparently this year they are celebrating eighty years of ice cream making here.

Then we have been sorting and tidying the house and garden to leave it in a reasonable condition for our friends who are coming to Bomble sit and have a holiday in Stroud. We are going to the West Highlands of Scotland in the morning to catch up with Helena's family and have a summer holiday ourselves.

My sister Rosie came to stay yesterday, so that we could all go to watch the broadcast of the latest 'The Scottish Play', acted and directed by Kenneth Branagh, live last night from the Manchester Festival. It was a beautiful evening to drive to the cinema in Cheltenham, across the Cotswold plateau through its fields and woodlands. The play was pretty good too, and we are big fans of these live performances in cinemas if you can't get to the real thing. In fact very few could get to the play itself as numbers were very limited.

Today we went to Brokenborough, a small village near Malmesbury, just across the county border in Wiltshire. We were meeting Rosie's and my cousin Tony, who emigrated to Australia as a '£10 pom' in 1963, and we hadn't met him since. His mother and our father were brothers, all now sadly passed away, and Tony had come with his wife Christine for a good holiday in England Scotland and a bit of Europe. Luckily their daughter Rebecca was able to come today too as she is finishing a work placement in London as a solicitor, before returning to Melbourne in a few weeks time

They have been staying with another Tony, and his wife Laurie, their English friends who they had met through their children's school exchange a long time ago when Rebecca came to stay with them. We only had a couple of hours to chat over a good pub meal, but we found out that our cousin is going to Scotland this week as well so we plan to meet at Helena's mother's house on Loch Etive next weekend so we can catch up further. There is a lot of family history to hear and unravel!

Tony took a picture of me with his Sony CyberShot, (I think) and recounted the tale of how he entered a magazine competition, wrote the required 50 word blurb, and then later received a call to say that he had won the camera, (still working now), and would he like to fly from Melbourne to Chamonix in France, to fulfil the terms of the competition blurb and pick the camera up! Yes, please!! Christine went too. I shall start entering competitions from now on.

I liked this picture of cousin Tony and Helena (aka Woodpeckers) best of all from today's bunch. I want to celebrate our meeting again 'after all these years'.

'After all these years' is also the name of one of my favourite songs by T-Bone Burnett, which you can hear here, if you are so inclined.