Cousins on the slide

It's a naff photo, because I was shooting into the sun on a bright evening, but here we see my niece Jezreel and her cousin Zina at play after youth club at Ampney Crucis. Jezzie is coming down the slide, and Zina is the one hanging upside down.

They had only met once before, when they were four and five, and they got on well then. Today there was no separating them. My sister Kate and I went over to Ampney Crucis, where our cousin Fiona lives, after work, and the kids went off to youth club on the school playing field. We stayed behind chatting, then walked up to meet them, and they continued to play long after youth club was finished. It was a poignant meeting, because they are at the same age (7 and 8) as Kate, Fiona and I were when we all played together in the grounds of our big house in Co Dublin. Then Fiona and her brothers Duncan and Alasdair were suddenly whisked away (they went to live in England) and we did not meet up with them again until we were all teenagers in Scotland, the day that Elvis died. After that, though, we managed to meet again every year, either in Argyll or Camberley, where Fiona and family ended up.

We walked back to Fiona's cottage in the setting sun and her husband, Stephen, who is a wine merchant, plied us with some excellent wine. Jezzie asked if she could sleep over, and eventually Kate and I headed back home, via the Stroud Brewery at Thrupp, where on Friday nights they serve local ale, and fabulous pizzas. We had a Vive La France pizza, with Pont L'Eveque cheese.

I have only just realised that it was, of course, the 70th anniversary of the D Day landings, and that was the significance of the Normandy cheese! Clean Steve and I, and my other sister TMLHereandThere and her husband Nicky, have visited the D Day Landing beaches at Arromanches and beyond. It is impossible not to be moved by the scale of the operation, and the success that it was, but also by the sadder stories told by the graves of the many 18 and 19 year olds of many nationalities in the myriad military cemeteries.