Isn't it nice, sometimes to "revisit" experiences from our youth and childhood, and often it's having your own children or grandchildren that provides these opportunities.
I noticed that local new dad Steve McKinley was very vocal about these age-old joys to the "Parenting Sub-Desk" of Onion News's Local "Worcestershire Headlines" Desk.
Well, when you're 77, the thought of being only 69 seems really young, you know, and I mean impossibly young haha!!!
How time flies !!!
[Aren't you both looking the wrong way for a start? - Ed]
Well, Lois decides she's going to make a second-ever visit to Croome this morning, and she's going to be taking with her our daughter Sarah and Sarah's twins Lily and Jessica - the family moved back to the UK in May last year after 7 years in Australia.
And isn't it worth all the money in the world to have children or grandchildren to give these new experiences to, at the same time reliving the wonders of our own childhoods, and of our own long-gone experiences as young parents?
Fabulous stuff, aren't they, all these memories. They're something money can't buy, and you take them with you for the rest of your life.
The Jessop family are going away for the weekend to a "glamping site" (luxury campsite) to celebrate son Robin Jessop's imminent wedding to his brash, abrasive girlfriend Cherry, and the youngsters are all calling it a "hag do".
Luckily, brash bride-to-be Cherry has a neat solution for Amy's problem.
So that's all right then!
Have you ever heard of Croome Court in Worcestershire, dear reader? It isn't a court in the judicial sense, it's just a minor stately home with - like - acres of space all round it - like billions of acres of space, literally!!!
Do you remember its English Tourist Board-inspired slogan "There's plenty of room at Croome!" ???? It's all coming back to you now, isn't it!
flashback to 2017: Channel 5 presenter Anneka Rice visits
Croome Court for the "Secrets of the National Trust" series
Lois and I visited the house and grounds with 4 friends almost exactly 8 years ago, and after we paid our entrance ticket money at the entrance gate, we couldn't help noticing, even then, that the imposing mansion Croome Court was a long way away. a mere dot on the horizon - like, literally!!! - .
flashback to February 2016: a very young 69-year-old Lois and I
strain to see stately home Croome Court, a mere "dot on the horizon",
after we pay our entrance money and step into the grounds
Croome Court dates from the 1640's and it was visited by both King George III, and by Queen Victoria, in their time. It was the subject of the first ever complete landscaping project by famed gardens-designer "Capability" Brown, in 1751. Also, in 1939 Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands stayed here en route to wartime exile in Canada.
In World War II it was even home to a full-scale secret RAF base, complete with a squadron or two of Wellington bombers, and the labs where some of the earliest research into air-defence radar was carried out. Now that's what I call "roomy" haha!
It was quite a cold February day during mine and Lois's 2016 visit, as you can tell from our winter clothing, and later we tried to warm up with a hot drink and a piece of cake in the mansion's modest "tea room".
above - an entry from my Danish blog for February 2016: Lois chats with
our friend Mari-Ann, while Mari-Ann's husband Alf deftly executes
a textbook "photobomb" [Danish: fotobomb] manoeuvre
to front and right of camera
Unfortunately I won't be able to join them, because I've got my "vocab work" to do for the local U3A Intermediate Danish group that Lois and I lead - next meeting on Thursday (yikes!!!!) - but I can look at Lois's and Sarah's photos when they get back about 3:30pm.
flashback to 1983: Lois and I take our daughters Alison (7) and Sarah (5)
to visit Jamestown, Virginia and see buildings surviving from this
first ever English colony in the New World
18:00 Everybody is pretty tired, however, except me, when we all sit down in our new-build home here in Malvern for a CookShop ready-meal, with added vegetables. They've all been walking for miles round and round of Croome "Plenty of Room" Court and its grounds. The atmosphere is noisy and joyous, however, as always, which is nice.
for tea we have a CookShop ready-meal, with added vegetables
19:00 We've still got a couple of days left on our free-trial Amazon Prime membership - I expect Amazon will tell us when it's about to run out. So we find a couple of episodes of "The Worst Witch" - the twins have read all the books, but they haven't seen the TV versions, so within seconds they're completely absorbed in it, which is nice, bless them.
20:30 The twins go to bed, and after Lois reads them another chapter from the classic children's novel "Wind in the Willows", we watch, with Sarah, another episode of the crazy sitcom "Here We Go".
Lois and I hadn't heard of "hag do's". In our young days, just before a wedding, there was normally a "hen night" for the bride-to-be and her female friends, and a "stag night" for the groom and his male friends, but apparently these days there's a gender-neutral outing called a "hag do", for all the men and all the women to go on together.
What madness !!!!
The Jessop family and their friends and family are initially delighted by their arrival at their weekend "glamping" site, but the Jessops' gloomy Scandinavo-phile daughter Amy is not impressed.
But what a crazy world we live in !!!!
[Oh just to go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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