Good grief, I can hardly believe I have gone for so long without writing anything here! I can't quite think how this has come to pass, but will try to catch up again and return to the present.
To carry on from where I left off, on June 6th we left our lovely Oxted home and went back to Manchester.
This is the back of our Oxted home. Needless to say, it isn't all ours. It was a country house that was built in the 1920's and has been converted into a number of apartments.
We needed to go back to Manchester to carry on helping our son and daughter-in-law. As well as this, we cleared our storage and we hired a van and some men and brought the majority of our possessions down to Oxted on June 16th. We only stayed long enough to unpack, and for me to attend a Directors' meeting on 18th then went back up to Manchester to continue up there.
We were fairly busy, but managed to take time out for a quick family visit to Dunham Massey
We were reasonably lucky with the weather; we had seen rather a lot of rain, but managed to find a better day for our expedition. Our grandson was not too impressed by buildings, but he enjoyed running about in the gardens and he liked the ducks and swans.
We drove back to Oxted on July 1st to get ready for my family visiting from Australia. We managed to get our house clean and tidy and ready to receive visitors by the time they arrived on July 5th.
We picked them up about 5pm and brought them back for supper. On both Friday and Saturday I went up to London with them, though I didn't accompany them on all their sightseeing - on Friday I ran them along the Thames from London Bridge to the Tower of London for some London photos, before going with them to meet someone for lunch. I didn't visit Buckingham Palace with them or Madam Tussaud's but I met them afterwards and went with them for a visit to have supper with another member of our family. Paul came too, driving up which was a mistake, as the traffic was terrible and it took hours. Our visitors were delighted when we drove past Harrods though, and admired the lights
On Saturday, after a bit of sightseeing, we left them to a Harry Potter tour, meeting them at platform 9 3/4 in Kings Cross after the tour. Paul and I had used the interim to visit the the National Portrait Gallery, where we hadn't been for years. After so many years teaching History in the 1980s, I found it interesting to see how many portraits of past English Kings and Queens which are well known from History books are hanging on its walls.
I took my family by bus from Kings Cross to Oxford Street, where they went shopping while we went off to organise somewhere to eat before the theatre. I had booked for 6 of us to see One Man, Two Guv'nors, which is an English adaptation of Servant of Two Masters, a 1743 Commedia dell'arte comedy by the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni. The play replaces the period Italian setting with Brighton in 1963. The easily confused Francis, the 'hero' becomes separately employed by two men — a local gangster and a criminal. Francis tries to keep the two from meeting, in order to avoid each of them learning that he is also working for someone else. The scene where he tries simultaneously tries to serve them supper in two separate rooms, aided by an octogenarian waiter, who has an amazing capacity to fall backwards down stairs and return like a rubber ball, caused most of my party to complain they were sore from laughing. We enjoyed it all very much, and Paul did not even complain about the songs used to cover every scene change which were performed by a skiffle band.
On Sunday my visitors left for further family visits, and we concentrated on getting ready for the visit of our daughter-in-law and grandson.
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