Visiting Aussies (Part the Second)

I was stood in the kitchen on Saturday evening watching a snow-capped mountain slowly make its way from the North towards our house, gradually obscuring the blue sky and sunshine.

Unbeknownst to me, The Builder was sat in the lounge room watching an inky blackness slowly making its way from the South towards our house, gradually removing the blue sky and sunshine.(There is no photo of this phenomenon because I was unaware that it was happening!).

The moment that the two weather systems ran across each other was quite exciting.  From my perspective it looked as though they met over our house, but I suspect it was a much wider event than that - there were reports of interesting weather from all over the local area!  But we definitely got thunder and lightning and torrential rain and hailstones and a road that believed it was a wild river - and a wet and soggy cat who came in from somewhere at one of the moments when the storm had abated a bit.

Very fortunately, the storm had worn itself out by the time we got up on Sunday.  For we were off on an adventure.  We were off to visit some Aussies over in Stockport, near Manchester.

My brother-in-law Ian has a niece living with her husband and young son in Stockport.  He also has a nephew living with his wife in central Manchester.  Their mother happens to be over from Melbourne at the moment visiting.  And it was the small boy's third birthday on Monday.  Fiona (the niece) decided to call a Sunday barbecue so we could mosey on over and see Jane (the mother) and celebrate the Small Boy's birthday.  Freyja was unavailable, because she was in Edinburgh.  Gaz was unavailable because he was working.  But The Builder, Tabitha, Cally and I had no plans for the day so we accepted the invitation and pottered on over the Pennines.

And we had a lovely time.  The sun shone for most of the afternoon. There were other people and a few other children there.  We had our barbecued lunch.  We had a magnificent birthday cake.  The children got to play in the garden.  There was a small bouncy castle which they had found on eBay:

It was all good.  Everyone had to beat a hasty retreat inside when the promised afternoon storms arrived a little early, but by then we were thinking about heading home anyway.  So thank you very much to Fiona for thinking to invite us.

So now we've had one lot of Aussies visiting us and we have been to visit another lot.  Excellent :-)




I meant to say.  Look at our beans and little pumpkin:

And we actually got some peaches from our peach tree this year.  We had to pick them early because the wasps were getting at them, so they were still quite crisp.  it was like eating peach flavoured apples :-D