A Trip Down Memory Lane.

We seem to be falling into a pattern of one day bright sunshine and the next grey turning very wet. Today began grey with rain arriving at midday. Fingers crossed for a sunny day tomorrow when I'm out riding in the hills.

I knew that there wouldn't be cake at the community gardens again today but went anyway. When I got there I found out that it was all off due to everyone being either unwell or busy. I like my routine and it took me a moment to decide what to do. My first thought was to wish that I had brought my camera with me so that I could go for a walk though of course I had my phone with me and could use the camera on that. But then I thought I might as well do some gardening, got myself a trowel and set to weeding one of the vegetable beds. I had just started on a second when the light drizzle began so I emptied my almost full wheelbarrow into one of the compost bins and came home.

When it's very wet the temptation is to just sit and do very little but after a while I motivated myself into doing some piano practice and a few household jobs that I'd been putting off.

And here is the result of one of the possibly time wasting projects I've been doing, a trip down memory lane using Google Street view. While I may not use my phone much I'm a dab hand at the pc and something I've found very useful is being able to use street view to check out new places I'm going to. (I don't think a Satnav is much use when the directions are - the layby after the fisheries with the post box, but street view gets you there.) I also use it to see where friends and family live, that's quite interesting. Lately I've been looking at places I lived to see what I remember and how much they have changed. So for anyone who is interested here are a selection. 

Inside the blue doors were steps leading to the first home I remember in St Ives, Cornwall. It's nice to see that the name of the gallery my mother set up is still there. It may not look much but the steps on the right led straight down to the harbour which was where I as a toddler and all the village children played.

Then we moved to London and for some time we had a room in a flat in one of these grand houses in Paddington. At the time I was mostly at a convent boarding school or down in Cornwall for the summers.

When I was 10 my mother bought this house in Fulham for the sum of £5,000 and this was where she lived for the rest of her life. I can't think why the current owners chose the awful blue and cream colours for the woodwork. My mother was one of the first people in the street to paint everything white and it looked so much better.

Having lived with my mother for a year after we were married Peter and I moved to this then newly built council flat in East London next to a major road leading to the Blackwall tunnel. It was a lovely flat despite the constant roar from the lorries heading down to Dover. When we first moved in the balcony walls and railings were painted white. I went into the kitchen one morning to find workmen outside painting the railings green and the walls salmon, yuck! Guess which flat had the walls restored to white by the next weekend?

A few years later we were able to buy our own home (with the green door above) in Forest Gate, still in London but further out east. it's such a shame that it's so hard for youngsters to buy their own homes nowadays. Just a couple of hundred yards to the left the road opened out onto Wanstead Flats, a large open area with plenty of space to walk the children and dogs. And there instead of a 5ft square balcony we had a 100 ft garden. From there we moved to our farmhouse in the country where we lived for 25 years before downsizing and then moving here to live by the sea in Wales.