Tuesday 28 April 2009

Easter . . .

Seems an awfully long time ago now.

I spent it, as usual, in Sandhurst with my parents, and SD#s 2 and 3 and the dog came too. And we enjoyed a relaxing but unremarkable time, at least weatherwise - there was no Easter snow this year!

Easter egg hunt. The children are far too old for this now, but the tradition persists.
The tall circular basket was made by my grandmother's cousin George, who was partially sighted and had learned basket-making at school as an alternative to the only other trade then deemed suited to the visually impaired - piano tuning.
I used to fill this and a couple of his other child-sized baskets with primroses and violets, gathered in the woods around my ancestral homes of Odiham (see also here) and Greywell. This was long before the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 outlawed the picking of many species, which led to a change in attitudes to the picking of wild flowers in general - what was once a simple country pleasure came to be regarded as an act of vandalism, so we desisted forever. Sad to say, however, the fragrant copses in which my sister and I spent many a happy hour with our mother, gathering choice blooms as Easter offerings for our grandmothers, have long been lost to housing developments and bypasses anyway, so our new-found conservationist spirit was in vain on that front at least.



Looking across the (other) River Blackwater) from Berkshire into Hampshire.



The Easter bunny gets lost in the woods (sad or what?!)


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