Old

What a range of options I considered for Tara's gallery this week. It could be my expanding range of lotions as potions to try to keep aging at bay (this is not huge, i made it to 40 with Simple moisturiser as my entire beauty regime). It could have been the pic of my Mum with her blond plaits as a school girl that i find strangely disturbing. Then I realised the obvious:

This is a pic of our cottage from when we had just bought the cottage. It was an emotional purchase - it fluttered puppy dog eyes at us (if you can imagine a building doing that). It was us or dereliction and we had to save it from that fate. We left our comfortable West London flat for our place in the burbs, complete (or should I say incomplete) with no heating, hot water or inside loo. A generous word for it would be grim. Over the years we striped back generations of dubious shades of paint, lovingly restored beams, reroofed using original clay peg tiles but not before we sorted out inside facilities. It is a labour of love, but it is far from over.