Sunday 29 April 2018

April. Adventures. Anxiety. ANN!

April has been a strange month. For the first two weeks, we adventured off to France, exploring with Pickle. So much to see and discover, amid mixed weather: a couple of days of persistent rain, some wind, more sunshine and a couple of days of summer-style warmth. Not bad for the month.
Enormous swell off the south coast - perhaps up to twenty feet

Beautiful 'summer's' evening at Rocquaine

Found in the garden centre car park: the latest Lamborghini.  #notinterested 

Pickle's preferred breakfast position

Found in the kitchen: an unusual moth...
 Yet, in the middle of it, some very sad news. My dearest friend, Ann, passed on halfway through the month, finally succumbing to pneumonia after a long and brave battle with lung cancer. Words cannot express how I feel, although I have jotted down some memories here. My new head kindly allowed me the day to attend the funeral. Although it was one of the saddest days I have had for a long tithme, it was good to meet up with her husband Richard and my dear friends Catherine and Mary - the other 'sisters' in our tight-knit group.

Then, back to work. The term has started at full gallop, as usual: always so much to do. A full scale musical production, then straight into our World War Two studies. First off was a trip to the Occupation Museum, a wonderful private collection of all kinds of Occupation-themed artefacts.

The film of the book 'The Potato Peel Pie Literary Society' had just come out, a tale about the Occupation of Guernsey during WW2 by the Germans, so there is a lot of local interest. We spent the last Saturday of the month visiting one of the gun batteries, the Mirus battery in St Saviours. A local organisation, Festung Guernsey, are doing a wonderful job slowly restoring some of the old installations, sharing them with the public. Fascinating to see, through photographs and the remains of the enormous bunkers, the huge German war machine in action. Awe-inspiring engineering.

At home, catching up with friends again through letters and emails, over meals, afternoon tea and on our Thursday nights...lovely.

A full month, too much to take in, really.

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