Oh dear. Colin’s new found half first cousin in Australia is starting to worry us! A few months ago they discovered each others existence via a DNA test that Colin uploaded to ancestry.com. The very positive outcome was that after not knowing for a lifetime what had happened to his maternal grandmother (who walked out on his Mum) and her sisters when she was only three years old - turns out to have been the Grandmother of a woman now living in Australia. She was able to send photos of her and fill in some big gaps in our knowledge about her. All started positively but over a few months she has become quite full on, befriending my friends on Facebook and constantly commenting and contacting them. She suggested she was going to book a trip to the U.K. to see Colin and we suggested she wait until we at least chat live online. On Christmas Day she informed us that she had booked a 6-week trip to the U.K. she has made plans and booked some places to stay but basically a week at the start and end of her trip is unallocated. At first we thought she was coming for a few days with her partner but apparently he’s not coming so it’s just her. She didn’t bother to check if we’d actually be at home (not away) and she seems to want to spend a lot of time with us. If this was someone else telling me this, my alarm bells would be ringing at full volume!! We were both up early as we’d spotted her emails so I’m going to tackle this face on and although we’ll agree to hosting her for the first week, I think she can only stay for a night or so over return to Scotland. I’m trying to manage expectations as even our own family don’t stay that long!
Oh well, after drafting an email we both felt a bit better and we’ll tweak it a bit more over the next few days before hitting send. The rest of my day was spent working on the logistics of our trip to Germany on May (perhaps we should change it !).
Then - unusually for us - we headed up town… on a Saturday!! Some time ago a daughter of our friends who we know invited us to her fortieth birthday celebration in a bar at Waterloo. We found the bar and it was packed and very loud. I’m glad we went but I felt very old. This is a shot of us walking back to the station and then post-processed in a film noire style for the ’52 Club’ I am submitting images to on a weekly theme.
