Paradise Garden about to become a Golden Memory

Well, after eleven months of my having started work near Blackpool, Hillside Cottage has been sold. Contracts have been exchanged and Completion Day is Wednesday, July 28. Before then, we have the packing team here for two days to put our posessions into boxes on Tuesday and Wednesday of the coming week. Then, their colleagues arrive the week after to start removing it all to storage for a few weeks or months - it will take them two days to complete their work, too.

I have just about come to terms with leaving here, but at least I will have two posts on this blog to remind me of how it was: Hillside Cottage and Paradise Garden. But I am still very sad . . .

Anyway, let's look on the bright side, at least we will be able to look for a new home unfettered by the need to sell our own.

Also, the move has given me, in particular, the opportunity to re-find lots of old photographs, postcards and historical documents to put in my blogs. I've done a fair bit of scanning recently so that I can write some posts and set them to publish at intervals over the next few weeks. I am particularly looking forward to sharing, for example, the images I took in a 19th century sailors graveyard at Comfortless Cove on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic, a colourful collection of early 1900s humorous Allotment Gardening postcards and much, much more.

Talking of boxes, I have recently scanned a number of family negatives - about 100 - that been stored in an envelope for decades. I had never ever seen them as photographs and I was stunned to find they dated from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Anyway, here is one of them, a photograph of me having a close encounter with a cardboard box in 1950 in Cyrenaica! Just look at my hair! Eek!