I'm Home!

...and have been since last Wednesday. For the final leg of our journey we flew home in an A380-800 Airbus, one of the biggest aircraft ever built and it was HUGE. We landed at Heathrow and went very quickly through the automated passport control. For non-UK travellers the queues were long - we could see the soldiers drafted in to do the work of the striking border force. Frustratingly having got through passport control so rapidly and being the first people at the baggage reclaim...our suitcases were almost the last out on the carousel!

My mother is at end stage Parkinson's disease. She was so frail when we left in late December I really worried that she wouldn't be around when we returned but she is! We drove back from London on Wednesday and went to my mother on Thursday. We're off to South Africa in just over a week's time so I'll make the most of the times I can get to her as, once again, I don't know what will happen while we're away (for almost three weeks). WhatsApp comes into play. While we were in the far east I video-called my step dad several times so that I could talk to mum. We've seen my mum again today and will go again on Tuesday.

It was a delight to get back to the garden which is just beginning to come to life. Some of the 100 daffodil bulbs given to me by my grandmother 35 years ago are just pushing up and here are one or two snowdrops and more emerging. I managed to get to my shed for day yesterday and continue a bit of daubing (Simon's term) and begin to plan out the first lesson for our return in early March... We're in Devon for a couple of days now with a new camera...maybe I'll put some photos on this blog after a walk tomorrow to the salt marshes and bird sanctuary...