Jacquelynn Luben's Blog

What Grandpa did next

What Grandpa did next

When Grandpa Michael was a little boy, there was a war on, and it wasn’t very safe to live in London, so Grandpa’s mother took him and his sister and brother to the country.
They lived near the train station, in a village called Wellington in Somerset.
Gramps used to go onto the platform with his friends, to watch the trains go through. They each had a notebook with all the possible engine numbers printed in it and they would tick off the number that they saw on any engine that passed through, hoping to spot as many different ones as possible.

I looked out of the window on Tuesday, expecting to see signs of devastation, but everything in the garden was intact. Two of our neighbours had trees down - one crashed down on their conservatory, and the other one had a tree blocking their exit.

On the whole we've been very lucky, bearing in mind we are close to Guildford, where part of the town centre was flooded. Still, we've already had our bad luck, when our 43 year old Bramley apple tree came down in St Jude's Storm - at the end of October.

I was inspired to send off an article this week to Best of British, about the storm of 87. It will be interesting to see if they take it on. They are including a short article of mine in their February edition.

Time to stop now; I've come to the computer without doing any work, and though it may be Boxing Day, there are still things to be done. OH was going to go out to a job today, but found their was no train going in that direction. I had ambivalent feelings about this, the first being that in his absence, I would have set the heating to stay on all day, and watch Downton Abbey in the afternoon. Still, at least I don't have to ferry him to the station - and we will probably still watch Downton.