the wedding

I seem to have ended up mostly with pictures of the food, which I'm sure won't surprise any of you. The amount of cheese was... Well, this is only a fraction of it. 

The dessert, a sort of Eton mess type thing:

Post-ceremony ice cream...

Sherlock was very excited about the swords, about getting to hold one, about them cutting the cake with one...pretty sure the swords were his favourite bit. Or the number of people around who were prepared to have mock pirate battles with him using sticks or forks or in one case pieces of cheese. 

There was also a bouncy castle, which we did not get kicked out of. I really thought we might, but honestly there were more adults than kids in it. If you define 'adult' purely in terms of age. It was Spence's idea. I'm not at all surprised. Even Mycroft went in with us for a bit. 

I think both he and Sherlock danced more than we did. There were a number of girls around Mycroft's age who asked him, and Sherlock asked...nearly everyone I think? And danced by himself when no partner was forthcoming. 

And now...it's our anniversary. Seems like quite a nice way to spend it, and I admit I'm very glad L got home in time. No anniversary is ideal when spent apart, but particularly the first one - that didn't seem quite fair. Life isn't, of course, but as Sherlock says: well it should be!

depressing poetry and the garden

Believe It
Joshua Mehigan

Hard to believe that, after all of it,
in bed for good now, knowing you haven’t done
one thing of any lasting benefit
or grasped how to be happy, or had fun,
you must surrender everything and pass
into a new condition that is not
night, or a country, or sleep, or peace,
but nothing, ever, anymore, for you.

... I almost feel like I should apologize for posting that one. Not the most cheerful thing in the world. But it really struck me.

Anyhow. Allotment pictures. The squash is growing. Slowly. The blossoms this year  keep being eaten by something. This is the first one that's made it past the blooming stage, and I feel like I ought to surround it with a small barbwire fence.

And these, finally, are the red Thai beans that Sherlock is so excited about. They're not as long as they're supposed to get, but they're already longer than my hand. And a lovely color, don't you think?

Finally, mulberries. Found while we were out walking. L, is there anything you want to cook with them when you get back, or shall we just piggishly eat them out of hand?

I'm missing my husband already, quite a bit. Sherlock managed to give me the silent treatment this morning for all of an hour for not letting him go with Greg to Ascension Island. Then he gave up in favor of explaining the elaborate cake we were going to bake for his return. He wants it to be shaped like a topographic map of the island...with glitter. 

paris, mainly in the rain

Paris! I actually only have pictures of the Eiffel Tower right now...and to be honest most of the photos we've taken have been of ourselves making ridiculous faces in front of various monuments to send to the boys. Got one back from Mycroft standing solemnly in front of the shop where he works holding an ice cream just out of Sherlock's reach. 

We climbed all of the Eiffel Tower that you can climb... 

I'm quite glad you can't climb all of it. This is from the second tier:

And from the third...

I think we did better than we would have before we started the half marathon training though. Today...rain. Hiding in a church from the raining. Getting briefly naked together as we changed clothes in a church in the rain... And Giverny, very briefly, in between the rain. We'll be home in time for dinner! Probably. Unless we get washed away.

Yesterday, among other things, we did this...

You can see ours a bit to the left of the pink ones. Hopefully it'll be there for many years to come, but part of the Ponte des Artes collapsed earlier this year under the weight, so who knows... 

The other things we did yesterday included a lot of walking and talking and eating, all of which we do at home, but it's different. I've been to Paris before and honestly not liked it all that much - not that I disliked it, but compared to other places it seemed a bit grey. Being here with L makes it seem like an entirely different city. I really can't describe how lovely this trip has been. 

short

Greg's birthday is this week. Wednesday, in fact. I'm reminding him of this because he might want to take some time off. In case he gets a surprise trip somewhere. I'm just saying, it's not out of the realm of possibility. I thought about making it more surprising than this, but I think the destination will be enough.

The boys are going to stay with their mum, or, at least Sherlock is. Mycroft is insisting that he's old enough to stay here on his own. Which I think is fair enough, but that's ultimately his mum's decision, so I'll let them fight it out. It'd certainly be easier for him to get to work from here than from her place.

That's about it from me, except to say that I still have blackberry stains under my fingernails from picking them with Sherlock the other day. They may be permanent.

And I'm adding this in because L just showed it to me... A memorial for the people who died in World War I. Article here.