Found, and irresistible

I may have given some hint over the past couple of weeks that we're trying to do something about the loft while we can still negotiate the ladder, on the grounds that old people really shouldn't have to stand on one foot as they hunt for things because there isn't actually enough room for two feet on the floor at once ... Well: yesterday Mr PB informed me that he'd come across a rather splendid photo of my parents, lying in one of the many boxes of photos that are the result of the obsession of both of them with taking photos. My father used a Leica 2, my mother a Rolleiflex, and the hundreds of prints I now hoard were mostly developed and printed by my father in his darkroom.

This photo, however, was clearly taken by someone else, and not, as in a previous photo I blipped, by my father's friend Sam, with whom he shared a truck in the desert war. It remains one of the few photos I have of my dad in his young days, and is very much the man I remember. They were on their way to the wedding of my mother's youngest sister in 1940, though we can't think where it was taken, and my father is wearing the morning suit which I am sure he wore to my wedding exactly 30 years later. He would be 32 in 1940, and because of his age wouldn't enlist in the RAF till a year or so later. My mother would be 29. I love this photo - they're so full of energy and purpose, these two formidable young people, and they're in the early stages of a war that would part them for three years without any respite. It fairly puts pandemic mask-wearing into perspective ...

Apart from burrowing in the loft, I actually got round to making some rather good bottom-of-the-fridge soup for lunch, and we had a walk without any rain despite threatening clouds. We watched a wonderfully athletic little red squirrel, more black than red except for face and tail, leap across the Loch Striven road via the highest branches of two trees, and several dark-coloured herons took off as we approached. 

I'm going to post two extras of the walk: one of Inverchaolain Church, now sold privately, and its ancient graveyard, carpeted in gold,  with its marvellously lichened stones, and one of the view up the loch taken from the wild camp site that I think might be of interest to my intrepid blip friends with camper vans!