A long way from home ...

Seventeen and a half years ago, in the first year of our joint retirement, we kept a promise and made a journey to New Zealand, to spend a month with a dear friend who had left Dunoon to live near his family. We knew when we left home that grey February morning that Edgar had been ill since the previous summer; a doctor who was a mutual friend had warned us not to leave our visit too much longer, but we were not to know that Edgar would in fact die the day after we arrived back in Dunoon. 

While we were living in Cromwell, in South Island, we became firm friends with Hilary and Alan, a third of Edgar's family, who lent us an amazing car (a Bighorn!) for the whole of our stay and took us to the airport when it was time to leave. And we've not seen them since - seventeen and a half years ago. Now they are roughly the same ages as we were when we last me, and we're ...older, and this morning found me waiting anxiously outside church before the service wondering if we'd recognise each other.

I needn't have fretted. And from the moment they swept up beside me in the car park to the time when we waved them off back to their hotel eight hours later we barely drew breath and it was as if we'd only said goodbye last week. They appreciated all the things I find best about church (Edgar had been a priest here in his retirement); Hilary knew my bestie from her childhood in another church and we all had coffee together afterwards; I'd booked a table in a local coffee house for lunch so that the blethering wouldn't be interrupted. (That's where I got one of the staff to take the photo above). After that we all got waterproofs and headed off down to Toward for a walk in the cool dampness - appreciated by our visitors because they've been spending time in Europe and England and now live in Australia and seem to have been hot for a very long time.

They've opened up a host of memories for us, memories which I've been revisiting since they left. (If you're interested, you can find them on my blog, Blethers, which I've neglected since Blipping became such a thing in my life). As I sit here yawning and blipping, I can almost feel what it was like to blog from Edgar's laptop in his study in the dark of a Cromwell night, to go out and look at the unfamiliar stars before going to bed on the other side of the globe. I've had a simply lovely day, and I'm completely exhausted.

I'm so glad they came.