Hopes and dreams

Josh is getting ready to harvest the first vegetable crops from his embryonic business - "The Veg Shed". Despite the dismal spring and early summer, he has sugar snap peas and various other crops ripening now.  It's a testament to his hard work that he's produced anything at all from a windswept field on an exposed ridge in North Sheffield.
His marketing plan may turn out to be a stroke of genius, or it may not prove viable at all - we'll see. In a blend of his trademark upcycling style and flexible use of online resources, he's planning to create a mailing-list of clients who'll be updated each week on what's available. They'll pay online and will get a code for a collection point near where they live (the prototype is my main today, sited in Josh and Ruth's front garden).  At the moment this will all be very small-scale, as it's still at the 'proof of concept' stage.  It's modelled, in some respects, on the approach he used successfully in the dairy business he used to run in North Oxfordshire. As ever, I'm full of admiration for his sheer determination. And I'm looking forward to picking up some tasty sugar-snap peas soon.
The three extras are three moments from a typical Wednesday afternoon for me. Poppies glimpsed by a wall on the way to Eben's school; a pensive (and/or weary?) fellow grandparent waiting in the playground at pick-up time; a quiet moment in the swimming-pool before the start of Eben's weekly lesson.