There are friends and there are friends.
Facebook makes it seem as if ‘friendship’ is as simple as
clicking on a name and – that’s that!
Friends for life- or at least
until another click ‘unfriends’ someone.
I’m happy to see my Facebook friends making comments or
liking a post and some of them are real friends
- friends in the outside world,
people I’ve met in person – or through long correspondence or
emails. People who might be separated sometimes by life taking them
many thousands of miles away but who,
when you meet up again, fit like a comfortable sock, falling straight back into place in your life
and reminding you of just how much you missed them.
We spent this weekend with friends like that - their life
has often taken them miles
away, to different countries,
different experiences, but just recently
they came back to live in UK – just down
the road in fact (well, in contrast to past times!). Close enough for us to go
and visit easily – and hopefully much
more often.
So this weekend I was able to fulfil a l-o-n-g held promise
to show my friend around Haworth and to visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum together. It was a slightly unusual trip to Haworth for two reasons – one that the
sun was shining so ‘Wuthering Heights’ it was not! And two,
we hadn’t realised that we’d be sharing our latest reunion with the crowds who had come to enjoy the annual
Haworth 1940s weekend. So the narrow
Main Street, the park behind the
Parsonage and every one of the
cafés were crowded with soldiers in
uniform, land girls, RAF officers – and the general public dressed up to the nines in costumes that ranged in accuracy from downright
perfect to a passing nod to the idea of 40’s fashion. Great fun – if a little wearing as you tried
to make your way anywhere in the bustling crowds.
The highlight for us – and I’m sure for many people there –
was the flypast of the Spitfire plane, circling low enough over the street to
be seen clearly.
After that we all went back to our friends’ new home for the evening
sharing in the - er ‘delights’ of the
Eurovision song contest ( you need to be
friends to do that!) There was also an
extra surprise for me - extending my birthday celebrations with
the most magnificent cake I have ever
been served. Blending my birthday with the 90th celebrations of HM
The Queen, Keef had created the Imperial State Crown of a cake decorated with incredible accuracy
(we’d been looking at a replica of the actual crown only that afternoon.)
But the actual crown couldn’t have tasted as delicious as
this light fruit cake version. It was
wonderful (well it should be when created by the Cook himself from
Keef Cooks )–
if something of a challenge! The cake itself weighed a ton. We could only manage a smallish portion each –
and the rest of the cake will need to be shared amongst friends who I’m sure will enjoy it every bit as much
as we did.
But at least we managed to walk off some of the calories the
next morning when we went down to
Rodley Nature Reserve where as well as the delights of watching a proud mother sw
an
carry all of her 8 cygnets across the water on her back we were able to watch oyster catchers and the
handsome, elegant herons from pretty close up.
A fabulous weekend
- I send special thanks to my
friends - and the great thing is that
now they live so much closer, we can repeat this again pretty soon.
It's all been worth it, but it's taken time, and I think I've walked more than those 10.000 steps you're supposed to count up in order to keep healthy. 
After a while he woke up - briefly - and had a wash and grooming session
