A Special Weekend

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 90^th 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.