It’s been that magical moment since I last posted…. when spring breaks. 
The Easter weekend was beautifully hot and still in Dorset, but nonetheless the leaves on the trees were only just coming through. The air was warm and balmy on our morning walks. 
Popping in to see our neighbour Jo on the Friday morning circuit… and her beautiful flowering trees in the garden…
While Charlie had been picking buckets of flowers to bring down to the church.
It was an amazing weekend of still, clear, hot days and warm evenings….
And bright mornings…. the leaves just turning – that magical moment. 
On Saturday evening we went round for drinks with Jim and Nic…. which turned into supper – delicious salmon, cooked on an open fire. 
Charlie’s tulips have been going crazy…
Not as crazy as Charlie…
On Easter Sunday we went for supper with Edward and Jane Hurst. Jane’s garden was looking extraordinary as always, serene in the pink dusk light.
And on Easter Monday, we had another day of tidying and packing and sorting the Parsonage, getting boxes and boxes of stuff ready to move to Scotland in a month or two. Our morning walk was under a grey, flat light, but the heat came through later.
The church roof repairs, to which readers of this blog contributed so generously a year ago, start imminently. 
The garden is looking so beautiful at this time of year. I had to tear myself away on Monday night, to head back up to London…
Where it has been a busy, busy week. I think it’s always around the end of April that one has that feeling of the year flying past quicker than you can imagine.
Walking the dogs in Regent’s Park in the week, clouds of cow parsley, already….
And today, up on Hampstead Heath, brilliant green spring has burst entirely. 
Here’s the strangeness of the blog, which I realise now is as close as I’ve ever got to writing a diary – for ten years now. For some one who hated diary writing, that’s a strange thing. So, I was just looking back to last year, and the year before, to see whether spring was bursting quite so vigorously. It turns out, it was, in its way…. but then I found these two photos from this week last year of Mum, and Charlie, and then of Sibyl as a puppy.
Oh, how I miss her. Time moves on, relentlessly, steadily, majestically – changing all the time, but unchanging as well.
