I arrived in Dorset late-ish on Friday night, at the end of a very long week. There is nothing in the world more happy than being met by Charlie at Dorchester Station at eight in the evening and driving home through summer haze to find the garden looking like a glowing jewel.
Crazy stuff had been happening – which is of course what happens when you go away for ten days in the month of June.
Great shafts of sunshine struck across the garden and the facade of the house.
The meadow and the beech tree glowed.
Mavis gave a quick demonstration of why she won the naughtiest dog in the Dog Show. Although normally she is very good, it must be said.
Charlie has been planting hundreds of foxgloves. This is their first year. I’m wondering what it will be like next?
Mum and Dad were staying and they arrived on Saturday morning. We decided to potter over to Powerstock for lunch in the pub, The Three Horseshoes, which was excellent, as usual. Although the place was curiously deserted – maybe everyone was in the Food and Beer Festival in Bridport?
I’ve always loved this little thatched house opposite the pub. Perfect.
After lunch we explored a little, and popped into the church, which I don’t think I’ve been in since the christening of my godson Gabriel some 8 or 9 years ago now?
It’s an incredibly beautiful building, serene, full of treasures.
Charlie and I loved this windowsill filled with flower jugs.
It is always lovely driving back across Eggardon Hill. 
Back home, the mist and rain was settling in – that has been with us for the rest of the weekend. But the garden has looked extraordinarily beautiful in this soft grey light.
We’ve done very little today. I took Mum & Dad for a little tour of recent projects, in Poundbury and down to Weymouth, where we pottered around the harbour looking as beautiful as ever (in the rain). We got home to a classic English summer’s afternoon.
While we were in Scotland our painter Andy very kindly repainted the kitchen – as I think I may have mentioned might be happening in an earlier blog…. do you remember? Goodbye orange. Hello GLOSS yellow. It is really spectacular – I don’t think I’ve been in such a happy room for a very long time. I’m not sure photographs can quite convey the sense of having floated into the middle of a shiny egg yolk.
You see what I mean? The paint, incidentally, was one of those ones off the Dulux colour chart (with about 5000 colours). We picked one of the brightest yellows, can’t quite remember the code number I’m afraid, but you get the point. Basic is best.
This afternoon, for tea, we met a couple of blog readers, Chris and Mike, who had come all the way from Christchurch NZ to Dorset. I’d spied a comment they had written on the blog that they might be coming, and we got in touch (so you never know! I do read the comments!!) A lovely afternoon chatting and wandering around the village in the pouring rain and realising that it is a very small world indeed.
It’s good to get home when you’ve been away, which I sometimes wonder is the purpose of going away at all. Travel energises the mind and lets you experience wonderful new things; but then you get home and realise that your tiny little corner of this big wide earth is the one you love most of all, and are happiest in. I’ve always felt that, and never more so than tonight, in the Parsonage, with Charlie sitting doing a bit of writing on his laptop and my sitting doing this bit of writing on mine, by the embers of a slowly dying fire, while an autumnal storm rages outside the windows, and Mum and Dad are asleep upstairs, and Mavis is chewing her bone in the kitchen. Home. It’s a powerful, resonating word and it’s never felt better.
