More holiday snaps

However, on a more upbeat note, here's a balloon floating near our Cotswold cottage. There's no way you'd get me up in one of those, but it looked very pretty and they must have had a great view.

Mr Life and my brother are steam train enthusiasts. Here's my brother admiring an engine in the Lake District which is about to pull this train with us aboard it.

Here are Daughter 1 and her husband, on this train. What nice smiles.

From above the door to the ticket office, some little faces looked down on us - swallows or perhaps swifts?

On our way to the Cotswolds we visited Liverpool to see an exhibition of paintings from the age of steam. We also passed some morris dancers. "They look a bit like steam enthusiasts," said Mr Life, "but slimmer."

A further, Cotswold, train, which we also went on. Don't say I'm not good to you, Mr Life. (But he's good to me too.)

This is Snowshill, a Cotswold house belonging to a rather eccentric architect, who collected - everything you can think of. Pictures, antique furniture, oriental artefacts, bicycles, weaving looms, various other mechanical whatsits, clocks, china - everything in vast amounts. The dusting! He accumulated so much stuff that he bought this house for his collection but actually lived in an adjacent cottage (also with a lot of objects in it but no electricity or heating or anything soppy like that).

He married at 60 (what was the woman thinking of?) and when he died, she moved away and lived in a hotel in beautiful Broadway. I wonder why.