with the picture above?
Well, the answer is that they're all of the same room.
Today I had the surreal experience of being invited to see the changes that the people who bought my parents' house have made. Above, you can see my parents' dining room, as it was. The new people have changed it into their kitchen, put a line of units where the fireplace was and blocked off the window, which is currently a wall with "Congratulations Daddy" adorning it. To the right, where you can't see it, they've knocked through a little passageway into the butler's pantry, and the wall between the butler's pantry and the kitchen, and made the butler's pantry's window into a glass door to light their kitchen.
It was all very very odd indeed. It was my parents' house and yet it wasn't.
The pictures immediately below show the sitting room as it was...
and above, as it is now. I thought the mantelpiece was rather nice before, but there we are. Tastes vary.
The new owners were happy for me to take some photos to show the family, but I didn't like to do this in any great detail, so they're not really effective as before and after photos. And the walls in the photo above are actually quite a dark mushroom colour, though they look green here (shades of the blue and black dress making headlines a few days ago).
I feel... quite stressed and a bit disorientated but ... it was very kind of the young lady to invite me. And the lovely thing is that they've given their little girl the middle name of May, which is my mum's name, because they thought that my mum was such a sweet old lady. (They might not have, I realise, if her name had been something horrible. But still. I wish I could tell Mum!)
The British Mother's Day is coming in a couple of weeks and the shops are making the most of this marketing opportunity. It's quite hard when you no longer have a mother and you keep being reminded of this fact. But of course this must be a very common experience.
Ah well. Such is life.
