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A nice relaxed day in Cheddar with my family, thinking about the past and future, but enjoying the present.
We'd talked a bit about Pompeii over breakfast in a cafe and my dad had produced a fridge magnet of the little known
Cheddar brooch (that for some reason he keeps in his pocket) and explained how it was found by a local metal detectorist. I then took the kids to look at the ruins of the chapel and the concrete markers showing the pillars of the medieval hall that are in the grounds of my own school.
Like his dad, Ernie seems fascinated by history and the possibility of buried treasure and he was very keen to get a metal detector so we could find a treasure chest. And when we got back to my parents he wanted to start digging for gold. I had been similarly obsessed with this idea about 50 years ago in this exact garden (I thought I'd found a carving of a prehistoric goddess in one of my digs, but my primary school teacher speculated that it was just a piece of melted plastic). Ernie dug up a little patch of soil and found two tiny bits of china and some orange pot and loads of stones that he was convinced were once part of a Roman wall and one stone had lines on that he said were drawn by a caveman. Not many archaeologists find so much stuff in the first hour of digging, from so many time periods. He's a natural. I am going to help him dig up a proper metre square tomorrow at the back of the garden to see if we can find something that will make us millionaires. And help with history or something, obviously.
Both kids are being delightful for their grandparents - Ernie, excited and loquacious and mainly talking imaginative nonsense and Phoebe sarcastic and funny.
Not sure how the fifty years since I was their age has passed so fast and as always it's funny to pass landmarks that create memories that seem fresh rather than decades old, or to pass places where the landmarks are erased - we're staying in a holiday cottage which wasn't here when I lived here - it used to be a field with a donkey in it. I hope they found the donkey somewhere nice to move to.
This series of RHLSTP has thrown up some pretty interesting interviews, but perhaps the most fascinating subject of all has been the brilliant Lemn Sissay, who is on the book club today. I found it a profound experience researching and then meeting this remarkable man. We were born weeks apart but couldn't have had more different upbringings and yet there was a kinship there as we recognised something of ourselves in the other.
Do listen to this one if you can.
