Meanwhile, at Hepworth Towers

I’m declaring my own personal ceasefire, in order to tell you what we’ve been up to (apart from weeping over Gaza).

I have a lot of siblings with a lot of opinions, and one or two of them have opinions on my blog – not that they are willing to post them in the comments section, mark you. One says I shouldn’t post so many photos of my grandchildren, but he hasn’t got any of his own yet, so he doesn’t fully appreciate the allure of the species. The other sibling with opinions says I shouldn’t mention jam. According to her, I have posted on jam too many times.

Well, this is my blog and I shall do what I want.

So here is the obligatory jam-making picture for the blog in July:

Jam-making is part of our summer. We have five blackcurrant bushes and they are impossibly fecund, and people who are jam connoisseurs – and don’t regard that pink/red sugar solution you buy in the shops as jam – they beg for our jam. My sax teacher is one, my daughter’s father-in-law is another, my eldest granddaughter is another

and last but not least is my sibling with the opinions on the pics of the grandchildren.

So far this year we have made 53 jars of jam and there are more blackcurrants to pick.

Another thing that happened is that I put away the almost finished patchwork until the winter, and I got out my screenplay to work on:

I got my hair dyed – just a streak of turquoise (and no doubt there’ll be opinions flying around about that as well):

And Dave has been making a stained glass window for the landing. Too many years ago he was given a dozen windows from a 1930s bay:

And he has been storing them behind the porch ever since. This summer he realised what he should do with them – make them into a landing window that we only have up in the winter when the landscape and the garden are dingy and drab. His working on the project temporarily got in the way of the table tennis

but hey, look at the end result -