Gallery: Here come the girls

This week’s gallery theme is Here come the girls. What a great theme. Here are some of the girls who are important to me. (There are, of course, others, but I don’t have easily accessible photos of them!)

This is me, my American cousin Sally Anne (who now lives in Ireland) and my cousin Sunny (who now lives in America). We were about 13 here, I think, though Sally is a couple of years older. Sally was over for a visit and we both went to stay with Sunny for a few days. I tried to persuade them to go to the Radio 1 Roadshow in Skegness, because I thought Sally would like it as she was American. No idea about my logic there!

I think this is shortly before Sunny and I both got heavily into Madonna and started wearing fingerless gloves and big silver crosses. Now, that was fun.

The lady in the middle is Granny Mary. She passed away a long time ago, now (26 years I think) and is still very much missed by us all – even those, like my sister, who never met her. I like to think I inherited my love of jazz from her.

This is Granny Goddard holding Rosemary when she was a baby. She’s long overdue a visit and hopefully I’ll rectify that at half-term. Although she’s only just over an hour away by car, it takes a whole day to visit by train (about 3 hours each way, including walking to and from stations at each end) which means school holidays are the only time we can do it (Sunday trains don’t make it feasible). She is a Great Great Grandmother, which is pretty amazing and she’s a true matriarch.

Here I am with my mum, back in my home-schooled days. It always amazes me what she gave to me in those days – teaching me, helping me, talking to me, taking me off round Europe to Esperanto conferences. And she still gives – these days looking after Eleanor every weekday from 9 to 3, so I can work.

This is my oldest friend. We’ve been friends since she was born (I’m about 6 weeks older than her). We were like sisters for many years and I still think of her and her parents as family. We don’t see each other very often and are both too busy to chat on the phone much, but that doesn’t matter. Because we’ll always be friends and pseudo sisters.

And this is me and my sister a good while back. There are 12 years between us, so we didn’t grow up having the traditional sibling relationship, but I think perhaps this makes what we have now even stronger. We’ve been through a lot together and will probably go through a lot more over the years. She’s my best friend after Chris and I turn to her these days for comfort, laughter and cuddles. She only lives round the corner but we don’t see enough of each other due to differing timetables. Which is a big shame.

And, last but absolutely not least …

… these are now the two most important girls in my life and no doubt will always be so.

Please update your blogrolls/links/whatever to the new address: http://www.wahm-bam.org Thank you! The old feed automatically redirects, but it would be nice (if you have the time/inclination/know-how, of course) if you could change your feeds to point to this one (click the RSS posts link in the top, right-hand corner of the blog). Thank you again. (This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to get back in the Tots100. Nothing whatsoever.