Blurred History

Here's a slightly blurred photo of a children's tea party in 1966, the year that even non-football fans remember as the year that England won the World Cup.

We were staying in a cottage in the Duddon Valley in the Lake District.


The little boy on the left in the blue jumper is my cousin Robert - he's actually the son of my mother's cousin, but the relationship always felt much closer than that. The earnest-looking one with all the hair, wearing the white top, is me, since you ask.

Here's Robert again, on the left - oh yes, that's me in the orange jumper, I grew into those teeth eventually. My mother and baby brother Michael are also in the photo, and we're looking at a black lamb which had wandered into the cottage.



And here is Robert again, wandering across the lawn having appropriated one of my dolls, watched by his father, with the beautiful Lake District mountains in the distance:



Robert - known to some as Bob, to others by his middle name Harry, and to some as H - died today, from cancer, age forty-seven, leaving a wife, two daughters, a little grand-daughter, his mother, his brother and sister-in-law, and a whole extended family who will all miss him.

Including me.

I am so very glad that we saw him a week ago in Barrow-in-Furness, whilst collecting the wedding cake on the way to Emily and Gareth's wedding. He was thin, but very much his usual self personality-wise.

I can't make sense of something like this - in my head it's blurred, like the photograph. But all my memories of him are good ones.