All part of the family – my mother’s side. Here we have two of my cousins  –  left centre Eddie Potter, who is the son of my Aunt Olive and Uncle Ted, with his wife Christine far left; and Sandy Maxwell, daughter of my Aunt Vi and Uncle Bill, with her husband Alex. Olive and Vi are sisters to my mother. Vi is still alive and living in South Africa with her second husband Richard Crawford. Bill’s surname was Shorten. Olive and Ted have both died fairly recently. This picture was taken at Eddie and Christine’s home in Fencepiece Road, Ilford, during a flying visit by Sandy and Alex.

Weather now is much milder than it has been, but extremely windy today. I went to the memorial service for Reg Brighton yesterday – a very old friend from Surrey Chapel. Packed church. Spoke to some almost equally old friends. Reg was 87.  At the same time Dot went to a funeral in Cromer of Alison McCrory, who died from cancer at 64, as I mentioned last time. 

I have just entered three poems in the Fish Publishing poetry competition, partly because I like the work of one of the judges – Michael McCarty. Here is one of his poems:

In Memoriam

Let’s say the year is twenty-one-sixteen.
The headstone says I died in twenty-thirty-six.
Though I’ve been dead these eighty years
I’m pleased to see I lived to ninety one.

The graveyard perched
above an S of sea where boats can rest
along a lonely curve of shore
where tourists no longer come.

Beneath my name: the dates of birth and death,
some long-forgotten lines I haven’t written yet,
Beside my grave a grass-grown gravel path
unused except by fishermen at night.

I see a woman, pushing back the grass.
She’s twenty-five or so,
Researching for her PhD, her subject:
Forgotten Irish Poets.

She found some poems of mine on micro-disk
buried in the archives of a library
in Edmonton Alberta, where
I was almost famous once.

She stands among small raindrops
as I once stood
in the graveyard at Drumcliff,
She weeps as I wept over Yeats.

A strand of hair clings to her face.
A briar sways in unnoticed wind.
Far below the waves say hush.
Close by a blackbird sings.