One man and his daughter

.....went to mow a meadow......

But before that, I set off early in the morning to collect son J from Memmingen airport. He had again chosen the Ryanair Stanstead flight and taking the hassle of driving from Worthing around London in the middle of the night. He prefers that and then landing virtually in our back garden to flying from Gatwick to Munich and the hassle of the journey here. He's now so routined that he knows which side of the plane to sit on and again managed to photograph our house as he came into land.

Back home we all breakfasted together and caught up on the latest news while J got the battery for his drone loaded up. Apparently, one is required by airport security to travel with almost empty battery packs. I hadn't seen his DJ Spark drone and assumed it was another "toy" although I had seen a few fantastic aerial shots from Bliper cbimages using the same machine.

So then we set off by bike and car to try out his drone. I simply could not believe the results of the photos he took mainly from our house but while we were some 600m away on the other side of the forest. The drone was to become a regular star of the next few days.

Quickly back home, they all changed gear as J had to do his "Couch to 5k" running/jogging/walking programme. While quite active with his several days a week mountain bike riding over the South Downs, he has recently started this fitness App based programme. He, son in law Barry and amazingly 8-year-old granddaughter Charlotte set off to do the walk/run. 6.1km at an average of 7.57 km/h. I went along with the car expecting to have to pick up Charlotte after a short time. However, she did the entire course and without breaking into a sweat!

Back home, they all threw themselves in the pool to cool down and as usual to clown around. The grandchildren love having their Uncle around.
Then once dried off, we all went indoors to celebrate Kate's birthday, Uncle J and the children having secretly decorated the living room with balloons and Happy Birthday banners.

Finally so as to work off the birthday "cake" Tiramisu calories that Angie had prepared, Dad said he would cut one of the horse fields. I was prepared for this and had got a new belt drive last week and had left it for Barry to mount - he deals with such things daily at work and can set it up better than I can. However, as he tried to fit it on, he noticed a critical pulley was broken and normally we would have had to abandon the idea and get the part ordered for next week. But Barry isn't one to give up. He stripped down the bits and insisted we drove to the agricultural engineer's workshop even though it was after 5:00 pm and thus closing time.

Amazingly one of the bosses was still there and together the two of them worked on a solution although neither spoke the same language. I guess technical talk is universal and after a visit to the workshop and drilling a few holes in various bits and pieces, we returned to the car.

Now in over 16 years, I have never locked myself out of my car. Today I managed it and to make things worse, the car was on the forecourt of the business that gets locked up. The owner luckily patiently waited while I phoned home and got Angie to come and rescue us with the spare key!

Back home, we fitted the Heath Robinson construction and Barry set about mowing the field and was accompanied by daughter Charlotte following him on our old garden tractor. We had to call off the action when Barry had mowed about two thirds. The tractor was smoking badly and losing power - I had forgotten to fill her up and while Barry had been fixing the mower, found a 10-litre canister of old heating oil diesel that had been pumped out of our central heating tank in 2006 when it was decommissioned. Some of the sludge also found it's way into the tractor tank and was causing the problem.

At the same time the heavens went dark and so we abandoned the project and anyway Angie was getting impatient as the meal she was cooking was nearly ready.

A lovely meal and a beer or two. We then did some more drone flying, J taking it up to 1,297 feet (nearly 400 metres) and out of sight and sound and managed to take amazing photos despite the dusk and clouds. He was so high that one could easily see the earth's curvature on the photos. He has promised to send me some of the photos, including aerial shots of Barry's mowing efforts. I want to check out if he cut nice straight lines!

Then we all retired to bed tired and happy.

And again .... Happy Birthday, daughter, it's lovely to have been able to celebrate it with you.