Change and decay

In the way of these thing it has been a week of change and challenge. All sorts of things have happened, including the routine stuff that makes one's life a pain....the hot water at PE stopped working, the toilet at Blackwood blocked (again!!), I broke my reading glasses just before church yesterday morning.
More importantly than this my mother's last surviving sibling, her youngest sister Mildred, died. I was really sad that death had beaten S & I by just a couple of weeks, and that had we been travelling to the UK a month earlier we would have had a little time with my aunty.
Because I was born in the early 1950s (can it be true?) rather than the late, most of the photographs, like this one, of our childhood are in black and white. They do not do justice to the Wasdale Valley (here) where this photo looks like it was taken, but black and white has a way of enhancing portraiture.
Mildred took a fine picture, and this is a good one.
Meanwhile there is a mountain of stuff to do before we go away. Bills to pay, hot water to fix, glasses to mend.
Mildred's death means we are now it, on one side of the family at least, my siblings and I are now the oldest generation.