Happy Birthday Grannie Garner

We spent the day today in Warwickshire with my extended family, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of my Grandmother. 

A huge number of my family gathered at her grave in the beautiful village of Stoneleigh to lay flowers, drink warm sweet sherry, eat cherries and play games in the meadow behind the house where she used to live. It was a perfect day. The sun shone constantly. It was a moment in time; a memory unfolding in real time. 

It was so wonderful to think that at least 14 of us had my Grandmother's blood coursing through their veins. That's a very powerful thing. The youngest of the children, Matt's son, Ned, had very little recollection of his Great Grandmother; a milky, misty image of someone which I'm sure could have been triggered or reinforced by a photograph. 

We went to look at High Beams, the house where Grannie lived, and peered through the windows: the same house undoubtedly, but somehow entirely different. I felt like a living cypher as I drifted past the windows. An echo from a bygone cry.

I recorded some of the sounds of the village. The familiar squeak of the gate into the churchyard, the sound of the family playing lawn darts, the sound of the bells chiming 7pm, whilst a single-engine plane buzzed in the sky, making its way from Coventry airport.

We ate at the Harvester for old times' sake. 18 of us around a table with someone representing every decade from teenagers to those in their sixties. 

A prefect, sun-drenched, nostalgic  day. Happy Birthday, Grannie. Gone but never forgotten.