The missing weekend

Following Sue's excellent instructions,

I used Pic Monkey to make a collage

of the last few days when summer took a curtain call.

Featured are:

the air raid shelter wall at the bottom of our garden

which has such beautiful brick shades, I think it deserved a picture to itself,

Grantchester meadows and the River Cam in Cambridge

whence we returned our son for yet more Japanese studying,

(we had tea at The Orchard),

a few grasses from a nursery in Sussex to rectify the rather disastrous

meadow grass experiment,

(first year great, second year thistles, moon daisies and narrow-leaved plantain

 overwhelmed the thirty six other weedier weeds)

and finally my Cornus kousa chinensis,

displaying its fine autumn colour.

And is there honey still for tea?

Walking with our eldest by the River Granta, 

through Grantchester Meadows

past a casually parked punt

drowsing cattle

solicitous swans with their cygnets

and darting damsel flies

we came to

The Orchard.

First planted in 1868, it became a Tea Garden when a group of Cambridge students

 asked Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House if she would serve tea beneath the blossoming fruit trees and in so doing, started a great Cambridge tradition.

One of their lodgers at Orchard House was a young graduate of King's College - 

Rupert Brooke.

His poem 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', 

written whilst homesick during a trip to Berlin,

contains the famous final lines immortalising afternoon tea in the Orchard:

Ah God! To see the branches stir

Across the moon at Grantchester!

To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten

Unforgettable, unforgotten

River-smell, and hear the breeze

Sobbing in the little trees.

Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand

Still guardians of that holy land?

The chestnuts shades, in reverend dream,

the yet unacademic stream?

Is dawn a secret shy and cold

Anadyomene, silver-gold?

And sunset still a golden sea

From Hasingfield to Madingley?

And after, ere the night is born,

Do hares come out about the corn?

Oh, is the water sweet and cool,

Gentle and brown, above the pool?

And laughs the immortal river still

Under the mill,under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty, And quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget

The lies, and truth, and pain?...oh! Yet

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

We had scones and strawberries and clotted cream,

and then our son had to leave as he had

one more supervision 

and one more exam to take.

And now it is over.

Three years.

So fast and yet so slow. 

Just like their growing up.