Life is returning to normal after the much
anticipated visit of our son and his wife and her parents to the UK, on their way to a holiday in Spain.
After they had flown out from Gatwick to Madrid
we still had two days of holiday left so we decided to make the most of it by
travelling around the Cotswolds.
During the last day we visited the National
Herb Centre which was only a couple of miles from the house we stayed in and we
enjoyed scones and a pot of tea. We’d
visited twice with our visitors, on the first and last day of their stay.
Although it was almost time for their café
to close we were not hurried and we chatted with the waitress as she cleared
away from our meal. Round the walls of
the café are watercolours and photographs (for sale) and we had admired the
paintings since our first visit when we viewing the holiday house to see if it
suited our purposes.
We told the waitress how much I had liked
the painting of the periwinkles which was no longer on the wall, and wished we
had bought it when we first saw it a few weeks ago.
It turns out that she was the artist and
that the painting had not been sold but taken down to make room for another of
her watercolours. She was able to fetch
the painting from another part of the building and we bought it straight
away. I told her that I specially liked
the painting because the same flowers were growing in my garden and that I had
grown them from a cutting from my
mother’s garden many years ago – she likewise had them in her garden
from her mother’s garden. Periwinkles
are very much a cottage garden plant and a favourite in such gardens.
I don’t know who was more pleased – the
waitress-artist for making a sale – or us for obtaining the painting that we thought
was no longer available. It will bring
back happy memories of the holiday.
