Slice of Summer
My trip to England earlier this year was a whirlwind of shopping, eating, train stations, laughing with friends, chilling with family and lots of talking. After 3 years away, I was ready for the fresh air, cooler weather and rain even though it was the hottest summer in the UK on record! Part of my holiday was catching up with my best friends from university who I hadn’t seen since one of my bestie’s weddings and meeting his daughter for the first time. To say I was excited was an understatement!
I traveled down from Durham by train to a small town I had never heard of before. As usual, my journey did not go smoothly due to a combination of train protests and broken down trains, but I finally made it with only an hour added onto my journey. We had decided to rent out a house big enough for us all to stay in for the weekend, but I hadn’t realised that we were pretty much staying at a mansion!
The whole weekend was just perfect. We all carried out roles in the kitchen and around the house like cooking, washing the dishes, tiding up without even thinking about it. We talked for hours as if we had only been separated for a couple of weeks rather than a couple of years. I think my favorite part of the weekend, however, was meeting the smallest and newest member of our group. It was a bit surreal and just a little funny to see 8 adults looking after one child, but I just hope that she grows up to know how much we all love her. That saying where it takes a village to raise a child made so much sense and could not have felt more true… I just wish, in these circumstances, that I didn’t live so far away!
I knew I wanted to document this little friendcation, as I do on all my holidays (you need to see our previous friendcation 7 years ago when we celebrated graduating university by going to Slovenia!) so I created a little video with snippets from our time together. There was so much not captured on camera like us all sitting together and telling stories, the hugs, the goofiness, the laughter (which I do regret a little bit now) but I knew I needed to be there in the moment and that those memories and feelings will always be there with me whenever I look back at the photographs and videos.