Blimey, I almost missed this one. It was only by chance as I was checking the date against our near-foolproof bathroom rota system that I realised it was 13th July 2021. And that meant it was ten years to the day that I started a blog that I didn’t think would get past ten posts. On that day, there had been a “hail of bullets” outside the convenience store that a preschool Reuben would later call “Number One shop” so I wrote a very nervy post about how great London was for kids, honest guv’nor. Then I hastily banged out another five posts on that same evening, about various parks we’d been to lately.
One of those parks was Hampstead Heath which, by happy coincidence, we visited again three days ago. This was the family shot I included on that first blogday:
It was taken in the children’s enclosure, which I did smile wistfully at as I went to the loos on Saturday (reader’s note – they close at 4:15pm. Don’t get caught short). I think the children are a bit big for the tiny wooden animals now tho. Here’s the update version, which we took for the purposes of being smug about arriving on time and beating our friends who lived closer…but again, it’s a happy coincidence that we got a full-family selfie for comparison’s sake:
I’m closer to the camera in this one but apart from that, I see no differences. Do you?
The skyline, however, has had a few changes in those ten years. This is the 2011 version. Look at all that space either side of the Gherkin!:
And updated for 2021. Safe to say it’s a bit more crowded…:
As tenth birthday celebrations go, this one has been a bit lame…but with Covid cases shutting down swathes of the kids’ schools again it doesn’t feel the best time to be doing anything too adventurous. And there is one more good reason to hark back to Hampstead. After all, that was the day when I took the photo that would become my logo for the next decade:
Some would say it might need updating, given the toddler will be a teenager next year…but he’s a bit more reluctant to pose nowadays. Ah well, happy birthday LWAT and let’s hope the eleventh year is a bit more exciting than the last couple have been!
