Back in Germany

Well, we had a really easy journey to my daughter's graduation last weekend and a wonderful time while we were there, but we had an awful journey back. We left Sheffield at 7a.m. in heavy rain and the windscreen wipers stayed on fast until we reached the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone. Just after we left Calais the heavy rain began again and stayed until one and a half hours from Bonn when it started snowing. We reached home at 10.15p.m. and excluding coffee stops and half an hour on the channel tunnel train, Stuart had done all the driving (at his insistence!). It was so stressful and tiring.

I must tell you the camera story. On the way to the restaurant for our celebration dinner, my daughter's boyfriend, Howard, mislaid his camera - we thought either in the hotel bar or in the taxi. Enquiries produced nothing and we thought his camera and all the lovely photos were gone for ever. Amazingly, the camera was found in the taxi by a very nice lady who didn't feel right just handing it over to the driver. She took it home, looked at the photos and quickly realised they were of a graduation at Sheffield but then she noticed that in one photo Howard was holding up his diploma and she zoomed in to read the name! She then contacted the university and they phoned Howard. All this restored our faith in human nature being good. But there was another twist to the tale. One of Howard's friends who also graduated that day with the same diploma is married to a doctor and when she was at work talking about her husband's graduation, a colleague said that her mother found a camera in a taxi with graduation photos on it. The doctor shrieked, 'I don't believe it - that camera belongs to my friend, Howard!' Howard was very surprised to get two phone calls about the camera, one from the university and one from the doctor friend. We have all decided that he was really meant to get those photos back...