Winds of Change

I was surprised to wake up to snow this morning! But I am just a child at heart, and thought it was all so pretty, decorating the trees and bushes. I would love to go sledging, whizzing down the hills, with the wind in my hair and a sledge bumping under me, to end up in a heap of snow, laughing! I remember when I was young, very young, my father made us a sledge, a big heavy thing, but he made steel runners, and kept them waxed, or whatever it is you do to steel runners, so that once it got going, boy, did it go! It could take three of us small girls, me, my sister and a friend called Rita. We joined up with a family of boys from up the road, and raced each other down the hill at the back of their house. Ah, those were the days!

Its good to remember days that were happy, even if they were a lifetime ago. And even if times were not good then - it was during the Second World War, and later on we would be bombed out of our house. Parents were rightly nervous about children going off on their own somewhere. But the news today seems unremittingly bad - death, destruction, credit crunches and poverty everywhere in the world.

Will our children have happy days to remember?