Brilliant and beautiful # 2

This is my lovely niece Bee.

Well, in fact, that was her on her fourth birthday (I think), a few years ago now. But as you can see, she's still pretty cute ( Billy the Bear, who also appears in the photograph above, is still very much around).

Bee (my sister's daughter, not my Aussie brother's,) is a twin, her sister Tom ( they are actually called Tabitha and Tamsin, you can tell they were children of the seventies...) is lovely too, but I don't think I've a picture of her handy.

Bee lived until recently on a pre-war wooden racing yacht, Gymea, in a place almost unbelievably fortuitously called Avalon, up the coast from Sydney, with this rather gorgeous Australian boatbuilder.

In the photo below, she looks a little like a deranged woman coming at her aunt with a winch handle, but I show it to give some idea of the nature of their living accommodation. If you look carefully on the left of the picture, you can see her cat, Willow, curled up in a shopping basket. We are about to go sailing; when Gymea is about to go sailing, Willow gets in her shopping basket and goes to sleep.

Here we are sailing, Tom and I. Tom was allowed to steer and looks like a natural. In fact Mikey the boatbuilder is a very good sailing teacher.

This is how you got to and from Gymea. There were no jetties or anything, you just pulled the canoe up onto the beach. (That's me paddling ineptly in the front, and Mikey, looking like the second last of the Mohicans in the middle. He didn't much like being a passenger.)

However, Gymea is now sold, and Bee is mostly living in her workshop, while they build another boat to live on. Perhaps because she has more landlubber time, she has started a blog. She very cleverly ran her computer off a solar charger on the boat, but I don't know how her internet access worked. At the moment she is writing and documenting much about the little boat she is building for herself, because that's what she's doing at the moment, which seems a good place to start. The photos are lovely. But she also makes wonderful, very special and precious jewellery, full of dragons and fish and stars and suns and moons and irridiscent enamel work and other marvels, which, with any luck will perhaps feature later, she lives in a beautiful place, is soon starting a psychotherapy course, has an amazing memory for detail, loves to write, so all in all, with a bit of encouragement, she should find plenty to blog about... if the bug bites.

So go over to bumble and give her a blog-warming!