WAR POST

 With sombre D-Day celebrations having taken place in Normandy yesterday I thought I'd dig out a few mementos from my late Mum and Dad, who both fought in World war II; Mum WAFs, Dad Navy.

Here's an old 1940's Christmas card.

To my Dad, I don't know who the sender is.

Here's another Xmas card possibly by the same sender. The motif on the front says Per Ardua Ad Astra. I assume its the RAF.

A similarly motifed card, this time with a photograph of an unknown plane.

A photograph of an unknown lady riding a military motorcycle of unknown make. I guess she was a friend of my Mum's in the WAF.

The taller chap was the husband of my Parents' old friend Peggy, who emigrated to the states after the War I think. I think this is an American airfield but I don't know the plane.

Post-War excitement blossomed with the Festival of Britain in 1951 in London. At the left hand side you can see the tall spear-like Skylon. I wonder what happened to that Fifties icon? Did you or your parents visit the Festival?

Leaving the Forties and Fifties behind here's me being fed something by my Dad at Butlins circa 1961 with Mum looking on and explaining something to me!

Everyone got white rolls. I still love them!

Around the same time, here's my older brother holding me up with his hands full, a packet of unknown sweets and an unknown toy soldier. I think my brother has a mouth full too!

CRUISER 1 BUSY TRAIN

We recently got hold of the Busy Train Book for Moonbase Junior.

A terrific idea, a pull-back toy train goes whizzing round different tracks in a book!

Genius!

When he was asleep I sneaked it off Junior and stuck a SpaceX Cruiser 1 on top!

Is it a goer? A Busy SpaceX book readers?

napping moonbaby sprinkled with faerie dust

Well, after milk, fruit tea and melon the moonbaby is napping on his poddle.

Missus Moonbase and me are well and truly kaput already and we've only been on baby detail since noon. We've got another 24 hours to go!

To help baby sleep I showed him pictures from a  book on my daughter's shelf I knew well: Faerie by Brian Froud.

This was a book I adored as a young hippy in the mid Seventies and I was pleased to see this was a later re-print for a new generation.

Froud captured the essence of Faeriedom like no other illustrator probably since Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke in the mid-1800's and Arthur Rackham in the early 1900's.

It was as if he had dipped directly into the magic kingdom with his brush and begun to paint what he saw there.

For me it merged with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, BB's Little Grey Men, Watkin's Ley Hunters Manual and Peake's Gormenghast to form a single realm spread across the mid-to-late Nineteen Seventies like King Arthur's Camelot and the knights of patchouli.

I wasn't alone. Many people 'dug' this stuff and the music of day, namely hard and prog rock, reflected it too: Rush's Rivendell and By Tor and the Snow Dog, Zep's Misty Mountain Hop and Wishbone's Ash's album Argus, the quintessence of the Arthurian-Faerie-Middle Earth zeitgeist at the time, to name just a few.

Returning to Brian Froud I can still smile at those long lost days of my jos-sticked youth every day for hanging on my bedroom wall is the centre spread of the book, a beautiful painting of the little people, which I had framed at great expense in 1979.

Right, Moonbase baby is awake again so over and out for now.

baby Moonbase mission is go!

Currently babysitting our Moonbase Grandson for the weekend at Daughter Base Station. She's got some well earned shore leave. For me and Missus Moonbase it's a whole two days of milk, puréed veg and wet nappies!

I've brought my laptop in the slim hope that I get chance to relax. I'm having that slim chance right now!

I've also brought along my ALIEN novel but Kane's chestburster may have to wait till bedtime.

Looking after baby makes me realise how hard it will be for families of the future to bring up children in space.

First of all they will need to be delivered on a spacecraft if the human race has any chance of deep space colonisation. Families will have to be created en route to other planets. All that triumph and tragedy packed into a tin can perhaps over generations.

It's going to be very hard.

Maybe a first step would be a family on the International Space Station?

But who would volunteer their children to go up there with them?

One day a couple or a family will have to be heroic enough to take the first step.

Alas I'm not heroic at all but more importantly I'm just too ancient to be raising kids in space.

So for now this particular Grandad is happy to be on Terra Firma with baby Moonbase watching Peppa Pig!

What do you think readers? Would you volunteer?