27 July 2009

In the morning we played in Azabu but despite factor 50 suncream Emily's arms still turned a bit red after only half an hour of intermittent sunshine. We had great fun going on the long roller-bar slide together; it gets up to quite a speed and she was laughing all the way down. She is taking steps in her stride now, if you pardon the pun, though can still only manage very small ones downwards.

After a bit of a trying morning (for once nothing to do with Emily, who was good as gold), the discovery of a bouquet outside the apartment door on our return was lovely. Nick can be very thoughtful at times.


We'd planned to play outside with Jo and Isy and Jill and Sophia, but on the way to Hon Shiba it went very cloudy and started raining, so we diverted to the Shibaura jidokan for an hour's play. While we were there we saw a few lightning flashes and heard some rolls of thunder, though nothing on the scale of last summer's storms.

As I was about to put Emily in the bath I noticed a gorgeous rainbow made by the setting sun. Only the bottom third was visible at each end, but the colours were amazingly vivid. The northern end looked like it was coming straight out of the top of the NEC building. No pot of gold there, though: the company has been very hard hit by the recession.

Our evening dessert was courtesy of our nice next door neighbours, who rang the bell and handed over 3 huge white peaches, which are a seasonal delicacy. I'm not sure if that is customary, but we had better think of something traditional to do for them sometime, though I did give a couple of trinkets from the UK to thank her for watering my plants.