Dublin and Hamburg

I had the most wonderful weekend last week starting with a visit to Dublin on Friday to meet up with family. There were 21 of us plus our honorary cousin Pol O Duibhir. We first met Pol when he gave a talk about my grandfather in Dublin in November 2014 when there were seven family members there. My father was always very reticent to talk about his family although we knew he had a happy childhood until his father passed away suddenly when he was 15. He joined the merchant navy very soon afterwards. Last weekend we returned for an updated talk and we found out so much more about our family. We will always be grateful to Pol for taking such an interest and we look forward to the book he is planning on writing

This is my grandfather, Gordon Brewster, at his desk working for the Irish Independent Newspaper  Group as political cartoonist. The National Library of Ireland holds 479 of his original cartoons and when we visited in 2014 we were lucky enough to be able to view some of them

This is one of the cartoons which actually shows his house as it was at the time:

And this is The Grove as it was in 2014:

The main difference is that the large garden to the right of the house has been sold and new houses built on the grounds. Last Friday Pol arranged for my brother, two cousins and myself to go to the house for tea and apple pie. We were made so welcome by the new owner of the house and her mother and they were so interested in the history of the house. Pol arranged a framed copy of the above cartoon to present to the new family

This is a lovely picture of my grandfather, aunt and father Christmas shopping in Dublin.

We had a lovely family meal on Friday night and Saturday we all went into town for the talk

Sunday was my surprise trip and Derrick and I left everyone at the hotel and made our way to the airport for a flight to Hamburg. We arrived early evening and made our way into town through the Hamburger Winter Dom , the largest funfair in Germany - and it was massive.

Monday (my Birthday) we managed a little craft shopping before going to see the fantastic Caro Emerald in concert.

Our hotel room overlooked a lovely park with some fabulous coloured trees and a beautiful Japanese garden and I had intended taking a picture before we left on Tuesday but when we got up and opened the curtains, everything was white - the snow had arrived! Luckily our plane had quite a long run round in Hamburg so our flight was only 30 minutes late

Such a fantastic weekend - this one will seem very tame in comparison