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I really love these photos.

These are some of my great-aunts, my grandmother’s older sisters, who were young women in the 1920s - Alma, Doris, Thelma and Phyllis (pictured twice, who died young of TB meningitis).

They were ordinary girls, the daughters of a dock labourer who raised 12 children to adulthood. They’d each of them left school by the age of 14 and went out to work, because the family needed the money. The jobs they found weren’t easy - they worked in factories and builder’s yards. They had a difficult life.

But somewhere amid the poverty and overcrowding, they got themselves dressed up and found the money to have these photos taken, and they look so beautiful and glamorous in their 1920s fashions. Good for them!

family stuffs

Tonight while I was visiting at my mum's, over the course of the evening Layla-May went from two faltering steps on her own to six increasingly confident steps on her own, from wibbling and wobbling and struggling to get her balance to standing straight up off my knee and launching herself.

The baby-proofing gets serious from here on out! She is ten months old now and has a fast growing vocabulary (hiya, hello, mum, dad, up, no, dog, nanna, ta, yeah) but not a single tooth in her head as yet, although she's been teething half her life already.

On a more serious note, Chelsea brought Layla into town to meet me for lunch yesterday, then went off to meet a friend afterward, and while they were in town they were accosted by a man we think can only have been Chelsea's birth father. He approached them, addressing Chelsea by name - and used her former surname, from before she was adopted. He smelled of booze and weed, and wouldn't identify himself, just kept asking if she was Chelsea W- (she told him that isn't her name, which it isn't any more) and then turned his attention to the baby, asking if this was her daughter and could he hold her - and then tried to take the baby out of the pushchair. Chelsea started screaming and hollering at that point, whereupon he ran off shouting that she's just like her mother. Which she is - spitting image. He matched the description of her father, 20 years later - and he was already an alcoholic even back then. Clearly hasn't improved. He hasn't seen her since she was a year old, but she really is the image of her birth mother, that's how he recognised her. Really freaked her out.

Cardiff isn't a huge city, but it also isn't small - what are the odds?!