Readers' favourite photographs, songs and recipes
Snapshot My grandad, the river swimmer
Two cheeky fellows fight over a towel. The one on the right is my grandad, Frank Edwards. He and his friend Jack swam every day in the river Cam, right through winter, for many years.
Frank was a barber and my grandma Joan was a hairdresser, who moved from London to Rugby and then eloped with Frank and settled in Cambridge. They worked together in their own shop on Mill Road, and it was above it that my mother and my two older sisters where born.
I remember visiting them often at the salon and sitting in the back room eating my lunch, which always seemed to be a boiled egg. I can still recall the cracked linoleum, the almost overpowering smell of hairdresser's chemicals and the merchandise of plastic combs and razors hanging on the walls. If I recall correctly, the barber's shop was at the front and the ladies' salon at the back. There was always barber's banter and customers would try to talk to me, but I was suspicious of strangers and not interested, much to my grandad's disgust.
Frank was a conscientious objector in the second world war and was sent to Bedford prison. Later, he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for hard labour, and to guard the prisoners. He made good friends with some of the Italians and after the war they visited each other for many years until they all became too old to travel. Grandma was a fantastic cook and picked up a lot of Italian cookery tips on her visits. She could make a delicious meal from basic ingredients and was a very inventive person, who recycled long before it was fashionable.
That generation lived through hard times and two world wars. They were resourceful through necessity, making use and re-using whatever they could.
Although my grandfather was a cantankerous man who could be quite difficult sometimes, they were devoted to each other and spent many happy years together.
My grandma had a massive stroke in her 90s and was never the same again, as though part of her brain had been switched off. She tried desperately to carry on with her cooking, pickling, sewing and knitting etc, but it became too much of a challenge. She died a few years later in 1998, and it broke Frank's heart. Exactly a year later, Frank died, aged 91, while I was pregnant with my third child. The nurse who was with him when he died said his last words were: "I'm coming, Joan."
They were buried together in a dissenters' cemetery, at the end of their lane, on a sunny day with the poppies and grasses blowing in a warm May breeze. Jo Speak
Playlist: Like Shania, we took the long way
You're Still the One by Shania Twain
"Looks like we made it/ Look how far we've come my baby/ We might have took the long way/ We knew we'd get there some day"
On 15 July 2007, with this song playing, I walked down the aisle, my mum and dad at my side (yes, I had to have both my parents give me away). My daughter, then four, was my bridesmaid and my son, two, was my page boy. As I floated along, I thought about the words of the song and how right they were.
My husband and I met in January 1996. We were 19, and inseparable. Due to a silly misunderstanding we split up four months later, but then got back together within a month. We split up again in April 1998 and that September he told me he was considering moving abroad to work for some friends who owned a bar. That was the turning point because I realised there was no way I was going to let him move to the other side of the world without me. I knew deep down in my heart that he would always be a part of my life.
The following year we bought a house together and booked a trip to see the friends who owned the bar. While we were out one evening at a restaurant overlooking a picturesque harbour, he proposed and, of course, I said yes.
We decided not to have a long engagement, but to start planning the wedding as soon as we got home. However, with house buying, and then babies coming along, the engagement was a bit longer than we had planned!
So, finally, 11 years, two break-ups, two houses, two children and 12 pets later, we tied the knot. We certainly did take the long way, and a lot of people said we'd never make it ... but we did get there and we have made it. And unlike a lot of couples these days, we are still very much in love ? 15 years on. Catherine Harbottle
We love to eat: Blue Peter crunchie cake
Ingredients
6 ozs digestive biscuits
4 ozs melted butter
2 x 16 oz cans mixed fruit cocktail
� pint Chantilly cream (whipping cream with a sprinkle of caster sugar )
Silver balls and broken chocolate flake to decorate
Crush the digestives with a rolling pin. Add the melted butter and mix well. Transfer the mixture to a buttered 8in plate, flatten out and press firmly to make a base, leaving a small, raised ridge round the edges. Chill in the fridge for two hours. Drain juice off the tinned fruit through a sieve. Whip the cream until it forms peaks. Once the base has set, pile the fruit in a perfect pyramid in the middle, leaving a small gap between the biscuit ridge and the fruit. Cover the fruit pyramid with the cream, allowing the cream to touch the biscuit ridge. Decorate with silver balls and chocolate flake.
I saw this recipe on Blue Peter when I was around eight, more than 40 years ago. Mum gave me a small corner of the kitchen on Sunday mornings, when she was busy preparing dinner, to craft this masterpiece.
I made Blue Peter crunchie cake religiously every week, each time trying to perfect it. I could never get it to look as it did on the programme, or as displayed in the photographs in my Christmas Blue Peter annual. Instead, the fruit slid into a flat mess on the biscuit base bringing the cream and silver balls along with it.
At my tender age, I didn't properly understand my daddy's request "to have his later" or my mum's small portion. I made sure my sisters and I finished the dessert so I could try the recipe again the following week. I never perfected it and eventually gave up, disillusioned and disappointed.
It is only now, when I look at crafted advertisements on television and in magazines, where they paint a raw chicken with varnish to make it look like a bronzed roasted one, or pour white paint over a pudding to look like cream to the television audience, that I think about that fruit pyramid. I realise now that those chunks of peach, pear, pineapple and cherry had been dried and glued on to some kind of upside-down conical structure to make them behave in that pyramid. It makes me feel that my cooking skills when I was little weren't so disastrous after all. Brigid Black
Sophisticated style Queen’s Park Arena Urban designer and architect
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