Reality check?

I've been playing chess today with Laurie Arthur Davis: not yet seven, he's already able to surprise me.

The subject of the above trick picture is his great-great-grandfather, Arthur Bertram Davis - playing against himself: born in 1885, he would have sat for it while Victoria was still Queen.

I like to think the image was created by the player's father, Arthur Henry, who thus set a photographic ball of thread running down through the Davis family.

Seven wheels

William, Edmund and I have been biking in London - from Paddington to the Tower, and here we are posing under the Eye. As on last year's car-free Saturday, when I went with a University friend, it was a glorious day for cycling. Even more than before turned out, though today I didn't spot so many (other) eccentrics.

At times William wiggled almost as much as his uncle Leo did at his age, but whenever I thought I'd lost him, I heard him whistling peacefully not far away in the throng.

The pocket chess set I had brought with me came in useful on the return train journey: my mother gave it me as a child, and I in turn passed it on to Edmund aged seven, but it remained in a drawer at home. Now it has a third name inside it: William's. He shows promise.

Edmund meanwhile wrestled with emails - giant haystacks of them: how lucky was I, he exclaimed, to have grown up in an era of less than instant comms.