Sigh

The weather is balmy, the sun comforting after a cold spring. The sky is brochure-blue. In my garden, last week’s rain and this week’s sunshine combine to send sap shooting through the plants. There’s a visible difference from one day to the next: clumps are sprouting like teenage lads, all legs and elbows. The earth smells damp and warm. The birds are taking their young ones for test flights and teaching them to twitter. The cats watch with interest, basking in the sun.

Standing on the grass – which is lush again even though it was cut only last weekend – I can almost feel the roots creeping through the ground beneath my feet, almost see the stealthy burgeoning all around. I sense that if I turned round quickly I’d catch plants growing: stems stretching, buds plumping busily up, leaves uncurling their fingers, flowers colouring and opening. And weeds boldly rampaging too: their seeds splitting and their little roots and shoots wiggling their weasly ways through the flowerbeds, tangling with the roots of the legitimate occupants of the garden.

Or at any rate I would feel all this, see all this, smell and hear all this if I weren’t composing these words in a stuffy classroom while my unfortunate students practise essay-writing for their exam next week.

Lovely day

Today felt like the first day of summer. It was a holiday (though not for everyone, eg poor Mr Life). In the morning, Daughter 1, Daughter 1's parents-in-law, Daughter 2, Daughter 2's actor boyfriend and I sat under the cherry tree in the garden drinking coffee and talking.

In the afternoon I gardened. Here's a pieris and magnolia stellata.

Rhododendron.

Polyanthus.

The front garden - little crab apple tree not quite at its best yet.

Tulips.

Even nicer tulips.

Here they are again.

And here's the pieris from the other side.

No profound thoughts today. Just flowers.

Always look on the bright side of life (te tum, te tum te tum te tum te tum)

I’ve read some blogs in which people try to – for example - post about three good things each day. This seems an excellent plan to me – not that I have time to post daily but I like the philosophy. I like it because sometimes life is a bit rubbish but there’s not a great deal of point in dwelling on the rubbishy aspects. We’re going to grow old and die but we might as well try to enjoy life while we can. (Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.)

This rings a bit hollow from me, one of the world’s worriers, but hey, I would be considerably more of a worrier if I couldn’t be distracted from my sorrows by enjoying things I see along the way.

I very much believe that the secret of happiness is the ability to take delight in small pleasures.

These last few years have certainly not been the easiest part of my life so far, for reasons which I won’t detail. (At least, not today.) But I give you three of the (many) things that give me pleasure.

My garden. The grass needs to be cut just now (all this Scottish rain) but there’s lots of colour and it’s spring. A garden is undoubtedly a lovesome thing, God wot. Including these tulips.

This glass vase. Mr Life gave it to me many years ago and I’ve always liked it. (Mr Life is also a lovesome thing, as are all the little Lives.) The vase has “J.Ditchfield” on the bottom. I looked this up on Google a little while ago and J.Ditchfield is still glassmaking, though there’s nothing on his website like my little crooked pot.

This poem (one of many) by Norman MacCaig. I love his poetry. It makes me wriggle with enthusiasm. There’s nothing like a good wriggle when life seems almost too tough to be worth struggling through. And look! Norman MacCaig knew the difference between "it's" = it is or it has and "its" = belonging to it! (Unlike some people out there... mutter, mumble...)

Caterpillar going somewhere

Its green face looks as if
it were about to spit – pft.

It moves along a twig
by doing exercises, bend, stretch –

hard to imagine
a potbellied caterpillar.

It looks so active (hard to imagine it
in the lotus position)

and yet, and yet
it looks so melancholy.

Is it because it knows that
when it reaches a green leaf

its jaws will open sideways
instead of up and down?...

It’s standing erect now – it turns
from side to side

like a retired sea-captain
scanning horizons.

Home

Lots of my favourite blog-people live a long way from where they grew up. A different state, a different country – even a different continent.

I live about six miles from where I grew up, in the same city. I’m very attached to my home territory. It's not that I'm particularly a city lover, but if I go away on holiday for two weeks, I’m thinking longingly of home about half-way through the second week. I love it when we’re driving up from England and we see the familiar shape of Arthur’s Seat, the biggest hill in our city, on the skyline. I love getting back to my garden and seeing what’s grown, and being back in my house, which looks to me, like the rest of Edinburgh, familiarly strange, strangely familiar.

I occasionally wonder if I’d feel the same about home if I’d grown up somewhere less pleasant. Edinburgh, as cities go, is a good place to live. It’s not very big – you could walk from the centre to any place on the outskirts in an hour or so – and yet it has most of the things you need in a city: shops, theatres, cinemas, parks, hills (I think you need hills in a city), art galleries, museums. It has its ugly bits like anywhere but also some lovely bits; it’s historic; it has quiet areas; and it’s got the sea on one side. The weather – well, it depends what you like, but I don’t like hot weather and it’s seldom either very hot or very cold. It has short days in winter but this is easily offset, in my opinion, by long days in summer.

Would I feel less attached to home if I lived in an industrial area full of tower blocks? A huge city like London? Or somewhere with an extreme climate? I don’t know.

I’m always amazed when people emigrate. Apart from leaving the place, I wouldn’t want to leave friends and family. I just can’t imagine why anyone would – of course I exclude victims of war and famine for whom home has become intolerable. And I realise that sometimes you have to move for work. But people who just tootle off from somewhere nice to somewhere else nice – clearly they have much more of a sense of adventure than I do. (Not that this would be hard.)

The only reason that we might move far away would be if our children did. They’re more important than anything.

Ah well. We’re all different; and other such original conclusions.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats

Thank you for your kind comments about my friend M. I still feel so grieved for her. Meanwhile I'm trying to seize the day, gathering rosebuds as I do so. And also blog a bit.

If you haven't seen An Engineer's Guide to Cats, you should watch it. Mr Life and I thought we'd got the wee screen on to this post like other, clever people do, but then it vanished. Still, the link should work. It's rather funny.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

M

When I was at school I had two separate groups of schoolfriends, both comprising three girls plus me. One set comprised my official “best” friends – my very best, my second best and my third best. Sounds ridiculous but that’s kind of the way it was. We went around together most of the time, sat together in class and knew one another’s secrets. But these girls all took packed lunches while I ate in the canteen. So my lunchtime friends were three other girls: M, G and S, with whom I also shared a lot of girlish chat.

I’m still in touch with all of these girls, though with some more than others. I’ve always seen M intermittently – she would come down for a meal with the family maybe once a year. She was unmarried, and when you have small children you sometimes hesitate to inflict yourself on childless friends whose life is more focused on a successful career than on picking up bits of Lego from the floor. But we got on well and she was very empathetic and – a lovely person. I’ve always been rather enchanted by her. In fact, when I was a girl, I really wanted to BE her. She was from an interesting and talented family and always seemed to be confident – not in an arrogant way, but calmly, as if life were simple. In fact, like the rest of us she had her neuroses, as I found out later in life. But she was sweet.

One of the surprising things about her was that she always seemed to fall for unsuitable boys/men. They were older than her, or they were planning on a career that wouldn’t have fitted in with her plans (for example, one was very religious and planned to be a minister, while she wasn’t at all religious) or they had emotional problems … anyway, though she was very attractive, she never seemed to find her life partner. And then, in her late thirties she did, though he came with baggage: he was quite a lot older, had been through a messy divorce and was wary of commitment. Eventually he recovered from this and they got married, but she was in her late forties by then.

At first when they got together, we asked them both to the house but he didn’t want to be regarded as part of a couple so she came by herself. Later, they did both come to dinner but we didn’t feel it was a great success. He was nice enough but I don’t think we had much in common and they never asked us back. He was retired but had been a top civil servant and clearly had lots of money and she was also quite a high earner and I suppose I vaguely thought that we didn’t seem important enough to him. I was sad about it but on the other hand, she seemed to have found happiness, which was good.

M and I continued to stay in touch via Christmas cards and notes and several years passed without much more contact, though we did occasionally mention meeting up and I certainly assumed that we would at some point. But you know what it’s like when you’re busy. Years go by. I was deep in family and teaching and she had a high-profile, engrossing job. I missed her but thought that when we retired and had more time, we would resume our easy relationship. We’d known each other since we were five and always just picked up where we’d left off.

But then we didn’t get a Christmas card for the past two years, which I was slightly hurt about.

Recently another of this group, G, moved back to Edinburgh and I met her yesterday. And she told me that M, beautiful, charming, funny, kind M was diagnosed two years ago with a rare form of dementia. She’s 57. She’s in a wheelchair, requires 24 hour care and is like a completely different person. This form of dementia decreases social inhibition and people become aggressive or say embarrassing things. There’s no treatment and she will just get worse and worse until she becomes vegetative and dies in a few years’ time.

I just can’t stop thinking about her. I’m so sad. How I regret not making more of an effort to spend time with her in recent years. How I ache to think of all the things she wanted to do when she retired and had more time. When I think of adjectives to describe her, they’re all to do with light and warmth: golden, glowing, radiant.

I also think of all my plans for retirement; for the rest of my life, as I fondly hope. Better get on with some of them now.

Yes, I know this is undignified. It was Daughter 2's fault.

Sirius is such a patient boy.

Resigned, I suppose you might call him.

He just sits there.

Cassie, on the other hand...

... is slightly less co-operative.

Still, she's prepared to look at her cake... (See the levitating hat!)

... for a short while. (The hat's still there.)

We sang "Happy Birthday" to them. I'm not sure they appreciated it. Then we were forced to eat their cake for them, because they'd lost interest.