Meeting up

I've been in London, visiting Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter - we had such a lovely time! Littlest is recovering from both chicken pox and an ear infection, poor little lamb, but in spite of all that, she was very jolly.

We puttered about, did the garden, cuddled the baby and had the occasional coffee out.

The weather was quite hot, but not excessively so - well, as long as one wasn't doing too much.

Look at her poor little poxed face.

She's growing so fast!

And now I'm home. Today I went to a school reunion to mark 50 - 50!!!- years since my classmates and I left school. Here we are - those who attended. It's a girls' school, as you may guess from the photo. Among us there were a chief accountant for a national firm, a university lecturer in engineering, a medical consultant, a professor of agriculture, an economist, another accountant, a writer, an editor, a few teachers, a homemaker and, as far as I could gather, a dilettante with a wealthy husband. We're mainly, though not all, retired now.

Surprisingly, the fourteen who attended (one arrived after the photo was taken), have so far produced, I think, only thirteen grandchildren, which isn't a lot, considering that we're all coming up for 68 years old and four of us had three children, others two. Of course the world has enough people already. But maybe not enough capable people, which I'm assuming that the grandchildren of these women would be. (I realise that clever people aren't necessarily good people - but I think my classmates' children would probably be good also.)

Four of them never married - one of whom is partnered, but gay. Three are divorced, though two of them remarried. Two married later in life to men who already had children.

I was in touch with quite a few of them already and saw all of them ten years ago at a previous reunion. I find it very interesting to see what's become of us all. We all started out from similar backgrounds and in the same city but our lives have been fairly varied. Five of us still live in Edinburgh and another four in other parts of Scotland. The rest live in England. The unmarried ones have had the most starry careers, which isn't terribly surprising since in our young days, women mainly stayed at home for some years to look after the children.

My London daughter would be happy to do this too, but sadly the world has changed, and for financial reasons she'll have to go back to work in September and dear little Littlest will go to a nursery. I suppose that she'll survive, like so many others. But I wish it were otherwise.

We've all decided that we need to meet again in five years' time, not ten, because... who knows whether we'll all survive for another ten? Already two of our class are dead - one at 23, one at 67 - and another has very bad dementia. But meanwhile, the rest of us survive, and it's been such a nice day.