The sorts of things that happen

Well, now that everyone's gone away, not much is happening, or at least not to us. Which is actually quite nice, if a little flat. (Never satisfied.) Big Granddaughter held up some pens to match her outfit - rainbows are always cheering, even if they do have orange in them. 

Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter have been down in Bristol visiting her friend A-L, who had a baby by sperm donation, without having a partner, in December of 2020. She's finding it very hard, not surprisingly. The little one has very broken sleep and A-L has taken to going downstairs with him in the middle of the night and giving him drinks and food. We all know that this isn't a good idea. We've probably all done it, though, in the despair of the night. 

The garden suffered while we were down south in Northumberland and it was very hot here, but it's pleasantly coolish now and there's been some rain, so we still have lots of colour. I planted cosmos seeds and they came up prolifically but they haven't flowered as much as I hoped. Websites suggest that they like lots of sun, not too much water and not too rich soil. I watered them quite a lot in the summer because it was so dry, but they got quite a lot of sun and there's not much I can do about the richness of the soil. But the flowers are pretty anyway. 

As are my hanging baskets

There's a sad story in this newspaper announcement. Eight children to such young parents! Think how many more there might have been if the father had lived. And how awful for the wife to be left with them all to support. Innishbiggle Island currently has 18 inhabitants - I imagine there were more then, but even so, what a stir this must have caused. 

And Liz Truss seems to be quite pleased to have been elected Prime Minister. No accounting for tastes, but I'm glad someone feels like taking the job on. There are so many problems at the moment! Don't think I'm very keen on a PM called an abbreviation, though. And Truss... would someone with great judgement cling to that name, when her husband's name is O'Leary - maybe not great, but surely better? Does Elizabeth O'Leary not have more gravitas? But hey ho. My maiden name was Smith, and even if I'd been born in these more feminist days, I would have been happy to swap it for my husband's slightly less common and more mellifluous one. 

Daughter 1 has added her husband's surname to hers - which makes it quite long, though I see her reasoning. Daughter 2 has kept her own, but that makes her little one have a different surname (though she has ours as a middle name). And DIL has kept hers, so she likewise has a different surname from the children. But they all call the children by the husband's name, which is still quite paternalistic, isn't it? Though commonly done. I wonder what the next generation will do? 

My friend who had the stroke on January 4 came to our house yesterday to rejoin the Monday gatherings that 10 of us - all ex-colleagues - have every week! It was so wonderful to have her with us again. She's walking now with a frame or tripod stick - not fast, and holding on to her husband's arm, but definitely on her feet. I'm so pleased for her. Her speech and thinking are unaffected and I feel quite optimistic about her future. We've all been visiting and writing and emailing lots, but this was her first outing to anyone's house but her children's, so it was a definite new development, and so welcome. 

 

Christmas contemplations

Why is it that I'm not any more organised for Christmas than I was when I was working and unbelievably busy?

We have at least brought the Christmas quilt out, my very first one, made six years ago. It's very simple (I was doubtful of my abilities) and it wouldn't pass my quality control nowadays. Some of those corners...

And the cakes were made some time ago; three of the four have been decorated and two delivered. And I've written the cards and posted the overseas ones in time and the tree is up and partly decorated and some other things are festively adorning the rest of the house. Tomorrow all the decorations will be up and serious attention will be paid to the gift situation. But it's getting dangerously late!

This sort of thing has been happening. Big Grandson wasn't very well, hence his wee white face. Also, he wasn't very impressed at being a donkey, with no lines.

Big Granddaughter was a Wise Woman.  It's the 21st century, after all. She had a line, which she delivered with clarity and aplomb, though she had a little weep from stage fright afterwards.

It's odd being so old - though I hope to get older, at which point I shall look back and marvel at my comparative youth now. But a girl who was in my class at school has just died after suffering from dementia for many years - the second in that class to have died from dementia. Both developed it in their early to mid fifties. Both were clever girls and very nice people. Then there's my good friend Dorothy, also from that class, who was killed at 23 by a car that mounted the pavement. Because of the school that we went to, most of the class were together from the ages of 5 till we were 18, so we were a very close bunch. There's a photo of us all just before we left school, all shiny and full of plans. Quite a few of these came to fruition, but there have been tragedies too - at least one whose child died of cot death, one whose sons both died of cancer last year, one who died herself of cancer a few years ago - and I'm sure lots of the disappointments that life deals out to everyone. But also many joys. It does make one a bit thoughtful, though.

I'm very grateful to be comparatively healthy and shall now prove this by going out into the cold and dark, to push cards through the letter boxes of various neighbours.

And I am, like everyone I know, horrified at the results of our recent election. Clearly someone must have voted for Boris Johnson, so I suppose they must be happy. But I can't imagine who they are.

I maybe be back before Christmas, but in any case, season's greetings to my bloggy friends and silent readers.

Loftier

In answer to your question, Toffeeapple, yes, our Edinburgh little ones are tall, especially Biggest Granddaughter. They have tall grandfathers and a tall father, though we're extremely medium-to-short in my ancestral family.

The other day we set out to recce a walk for our group to do today. The weather was lovely. Here, I pushed my phone through the fence to take a photo of a small part of the extensive private gardens in Queen Street - you can get a key only if you live or work in one of the streets looking on to them. The houses are all very expensive, so it's a pretty exclusive place to walk your rich dog.

When I rule the country, these gardens will be opened up to the public - though only those who don't drop litter or spray graffiti.

Anyway, we plunged down to Stockbridge and walked along the river,

 along the back of the lower New Town

through Inverleith

to Leith. It was splendid. Sun, blue skies, balmy breezes. 

On Thursday we walked in the Botanics. Spring was everywhere.

Fluttering and dancing and all that.

And then today - the day of the walk for which we'd done the recce for the group - this happened. After much emailing to and fro, we decided to cancel the outing. Thanks, weather.

But it's not important compared to other things that happen in this problematical world.

At one of my choirs, we're singing John Ireland's setting of part of a poem by  J Addington Symonds. Depressingly, though Symonds was born in 1840, his vision is still very far from coming to pass (though I'm not so sure about the "man's lordship" bit - maybe that has, at least for the moment, and it's not entirely a good thing). I'm not saying it's deathless poetry but because we've been practising it, it's fixed fairly firmly in my head. And whenever we sing it, I feel his vision seems so desirable (though with some women around and a bit of patchwork).

So. Roll on that loftier race.

From A Vista

Say, heart, what will the future bring
To happier men when we are gone?
What golden days shall dawn for them,
Transcending all we gaze upon?

These things shall be! A loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known shall rise
With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of science in their eyes.

They shall be gentle, brave and strong
Not to shed human blood, but dare
All that may plant man's lordship firm
O'er earth and fire and sea and air.

Nation with nation, land with land
Unarmed shall live as comrades free;
In every heart and brain shall throb
The pulse of one fraternity.

They shall be simple in their homes,
And splendid in their public ways,
Filling the mansions of the state
With music and with hymns of praise.

In aisles majestic, halls of pride,
In gardens, groves and galleries,
Manhood and age and youth shall meet
To grow by converse inly wise.

New arts shall bloom of loftier mould,
And mightier music thrill the skies,
And every life shall be a song
When all the earth is Paradise.

These things - they are no dream - shall be
For happier men when we are gone:
Those golden days for them shall dawn
Transcending all we gaze upon.

Hypothetically...

We took the two older grandchildren to the Glasgow Science Centre the other day, where they did lots of stuff like this...

... and this. Daughters 1 and 2 and also Littlest Granddaughter came too, but the latter mainly just watched.

She is very delightful.

And then on Sunday we went to Perth, where we celebrated the Unbloggable Toddler's second birthday (somewhat early) by spending lots of time in a playpark. Look at her beautiful blonde hair. She now calls us Granny and Grandpa - hurray.

Here is the Forth Rail Bridge as we went home on the train after a lovely day.

I'm aware that droning on about the grandchildren isn't terribly exciting so how about this? The other day I asked Mr Life if, given the choice, he would like to be young again, and without a moment's hesitation he said, "Oh no, I couldn't go through that again" (or words to that effect). This was slightly insulting, since most of "that" has been marriage to me... however, setting that aside (he claimed he was talking about the pressures of work, so let's believe him) - would you, o bloggy friends, like to be young again? I certainly would. The only problem would be that I would miss the grandchildren horribly - and that would be a great problem (but I don't think this is what Mr L was thinking about).

And there are, of course, things that I would do differently - not refrain from marrying Mr L but, you know, look after myself better in various ways - and many things that I'd try to worry about less.

When my brother and I were children, we had adjacent bedrooms and used to talk after lights out, and every now and then I'd ask him something and he'd say, "Hmm, I don't answer hypothetical questions." And this is a very hypothetical one. But - would you like to live your life again?

Girls of various sizes

We've been spending time arranging my aunt's funeral - at long distance, not the easiest way - though my brother and sister-in-law in Surrey have been doing much of the liaising with the funeral director and so on. But so many emails have been whizzing to and fro! Meanwhile, Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter have been staying with us, which has been so lovely. But you may know how much time for anything else there is with a little person who likes a lot of attention. And then the Edinburgh grandchildren have been here today.

It's very ... what do I mean? ... poignant? touching? reassuring? seeing this baby, this little girl, this young mother moving into their places in the world just as the old lady moves out.

Biggest Granddaughter decided to go camping with her dolly. It was apparently very hot so dolly took her clothes off to do a bit of sunbathing. Wisely, however, they stayed inside today. Spring? It's a chilly one so far.

Casting off

When I was teaching, one of the texts that I did with classes many, many times was Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". I first saw it when I was very young myself and then taught it, on and off, over a career of nearly forty years, and I now realise that I appreciated it in different ways at different parts of my life.


Now that I'm quite old, I marvel at how Arthur Miller, who was 34 - 34!!! - when he wrote it, had such insight into how an older person feels. I know that he partly based Willy Loman on his father, so I wonder whether some of the things in the play are direct quotes from the family. One that resonates with me a lot nowadays is when Willy is bemoaning change, and his wife Linda says to him, "Life is a casting off. It's always that way." How did Arthur Miller know this? By my age it's obvious, but when I was 34 I was busy having our third child and being the centre of lots of exciting things and I didn't really think about it.


But now... our children (reasonably enough) are living their own exciting lives, our parents are dead (that's a hard one) and friends will soon, no doubt, start to drop off the perch (unless we do so first). And recently my remaining aunt let me know that the wonderful Norfolk house that she lives in, where we've been so lucky to holiday for the past 30+ years, is being sold. It's a long story but she retired there with friends, including the much-younger husband of one of the friends, and they agreed that the house should actually belong to the younger husband. It got partly divided into flats for various of them. And she's lived there very happily for 35+ years, but now only she (92 and a half) and the much-younger husband, now for some years the widower, of her friend are left, and he is nearly 76. So very wisely he's selling up and she will go into a home.


Which is of course much worse for them than for us - though my aunt is taking it very philosophically - but very sad for us too.


Ah well. Life is a casting off, it's the same for everyone (much worse for some, I realise) and it's always that way. But it's also quite hard.

We were up town yesterday. Princes Street has lately taken to having little video adverts on the bus stops - not a huge improvement to the joy of life, in my opinion, but anyway. And all the way along the street, we saw Keira Knightley advertising Chanel perfume. "It's funny," mused Mr L. "Her mum would never have expected her daughter to appear on every bus shelter in Princes Street."


By which he meant that the girl we knew when we were young - the pretty girl who was part of the local crowd at the badminton club (and who grew up to be Keira Knightley's mum) presumably never expected to have such a famous - and exceedingly rich -  daughter.


Keira's mum was nice enough, though not one of our particular friends. She was very pretty, but in a slightly broad-hipped, thick-legged way. I assume that Keira takes after her dad in body shape.


It's odd how things turn out. The family who lived across the road from us when our children were small were extremely nice but utterly normal. You would have put money on their never doing anything particularly unusual. The parents were very devoted to each other and the children; and the son and daughter were really lovely young people: sweet and slightly shy but very charming. Yet within a few years the daughter of the house had become a tv presenter, appeared scantily clad in lads' mags, had her naked image projected on to the Houses of Parliament, married and divorced a famous pop singer, become bald and bipolar and had more or less (though not totally) sunk from sight. Meanwhile the parents split up, the father became alcoholic (possibly the former as a result of the latter) and the mother had died of cancer.


And it's interesting to see what the girls who were in my class at school have done with their lives. It was a selective girls' school, so most of us were together for 13 years and I'm still in touch with quite a few of them. We were all in the top stream, so all reasonably clever. One became a professor of agriculture and advisor to the government. One, a good friend of mine, had a very important job in the museum world, sadly developed dementia in her 50s and has recently died. One achieved great success in business. (None of these successful women had children; two didn't marry at all and one married late in life. I imagine that this is relevant to their achievements in the wider world.)


One, another of my particular friends, was knocked down and killed in Brussels as she walked along the pavement, at the age of 23. Unbelievably, another member of the class also developed dementia some years ago, though is still alive - just.


And, as you would expect, a lot of us have been teachers and librarians and accountants and mothers, never making a big splash in the world. Some really bright girls never worked at all after having children.


But back in the 60s, you wouldn't really have been able to predict with certainty which of us would be the high-fliers. Nor had Mr Life and I any idea that we were sharing a badminton court with the mother of a famous film star or allowing our children to play with someone who would become a slightly infamous ladette.


Strange thing, life.

Little life

I sometimes think about how, since retirement, my life has narrowed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a college teacher, I was constantly interacting with many, many students and this was never-endingly interesting but also never-endingly exhausting. Now, I meet up with friends and of course spend lots of time with the grandchildren, but life is nothing like as varied as it was. Or, I suppose as stimulating, but then, stimulating = exhausting, so again, the change is good in a way.


Anyway, Grandson and I made pancakes, or as some people might call them, Scotch pancakes (but we wouldn't because... you know... they're what we regard as pancakes).

He was pleased.


We saw all the offspring at the weekend and it was Mother's Day, so that was lovely. Cruelly, I persuaded Daughter 2 and Son to go up on the kitchen roof to clean the outside of the skylights. Granddaughter found this very interesting. (She's wearing her brother's hat and Daughter 2's scarf. She loves accessories and is very loth to go hatless at any time, which is a pity since hats squash her curls.)

This is what she was looking at.

And here are my favourite people (well, most of them) on Saturday.


And, below, the grandchildren at the museum. Granddaughter chose her own outfit, hence the lack of colour coordination.


Though teaching was exhausting, looking after two little lively people isn't exactly restful either. But oh, how I love them.


(Oh, Blogger is being so annoying, making my photos huge (which is all right, but I don't know why it's happening), putting the first one through the About bit, and then not letting me write under the final photo. Anyway, I've just realised that my blog is 10 years 4 days old. What a lot of blethers have come out of the ends of my fingers in the last 10 years and, oh, how my life has changed since then. Not, generally, for the better, but the little people have compensated for a lot of sadness.)

The effects of time

A study...

in...

concentration.

She'll be 3 next month.

Where does the time go?

Blogger is being peculiar, as happens from time to time. My previous post turned out a bit funny-looking.

Thank you for your new-grandchild congratulations. I can't quite believe that Son, our youngest, is old enough to be a father. However, he'll be nearly 32 when he becomes one, in July/August, so I suppose I'm wrong. How time flies. (This seems to be the highly-unoriginal theme of this post.) 

And Terry Wogan has died, which feels equally unlikely. I fear that David Bowie meant little to me personally - his music never really penetrated my consciousness and probably wasn't my sort of thing - and I'm sure Alan Rickman was splendid but his face was only vaguely familiar to me from "Sense and Sensibility". But Terry Wogan!  That's very sad. On the other hand, I suppose that having a wonderful time till you're 77 and dying before you get dottled (a fine Scottish (I think) word which means confused) is no bad thing really.

I shall now stop musing and start practising the piano. I'm sure that I'll get a lot better at my piece before my lesson tomorrow morning. You think?

Fiction and stranger than that

Look: a little vase of polyanthus from the garden. It's spring! (A bit of wishful thinking, possibly.)

Something rather strange happened on Hogmanay (New Year's Eve). Well, firstly, the night before, Mr Life, Daughter 2 and I watched the film "Sunshine on Leith" on television. (That wasn't the strange thing.) It was slightly toe-curlingly Scottish - not sure why my toes should thus curl but they did a bit, probably just imagining what other, non-Scots people would think of the rather thick accents. However, there are lovely views of Edinburgh in the film and I loved the closing scene.

It's a story about a daughter appearing in her father's life - the product of a fling shortly after he got married. Predictably, this somewhat disrupts his current family life with his wife, son and daughter. It's interspersed with songs by The Proclaimers, a Scottish band. After the film, we briefly discussed how strange it would be if a similar daughter appeared out of the blue claiming that Mr L was her dad. (This didn't happen. That would have been strange. I've known Mr L for a long time.)

The next day, Daughter 2 met a schoolfriend for coffee and heard that something very similar had just happened to her: an unknown half-brother had been in touch, the product of a relationship that her (now dead) father had had before he met his wife. So - no element of faithlessness in this story - but it was a coincidence, right after our conversations of the night before. And it was a shock for the family.

Later that day, the three of us went to friends' to see in the New Year with lots of other friends. I got talking to someone I've known more or less all my life and she mentioned that her husband (whom I've known for almost as long) had discovered only when he was forty (he's now in his mid-sixties) that he was adopted. His adoptive father had died some years before and when his adoptive mother died, our friend was going through papers looking for the necessary paperwork to register her death, and found his adoption certificate. Not an unheard-of situation; but as you can imagine, he was hugely upset.

The very strange thing is that I knew, years before, that he was adopted. My mother had mentioned it in passing; I thought nothing particularly about it but did remember it. I - and he - must have been twentyish at the time. I never mentioned it to anyone else because I wasn't sure that it was common knowledge. But I had no idea that even he didn't know.

He has since met up with his birth mother's later daughter and her family, though his mother had died by that time.

How did my mother know? I haven't a clue. We all lived in the same suburb and knew lots of the same people. Some of our friend's extended family evidently knew but had been sworn to secrecy, but of them, my mother knew only one aunt and I can't imagine her telling my mother; they weren't close. And our friend didn't live in the district till he was nine, so Mum couldn't have observed the change from no-baby to baby.

Stranger than fiction, isn't it? In fiction, however, there would be an answer. Mum died three and a half years ago and there's no one to ask.

Heartwarmingly, in all cases (including the film) the new siblings were welcomed into the families after the initial consternation and the outcomes have been happy.

Such excitement

Well, it's been a busy old time. Grandson and I had a trip on a tram.

My brother and his wife were here for the week. Son and his beard came down to meet up with us for lunch. We were having a nicer time than you might imagine from my brother's and SIL's expressions. My phone cogitates for a while before actually taking the photo, by which time smiles have sometimes slipped (and grandchildren tend to be several yards away).

Another day, while Daughter 1 and Son-in-Law 1 were making a Very Important Decision, we took the grandbabies to a play park and the beach.

The beach bit was somewhat unplanned so we didn't have their buckets and spades with us, but they had a happy time playing with the sand, shells and bits of twig. A lesson for us all.

While we were on the beach, Daughter 1 and her husband made an offer for a house and later on that day, they heard that this had been accepted. Hooray! Even better, the date settled on is the same date that they'd agreed to vacate their present house to their buyers. (Also, the same date as Son and his wife are moving to their new house. What are the chances of that?) Mr L was especially delighted, since this means that they won't have to move in with us while searching for/waiting to get into a house. It's not that he doesn't love his grandchildren. It's just that his small-child stamina is not quite what it was.

Life has not been entirely kind to Daughter 1 and her husband in the last few years, so I hope this is the start of better things for them. They deserve it.

My face, by the way, is amazingly better. I would never have thought that it would heal so fast. It looks and feels more or less normal - even though not much more than a week ago, small children were still pointing at me, aghast, in the street. And my hand is pretty good too. The human body has great powers of recovery (sometimes). Thank you for your good wishes.

And now I must get on. More visitors arrive tomorrow.

Progress report

Thank you for your kind comments about my accident. This is my hand and wrist. My face is considerably worse. However, considering that it's a bit less than a week since I did it, I'm a bit better than I thought I would be. Or possibly I'm just getting used to it. Currently the skin is peeling off the affected part of my face - the entire right side - which I suppose is a good thing because the scalded skin was never going to be much use. Unfortunately the new skin is rather red and raw as well. However, I'm sure time will improve it somewhat. Fortunately I wasn't expecting to base my future happiness on my dazzling beauty.

The grandchildren seem to have become entirely accustomed to the new, red and cracked Granny, so maybe I don't look so different after all... . Granddaughter, to add to our joys, fell most of the way downstairs in her house today and had to have a trip to the Sick Children's Hospital. Luckily her main injury seems to be a carpet burn on her chin. Neither of us is therefore looking her best.

These things don't really come in threes, do they?

Weekend

Our weekend was... mixed. On Saturday, we walked along to one of the modern art galleries, where we had coffee and then visited the M C Escher exhibition, which was wonderful. I'm not wild about surreal images - too nightmarish - so didn't really expect to like it much, but in fact I really loved it. His drawing, seen up close and full-sized rather than in small reproductions, is really beautiful - fantastically detailed - and much of his earlier work isn't surreal at all. Though in fact I really liked the stranger pictures too, once I saw them close to.

Then we walked...

 ... back along...

 ... the river...

saying hello to the heron (can you see him in the middle of the photo?)...

... and back out into the real world, fifty yards away from the heron in his quiet lair.

So that was all lovely.

Then on Sunday, in the church hall, I was carrying a newly-filled, catering-sized teapot, and tripped. As I fell, the lid came off and the tea splashed all down the right side of my face and on my right hand.

Kind friends brought ice from the freezer and Mr L took me to Accident and Emergency (which was well staffed with kind nurses and doctors, despite what you might think from Jeremy Hunt's remarks). After three and a half hours of lying holding ice to my face and hand, I was allowed home. Because of the ice, I have what the doctor said amounts to bad sunburn - superficial burning rather than anything deeper. I have one blister, on the tip of my nose (so fetching), which I hadn't noticed so hadn't particularly been holding ice against it. This is now quite raw but the rest of my face, though not exactly scenic, looks more as if someone had been punching me (quite hard) rather than as if it had been scalded. It's a bit swollen and a bit scarlet and tender, but that's all.

It could have been so much worse. I could have scalded someone else as well - thank goodness I didn't. I must have shut my eyes as I fell, because though the skin all round my right eye is affected, my eye itself is fine. And there could have been no ice, which relieved the quite considerable pain and took the heat out of my skin.

It could also have been better, however, if I had been more careful. I'm still feeling a bit shaky when I remember the moment that the almost-boiling water hit my face and I thought, oh dear, I've done something really serious here.