Rosebuds

We went over to Fife today to have lunch with Mr L's cousin and her 100-year-old mother - Mr L's aunt by marriage. This is the view from the restaurant. Aunt J is really amazing - no sign of dementia - but in the last year or so her eyesight has been going and she needs a walker for balance. This must be so trying for her. She was a doctor and still lives in her beautiful house but can no longer really go into her lovely garden because it's on a slope, and anyway she can't see the flowers. Fortunately she has help with the house and garden, and also has her daughter, who lives in Edinburgh but nobly spends every weekend with her. But Aunt J says that she enjoyed her 90s much more than her 100s, and I can see what she means. 

Oh dear, old age. 

Meanwhile there's no use thinking about one's own ageing (we're merely in our 70s, after all, and in reasonable nick). 

I've been back at the archives, and by the simple change of moving things into the reasonably large sitting room instead of spreading them out on a bed, have made progress. The piles are no longer in danger of collapsing into one another. Going through my parents' papers is rather sad, though. We made a book for my mum's 80th birthday by writing to all her friends and asking them for reminiscences and photos. We got an excellent response, but while it's very heartwarming to read about what a lovely person she was, it's also sad that not only she, but most of the contributors, are no longer with us. Ah me!

Gather ye rosebuds... And meanwhile, the grandchildren are very cheering. They're now nearly 13, 11, nearly 8, not far off 7 and 5. And very lovely!

Socialising

On Tuesday, we drove up in the rain to Son's house, because the school teachers were on strike and the children were therefore not at school. We met them at a soft play/trampoline centre. The children had a great time. Son is a very good, active father. 

At home, he rigged up a string and they all played badminton with a balloon. The little ones were surprisingly good with their racquets, though it's much easier with a balloon than with a shuttlecock. Again, it was good fun. The walls and ceiling look interestingly striped in this photo, though they're actually plain cream - the stripes are the effect of light coming out from a shade with slits in it. 

It's been quite a social week - coffee with eight ex-colleagues on Monday at my house - we meet up every Monday for an hour or so, which is a great way to keep up with one another without any great effort on anyone's side. One week we're here and the alternate week at another person's, and if someone can't make it one week it doesn't matter because there's always the next week. Then Tuesday - up north. On Wednesday I had lunch with three schoolfriends - we were in the same class from the age of 5 to the age of 18, and meet up every three months. So that was lovely. And today I had coffee with another friend and we compared the progress of our arthritis and discussed the vexed question of what the best time is to downsize. Despite how this sounds, we had quite a jolly time. We also talked about books. 

The downsizing thing is really difficult. I want the family to be able to come and stay, and at the moment feel quite able to have them. But we have a five-bedroom house and lots of stuff, so the trick will be to catch the moment when we're still just about able to do all the appalling sorting out and decision-making, but we nevertheless know that the time has come to move to a small flat (oh dear) with no garden (oh NO!). Is this a likely conjunction of circumstances?? At the moment I would hate not to have a garden, and yet the old joints get quite sore when I've been working outside and I'm only (only!) 72. As everyone always says, I don't feel old inside my head. But facts must be faced. Just not yet... .

 

Change and perhaps a bit of decay

Blogging used to be such a community - it felt like a conversation. In fact, it was. But - as I've said before - so many of my bloggy friends have dropped away - though some are now Facebook friends - that it feels a bit daft to keep putting out into the ether pictures of mundane old-lady activities. People are reading (according to the stats, which I occasionally look at) but on the whole I don't know who they are. So I think I'm inclined to stop. I started in 2006 and things change. 

However, I'll record yesterday, when I saw a consultant about my arthritic hip - he was very nice, if disconcertingly young. I'm now on a long, long list to get a replacement hip. It's not that bad, though, and after seeing him, we went on a 7.72 mile walk (according to Mr L's device) to do a recce for the walk we're leading in a few weeks. It was, frankly, something of a struggle towards the end! It wasn't easy walking because it started along a beach, which was at first sandy (not easy to walk fast on) and then stony. I really love the wonderful variety of colours of stones - but they make for uncomfortable walking. Is it just Scotland that has such a colourful selection of stones on beaches and riversides? I don't know - probably not.  

Then the route led along the cliff top. The flowers, particularly the campion, were beautiful but the path was somewhat imaginary - consisting mainly of slightly squashed long, wet grass - again, a bit of a struggle to wade through. 

One didn't want to fall off the cliff. 

After a few miles the area became wooded but was still slightly precipitous, as evidenced by this somewhat discouraging sign. 

It was still pretty, though. 

Then there was open country, with lupins growing wild. Considering how I have to nurture lupins in my garden, defending them valiantly from slugs, snails and aphids, I'm always amazed at how they seed themselves in rough grass in the countryside. 

We passed a field which from a distance I thought was planted with tulips, but as we got nearer I realised that it was red clover - grown, I assume, for green manure. Isn't it beautiful? 

And there were one or two tiny villages. 

And then we looped back along the cliff "path" and beach for the final three miles or so - which seemed quite long. 

We were pretty tired. We might be getting old. And then we have to do it again in a couple of weeks! 

 

Faces, hair and time

Life is so busy! I'll never have enough time to do all the things I want to do. But it's fun. The Edinburgh grandchildren have been here, not adding to the tidiness of our house but adding so much to the happiness.

It's been very wet! I tried to go for a walk in the Botanics the other day, but they were closed! - I assume because of flooding on the paths. Instead, I walked in Inverleith Park, which is opposite the Botanics, and got rather muddy.

This path (yes, it's a path) was impassible so I had to walk on the grass. Hmm, yes.

More from the archives. My parents took our family and my brother's to France to celebrate my parents' Golden Wedding in 1996 and the children made a joint book about it to thank them. They all wrote some entries. Food figures widely in these. The one below is written by my niece. She's rather disrespectful about her mother, my delightful sister-in-law!

And then - photos. This is my father's paternal grandfather. He died at the age of 40. He was a house painter but also painted pictures - which we sent to auction when my mother's house had to be cleared, on the grounds that you can't keep everything. I feel bad about that but on the other hand, we've saved the dilemma passing itself down to our children in future years.

This is his wife, my dad's paternal grandmother. Good hair.

This is my dad's maternal grandfather, the reason that I'm astonished that Son still has a thick head of hair.

And here's his wife, my dad's maternal grandmother.

My dad's parents, children of the above.

The chap with the moustache looks like the same chap, my paternal grandfather, but is actually his brother Angus. Here he is with his mother, grandmother and baby son (my dad's cousin) in 1910. Sadly Angus was killed in the war five years later. But these ladies are our grandchildren's great-great-great grandmother and great-great-great-GREAT grandmother. Which astonishes me. Imagine being able to see such a good picture of one's GGGGgrandmother! - and she's smiling at having her first great-grandchild on her knee. She was born in 1829, in the reign of William IV, Victoria's uncle.

And here's my paternal grandmother (as seen two photos above with her husband). She's on the right. She was the third youngest of ten children. Sadly, the little boy, Henry, was also killed in the war in 1915. Poor mite.

I needed a photo of myself for other purposes and tried taking a selfie. The result was too horrendous to contemplate. So, to cheer myself up, I took a non-selfie in the bathroom mirror, with kind, gentle light from the side, thus making myself look better than usual instead of worse. I'm not particularly vain, but there's a limit. Ah, it's a terrible thing, getting older. I used to have curly, shiny brown hair - it was never hugely thick but it was acceptable. Now it's greying and straightish and there's far less of it. Ah well. (It might have looked better if I'd at least combed it.)

This is my mum's wartime diary from 1940. She was living in London and working for the Civil Service. Now, she had lovely thick hair. My dad was visiting her when he was on leave from the army but so were various other young men. She had at least three marriage proposals. One chap, Geoffrey, said he'd become a monk if she didn't marry him. She didn't but he didn't.

It's all terribly interesting (to me; probably not to anyone else apart from the daughters) but also very time-consuming. And that's not to mention the 132 (out of the projected 144) tumbler shapes I've so far cut out of my friend's deceased husband's shirts, at her request, to make a quilt of them. Busy busy busy.

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.

Big heads, little feet etc

Doesn't life whizz by, and isn't it odd to consider that fairly soon (in whizzing terms) it'll go on zooming along without one? I'm 68 now. Maybe 10 good years, if I'm lucky, and that's nothing. But meanwhile, Grandson made me up a set of instructions for drawing flames.

He told me about the moai on Easter Island and drew a picture of one. I knew about the big heads but I didn't know that they were called moai. Some of them have bodies beneath the surface but I think that Harley Quinn from the Lego Batman movie (something else I know very little about) is probably not lurking in an underground cave nearby.

Biggest Granddaughter drew her toy guinea pig chatting to her toy bunny. She's at school now; very grown-up.

Son-in-Law 1 and I took them to the Glasgow Science Centre and they got very wet doing experiments with water. I didn't notice that No Climbing notice till afterwards.

Mr Life and I went for a walk in East Lothian with our walking friends on a perfect autumn day.

So lovely.

Then Son and Daughter-in-Law came for a couple of days with Middle Granddaughter, the Unbloggable Toddler. Here are her cute little boots. She's also very lovely. She now calls us Gwanny and Gwandpa and has accepted us as part of her staff. This makes me very happy, though we'll never see her nearly often enough. Still, I'll have to aim to be the less-frequently-seen but therefore the more exciting grandmother. You think?

Here she is playing in the sandpit.

And here she is sitting on a tractor at Gorgie City Farm.

I went up town today and wondered as I often do (no, not at all biased...) why anyone who liked living in a city would want to live anywhere but here. (Well, or Venice. And possibly Florence, but then - they would be far too hot in the summer.) Though it must have looked even better 100 years ago, without the cars and bins and things painted on the road and various bits of street furniture.

100 years ago, my future granny was working as a sewing maid in Edinburgh and my future grandfather was coming home from the war, having been shot in the hand at Gallipoli.

Cake etc

Ah yes, Delta Airlines. My cousin, or to be more accurate the daughter of my father's cousin, who is American, is married to a lovely chap with a dark chocolatey voice who does voiceovers, including for Delta Airlines. So he sometimes has the strange experience of hearing himself tell him that his flight has been delayed. If you've flown by Delta, you'll probably have heard him too. 

This weekend, Mr Life turned an astonishing 70. I can't quite believe that we're so old (mind you, I'm over two years younger, a fact I'm clinging to). The idea was that the whole lot of us, including my brother and his family, would come for the weekend to celebrate, and this sort of happened. My nephew didn't quite make it. He was willing to drive up from Essex one day and back down 36 hours later but we persuaded him that this would be too exhausting. 

Here are Son and his child's hand at the Botanics, where we all went on Saturday. 

And here he is reading to Littlest Granddaughter and his own child.

And here's Littlest playing with the family rattles. Isn't she cute? (totally unbiased opinion).

And here's the cake that Daughter 2 decorated for her dad.

On the same theme, the card that she made. He likes trains (understatement) and they're organising a trip to Hamburg for him to visit a model railway setup there (and other things).

Some of us went for a walk.

But others got chicken pox and weren't able to come to the party... though they did see Littlest the day before the spots appeared and breathed lovingly on her...

And gradually everyone departed, though my brother and sister-in-law kindly took us out for dinner last night before they too went back home. 

My niece has chosen some fabrics from my stash for a quilt that I'm going to make for her. I haven't yet decided on a design. Thinking about it won't quite console me for the departure of Middle and Littlest Granddaughters, but it'll help.