New

We're back from a few days down south, visiting Daughter 2 and family in their new house (6 days after they moved in. They were impressively organised). It had been empty for nearly a year and the grass at the back was extremely long! The house was worth all the wait and stress, though - it's very nice and very suitable for their needs. 

There was the odd snag - Mr L is a tall chap, but not that tall. They're going to change the light fittings anyway. 

They got a gardener to come and cut the grass - it took him nearly three hours and generated a lot of clippings, which he took away. The garden is not fancy at the moment but has great potential. 

We went to a park which had a railway. This was very popular, especially with the oldest and youngest of the party. 

It's a beautiful park - up quite a big hill, but not really far from the new house. 

There's another playpark, just round the corner from the house, which I imagine they'll visit a lot. 

This is the view from their top windows. 

And then we came home again and as usual, having been with them, I miss them even more than when I haven't seen them. However, I'm happy to have seen them settled in the house. Their previous home, a flat, was nice but small - this has so much more space. We met various of their neighbours and they all seem very pleasant too, which was a great comfort. 

My dear bloggy friend, Thimbleanna, was to have come to Edinburgh for a flying visit with her cousin yesterday on the way to the west of Scotland to walk the West Highland Way - quite an energetic enterprise. However, because of plane delays, they had to go straight to Glasgow instead. Alas. So we went to the Botanics to cheer ourselves up and found that 1000 tulip bulbs had been planted in the beds where there are usually annuals. 

They were beautiful - food for the eyes and the soul. 

 

Blue

Littlest Granddaughter has settled happily into her new room in her new house. 

Here she is, having a slight picnic in the garden. That grass is going to be cut soon!

And she's now a commuter, back to pre-school every day where she used to live. 

Meanwhile, my mecanopsis is flowering. I have three plants and so far one bloom, so it's a case of "try harder" at the moment. But this one is pretty. 

I took Big Granddaughter to bounce; her brother wasn't well, poor chap. 

 She borrowed my phone. I do not have pink hair - among other things. 

A number of things

We went up on Tuesday to visit Son and Little Grandson - DIL was at work and Medium Granddaughter was at school for much of the time, which was the snag. But we had a lovely time. Mr L pushed the little chap on his swing in their garden and we went for a walk. My boys! 

Little Grandson didn't fall into the burn, though I thought he might. 

We collected Medium Granddaughter from school and she had a play in the playpark. So that was all nice, or as nice as distance allows. 

Mr L and I visited the Audubon exhibition at the museum. I didn't know much about him except that he'd painted the birds of America and that his work is now extremely valuable, but it was very interesting. It turns out that he didn't get enough recognition in America and then came to Britain for a while, including Edinburgh (good choice) and we all thought he was great. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (as was my father, for different reasons) and generally did very well. 

I was somewhat disconcerted to find that he painted the birds by first studying them in the wild and then shooting one and wiring it into position. However, different times, I suppose. 

Also some of his "new species" - though by no means all - turned out to be the female or juvenile version of species already known. And then there's this one, the Bird of Washington - which has never been seen by anyone else. Did he make it up? Or was he just mistaken? 

We then walked down to Princes Street, admiring the city in the sunshine. 

In Princes Street Gardens, it turns out that Edinburgh Parks and Gardens don't share my view of orange flowers. 

Meanwhile in London, Daughter 2 and her husband packed up all their stuff...

and moved to their new house- yesterday.

It's not quite organised yet but they like it very much (thank goodness). 

The buying process has been so long that the grass needs a serious cut. But the garden has definite potential. It's much bigger than it looks here, somehow - the shed down at the bottom is quite large, though looks small. 

And in our garden, Mr L has kindly put up some trellises so that I can grow everlasting sweet peas up them. This involved drilling into a stone wall and lots of kneeling on the ground. He's now having a rest. Poor chap. How he loves my ideas... .

 

Good news

Life is quite packed with events, somehow - I never seem to have caught up with what I plan to do. Of course, quilting doesn't help... . I've finished one of the quilts for the bunks we bought a while ago, for accommodating grandchildren. Here it is. 

Now I'm quilting the other one, which is the same colours but a different pattern. Such fun. 

Look at this fine wallflower - beautiful in every respect but it's orange. I could swear it was yellow last year. Hmm. 

I took the Edinburgh grandchildren to the Camera Obscura, which does have a camera obscura but is mainly five floors of optical illusions. They had fun. 

Here they are on the roof, spotting buses (in Big Grandson's case). 

The view is good, though the weather was a bit hazy.

Here I am, taking a photo of the pair of them in a distorting mirror. 

Then they came back here and played with Brio. Their parents were at a wedding down south. 

Yesterday Mr Life took Big Grandson (at his request) to Newcastle, to ride around on the Metro. Each to his own. 

And Son-in-Law 1 and I took Big Granddaughter to a climbing wall and trampoline place. Here she is, at the top of a wall. You wouldn't get me doing this. Each to her own. 

Today we went out with our walking friends, along cycle paths for five miles or so, ending up

in the gardens of Lauriston Castle, in their spring glory. 

Such a lovely day, in good company.

 

In house news, Daughter 2 and her husband have now exchanged contracts on their new house, have definitely sold their flat and are thus moving on the 29th of this month. Whew! 

And about an hour ago, my very nice nephew WhatsApped us to say that he and his equally nice girlfriend are now engaged. 

So - some good news! 
 

Nice people and not-so-nice ones...

We've had a lovely visit from Son and family. On Thursday we went to the playpark, where things like this happened. 

On Friday we went to the museum, which was fun,

and then there was a certain amount of what my dad called "noise and nonsense" in the garden. 

And today we went to the Botanics with the Edinburgh family, where Medium and Big Granddaughters walked around together, chatting a lot. Medium thinks Big is very fine, and Big is very good with her little cousin. 

It was a beautiful day and we had a good time. 

We did however miss Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter. The latter was busy being a unicorn in the garden in London. 

Daughter 2 and her husband have been having a terrible time, trying to buy a house with the mad English system which allows people to pull out of agreements at the eleventh hour. It's taken ages, and for weeks the chap they're trying to buy from has been saying that he's got a better offer and might take that if they don't hurry up. And they've been trying their best to chivvy unresponsive lawyers and estate agents. Finally it looked as if things had been sorted out and they were thinking that they might move on the 21st of this month. And then the chap who's supposed to be buying their flat lowered his offer by £8000. To cut a long story short, we all decided that they'd better just accept this (though it's very annoying and financially difficult) rather than lose the house. So it looks as if it's going ahead again, though no chickens are being counted. 

After they'd accepted his offer in November, their boiler was being inefficient so they got a new boiler, at the cost of £1000, because they thought they couldn't decently sell him the flat with a boiler that was just limping along. Hmm.... 

Ah well, as we've all being telling ourselves, it's only money. 

And now our house is quiet again. And tidy. Which is sad but on the other hand, has its good points. 

 

Time, like an ever-rolling stream...

Life is slightly boring at the moment, though not unpleasant in any way. I do like to see people and go places from time to time, and that's severely restricted (and likely to get worse, if our virus figures don't improve soon). I find it slightly trying that people like us, who wear masks when we go into shops and buses - but frankly hardly ever do go into shops and buses - and who would visit friends and family carefully, with the windows open and sitting on opposite sides of the room, are having our lives curtailed just so that silly people should be discouraged from going in large groups to pubs and having big house parties. However... there we are. It could be worse. It may well become worse.

A little excitement is being provided in our tiny street by the chap who's bought the house opposite. The old lady who lived in it died about fifteen years ago, and her son, who lived in Glasgow, used to visit for the occasional weekend. But in recent years he didn't even do that, though did occasionally instruct roofers to patch the roof or whatever. So it was in a fairly bad state. Anyway, the son has now died and it's been sold to a family who are, reasonably enough, having major works done to it. Unfortunately this means that our tiny street is cluttered up with vans, which our next-door neighbour does not like. And then yesterday, gas vans arrived to dig up the road for the installation of gas pipes. Yesterday was also the first day that our landscapers were going to come to fix the ex-hedge area, using a digger. However, they'd have had difficulty accessing our house, so I put them off and they're now coming on Monday - I hope. 

The new owner seems affable enough but I'd have liked him to be at least a bit apologetic about our having to postpone our landscapers, for whom we've been waiting for some time; but he wasn't. More seriously though, our next-door neighbour is very miffed that the new chap didn't inform all the neighbours that the digging-up was about to happen. Our street is a dead-end, with only five houses and a total of seven occupants, so it wouldn't have been a major task to ring people's bells, and for those of us who normally back out of our driveways into what we regard as the turning circle (now a big, fenced-off hole) it's a bit tricky. Ah well. I wonder whether I should gently mention to the new neighbour that it would be better to communicate more with the rest of us ... or will I just keep out of it? 

I'm spending/wasting far too much time quilting my African fabrics quilt, but have also been doing a bit of sorting of the archives. It's so hard to throw things out - letters from dead friends and relatives (actually, I'm going to stop kidding myself that I might do that) and photos of the family (but we have literally thousands of those). 

There are minor triumphs. Here are some postcards written by their neighbours to my grandparents in the early 1970s. I found these in my mum's stuff and it wasn't too difficult to decide that they weren't examples of deathless prose or wit. 

I know who these people were - the Browns lived up the road and were friends of my grandparents, and the Hoggs lived next door and weren't particular friends, though pleasant neighbours. But it's interesting that Mrs Brown signed herself as C Brown - such formality. They were more than passing  acquaintances (Netta was her daughter and slightly younger than my mother). And Violet Hogg signs her husband and herself as V and J[ohn] Hogg on the postcards. Such different days and such boring messages! Though actually the Hoggs' postcard was from what was then Rhodesia, which explains why it was "really" hot. I wonder why they went there? I have a vague idea that they had family there. 

No such exciting trips for us, but we still go for regular walks along the same old roads. All these leaves will fall off these trees in the next few months, and someone will have to sweep them up, fortunately not us.

Meanwhile the river flows steadily down to the sea, uncaring that our lives are slipping away, as have the lives of my grandparents, my parents, the Browns, the Hoggs... 

I'd probably be a bit more cheerful (though I'm not really uncheerful) if someone would come and buy Daughter 2's flat. But since it went on the market on July 31, there have been only three viewers. Such bad timing, as it turns out. 

And yes, Margaret, Mr L has regrown his beard. He shaved it off but then decided that - I don't really know - he no longer liked his face or something? I myself think it's a very fine face, and it's far less wrinkly than mine (could I grow a beard to hide the wrinkles, I wonder?) but anyway, it's back for the moment. 

So yes. Nothing's happening. But this is better than something terrible happening, and we'll see the Edinburgh grandchildren tomorrow so that's good.