More snowsnowsnow

We've had a few beautiful days. On this one, we went up on the golf course and it was really lovely, if quite hard work, trudging upwards in deep snow. 

But worth it

for the colours 

and the general exhilaration of being among them. 

I'm making progress with the photos, indeed getting towards the end of the initial sorting-out. The experience is mixed: it's lovely to see the family history (this is my father with his two sisters) but also wistfulness-inducing. 

Sledging with the Edinburgh grandchildren, again on the golf course. Annoyingly, one of the new sledges we had sent for lasted 20 minutes before...

it broke. 

Yesterday we went down to check Daughter 2's Edinburgh flat and then walked along a cycle path, an old railway line, which had been cleared of snow - unlike the pavements, which are the lethal, icy result of trodden snow. Luckily it's much milder today so with any luck, the snow will melt and we'll be able to linger outside a bit more. We're still not allowed to meet with others inside unless for caring purposes. I'm looking forward to getting into the garden, with spring flowers. 

I'm wondering what to do with all my younger aunt's work references. I wonder why she kept them - maybe because they say nice things about her. Would descendants be interested in what people thought of their great-(however many times)-aunt? Maybe. The trouble is that once something's been kept for, in the case of this one, 70 years, it acquires a slightly sacrosanct quality. And by themselves they don't take up a lot of room. But then, nothing does by itself. 

I can't wait to be finished with this archiving and to be allowed (by me) to make a quilt. That would be such therapy. 
 

Snowsnowsnowsnow and the virus

We don't generally get much snow in Edinburgh, despite being on much the same latitude as Moscow. But every few years we do get quite a bit, and this is one of these years. The last one was 2010, and then we got snow on and off throughout the winter, which was very memorable and thankfully hasn't happened this year. But at the moment, it's snowy. And I don't like it. It's pretty, but also very inconvenient, especially during this, the schools' mid-term week. Normally we could take the children to the museum or an art gallery or if nothing else a cafe. Now... it's snow or nothing. 

The main roads are all right. 

We do not live on a main road. This is our road. 

This is our garden. 

Our great (Scottish) leader has decided that passengers arriving at our airports from abroad will have to quarantine themselves in a hotel, at great expense to themselves. She hasn't, however, worked out how to stop them arriving in England, which hasn't instituted such a regime, and then travelling up to Scotland. One feels that this may happen.

I went to the dentist up town today. 

It was snowy there too. 

Altogether I'm finding it quite hard to maintain a jolly disposition. It's such a long time since we were able to see our lovely non-Edinburgh families and I see no prospect of this changing any time soon. We're very lucky to be able to see the Edinburgh one - and I'm grateful for that. But otherwise... . This is all a bit rubbish. 
 

Happy birthday, Dad; and things you might not have predicted

This begonia semperflorens has bloomed since last spring, which is very cheerful of it. It's a bit leggy but bright, at least. In a few weeks I'll chop it back for cuttings. 

I've been going through photos again. This is my father's mother, who - unusually for a lady in her eighties in the 1960s - lived in Pakistan for a few years with my aunt, her daughter - who was a doctor there. 

Today is my father's 101st birthday. Here he is in a natty velvet suit with his little sister (who became the doctor in Pakistan). 

One of the problems is this huge album, which contains souvenirs from my parents' Golden Wedding dinner in their rather posh club. It contains the guest list, the menu signed by the guests, all the many cards they received, photos of flowers they received and of the guests at the party, my dad's speech... and so on. I had just decided to be ruthless and fillet it for a few things when Mr L said he thought I ought to keep in intact. So I did. For the moment. It's all rather sad, since their friends were on the whole rather successful and confident people and now they're all gone. Again - not sad really - everyone has to die - but. You know. Tempus fugit and all that. 

There were lots of letters, many of the less relevant of which I've firmly thrown out, but I've kept family ones such as this to me from my dad, in 1970 when I was in America. I had to look up who the Chancellor who died was (Iain MacLeod - I remember him vaguely). Poor old Barber (only just remember him, I fear), wasting his time (as it turns out) on EU negotiations. And people indeed don't send so many Christmas cards now - young people, anyway - but not so much because of the postage as because of other methods of communication, I think, not easy to predict in 1970.

Imagine Sir John having an £8000 car in 1970!

It snowed a bit earlier in the week and then it snowed A LOT. 

Big Grandson came for the day yesterday and I was just about to take him home at 7.30pm but then looked outside. I hadn't done so for a couple of hours, and it had snowed rather a lot and was still snowing heavily. I decided not to risk an hour's drive there and back, so he stayed the night. 

And by the morning...

 

He and Grandpa did some manly snow-clearing

and then Son-in-Law 1 brought Biggest Granddaughter over for the afternoon and they played outside for a while (and also inside in the warm). I'm glad they're getting this snow experience but I hope it doesn't last too long. I'm ready, SO ready, for spring. And some good news. The media keep telling us that the vaccine that we got doesn't work too well for over 70s - though there are other voices who tell us not to worry about this, for various scientific reasons. What can we do - but plod on? 
 

Snow. And news!

Well, it's certainly not spring yet but one can buy a bunch of daffodils for £1 in the supermarket, so it would be foolish not to do so. They certainly look and smell like spring. 

We walked up on the high golf course again on Saturday. You can see that we weren't the first! 

The weather was beautiful, if chilly. We gazed over the sea to Fife. If only we could go over there to see Son and his family. 

So white and so blue.

And in the other direction, there's the lower golf course - the expanse of snow in the middle distance, far below. We were out for three hours - it's quite hard work walking uphill (and come to that, downhill) through snow and we needed a seat when we got back. 

Yesterday we went to the Botanics. Again, it was lovely. We walked round, in the permitted groups of two adults, with Daughter 1 and her husband and children. Social distancing wasn't a problem. 

Then the children came back to our house for some Brio railway construction and some drawing, such as Big Granddaughter's cheerful giraffe. 

And then today - great excitement! We didn't expect to get vaccinated nearly so soon - though our governments have decided on a twelve-week gap between jags so as to vaccinate more people sooner, so it'll be a while before we're fully protected. Still, it's progress. 

 

Snow and virus - double joy...

Nothing different is happening. There's home-schooling, which is rather fun, really. Some of it happens with pencil and paper,

and some of it on the computer. Everyone's doing their best: the school teachers are sending stuff and the home teachers and the children are doing at least some of it. The little ones are being amazingly cooperative, really, considering that they get no outings apart from a walk after school and see no one but their parents and us (mainly me), and it's been so cold recently that even our walks aren't lasting very long.  

In what seems like an unreasonable extra trial, the snow's back. This is quite stressful where we live, since it's a dead-end street, which never gets gritted, at the bottom of a hill. The only way out of our street - the street at right angles to ours, which is also on a hill - never gets gritted either. We don't normally get much snow so we tend to think - oh, it'll melt. And then if it doesn't, various people's cars have by that time squashed the snow into ice, which makes it much harder to shovel away and also much more slippery to drive on. At the moment it's passable, which is good, since on most weekdays I drive to get to Daughter 1's house to help with the children. I could get two buses there and two back, which would probably be perfectly safe, since buses have hardly any passengers at the moment, but it would take an hour each way and really one would prefer to keep off public transport at the moment. 

Still, Son-in-Law 1 brought the children round today and they enjoyed playing outside, so that was lovely. 

But we haven't seen Daughter 2 or Son, or their little ones, since September and October. And all our lives are ticking away.

The vaccine is slowly being administered, though - my brother and sister-in-law in the south of England have both had the first dose, for example. Here, however, it's much slower (why??) and lots of over-80s are still unvaccinated. As for us... I think it'll be a while. 

Snow in the time of Covid

Well, happy New Year, all bloggy friends and silent readers. We watched the New Year concert from Vienna, which was lovely but rather sad, with no one in the audience. They did have a Zoom audience though, whose applause was broadcast. 

I'm NOT going to start another quilt till I've sorted out the archives, but while the concert was on I did fish out these extremely crazy patches I made last year when I was waiting for instructions from the friends I was about to make quilts for (and before I'd Googled how you're supposed to make crazy patches). I laid them out to cheer myself up. Fabric! I might possibly do something with them but not till... etc. 

In the afternoon we went with the Edinburgh family up to the nearby school and they did some sledging. The snow was rather thin but it was icy and so

they could really slide

quite a long way. 

Then we had the children for the rest of the day, which was nice. 

Last night it snowed again. This morning we took down all the decorations because we've frankly had enough of this fairly non-Christmas season. I deeply dislike undecorating, but it's done now so that's good. 

And then we went out for a walk on the nearer golf course. If it's still snowy tomorrow, we might go up to the other one, the hilly and lovely one that we walked on when it was closed during lockdown. Surely golfers don't golf in snow? I don't know why we didn't think of it today. It would be so good to visit it again. 

But it was nice walking in the sunshine (though quite tiring, plodding cautiously. This is not the time to end up in hospital with a broken limb).

The allotments were empty. Still, the days are getting longer. We're coming for you, spring. Just not very fast. And there's a lot of virus about, according to the news. 
 

Remembering

More self-indulgent pictures of Littlest Granddaughter. I feel the need to indulge because she's now 400 miles away, as is her lovely mum, and I miss them a lot. Here is Littlest playing with her Edinburgh cousins, who're being very patient as she carefully undoes their construction.

The next day, Big Grandson was having a nice quiet game on someone's phone when Littlest Granddaughter came and leaned companionably on him. So sweet. She was lying on his right arm but he didn't complain.

It was my father's 100th birthday on the 9th. Sadly, he died in 2007, but we put a candle on a cake and sang him Happy Birthday anyway. Littlest, who didn't quite grasp the concept but knows the song, insisted that it was her birthday, so we sang it to her and then, at her suggestion, to everyone else too. My dad would probably have been a difficult 100-year-old - he was quite a difficult 50-year-old, 60-year-old etc at times - but it's sad that he was so definitely alive and no longer is. He was very very clever. We're all clever enough but his exceptional brain has now evaporated, which seems improbable.

And then the other day it snowed, and Biggest Granddaughter, who is too young to remember snow (I don't think there was any last year and she's only 6) wanted to go out into her garden and throw snowballs. There was just about enough for her to manage (though it's all gone now). Duck!