Trying to look on the bright side

Thursday seems to be my blogging evening, since I don’t have any classes on Friday mornings and therefore have no urgent marking to do the night before. Though I do have the girlies at lunch time… but actually they’re beginning to grow on me. Last week they actually asked for more punctuation lessons; well, that’s an easy request.

Life is rather stressful at the moment and I’m not quite sure what to worry about first. There’s the Daughter 1 problem – she’s between jobs, or at least she’s temping as a secretary, but hasn’t got another archivist contract yet. And then her husband is always liable to be depressed if things go wrong, or indeed often if they don’t. Daughter 2’s aspiring-actor boyfriend is another great source of anxiety. I don’t know whether to hope that he makes it as an actor, in which case he’ll undoubtedly spirit her off down to London, or that he doesn’t, in which case he’ll be disappointed. I don’t imagine that he actually will make it, because most don’t seem to. But how long will it take him to accept this? And Daughter 2 isn’t terribly well in a sort of undefined way: tired, pale, occasionally dizzy. She’s been to the doctor and had all sorts of tests, all negative, so I suppose she’s maybe just stressed too.

And now my dad’s in hospital. He’s 86 and ill in various ways, such as having a lot of sarcomas – tumours of the muscle and such like – and arthritis, and he’s deaf and very grumpy and getting a bit confused. On Sunday evening at 8, he suddenly couldn’t get up out of his chair in the kitchen. We just couldn’t get him moved because it caused him so much pain, and – to cut a long story short – we eventually persuaded the health service to send an ambulance, and my son and I accompanied him to hospital, where he was finally admitted to a ward at about 3.30 am. He’s had various tests and these seem to indicate so far that he has a fracture of the pelvis. And it seems possible that this is a result of the cancer. Meanwhile my mum, who’s 84 and not in fantastic health, though much more able to get around and much better-tempered, is worrying about how she’ll cope if they send him home. Sigh.

And today some bright spark in our marketing department decided to hand out helium balloons with the college name on them to the students. Well, what would you do with a free helium balloon if you were 18? That’s right. I had lots of students having enormous fun talking in cartoon voices right outside the windows of the room I was trying to teach in.

Okay, yes, it was quite funny.

And it’s lovely weather for autumn and there’s still lots of colour in the garden. So life's not all bad.

A day out

Monday was an Edinburgh holiday and the Husband and I decided to go for a little day trip. Not far: just to Fife, which is over the River Forth to the north. Our offspring are now 27, 25 and newly 22, and though I find it very hard to part with them, they do, naturally, have lives of their own. So he and I sometimes find ourselves doing things together without any of them.

Which is quite strange and really quite new. And it’s nice that we still like each other, 32 and a half years into our marriage. We actually met in about 1964 – 42 years ago – if you can call it meeting. We went to the same church and just gradually became aware of each other, though I would have to say that I think I became aware of him before he became aware of me… . I actually precipitated things by asking him to my school Christmas dance.

He claims that he would have eventually got round to asking me out but just needed a bit of encouragement. Anyway, we started going out when I was 17 and he was 19, which was 39 years ago, and here we are. I certainly didn’t think at the time that I was finding myself a husband. You just don’t imagine that far ahead at 17.

We were married for 6 years before we had Daughter 1, but it’s hard to think in detail of what those 6 years were like. Actually, they must be documented in the diaries that I’ve kept since I was 15, but I can hardly remember not knowing the children. What did we talk about? Once children arrive they’re an all-consuming interest, and even now they’re grown-up, they still tend to be the topic of our conversation. It’s so interesting following their careers and interests, and – pathetic though this sounds – living vicariously through them. Daughter 1 is a trainee archivist, Daughter 2 a junior architect and Son a medical student, and through them we kind of feel experts in all of those fields. Would you care for us to delve into your cupboards, design you a house or diagnose your diabetes?

We’re a very close family and feel so lucky to have had the young ones living at home so long. However, Daughter 1 has flown the nest and I need to face up to the fact that the others can’t be all that far behind. So Husband I need to start redeveloping our lives; hence the Darby and Joan day trip . We wandered around Pittenweem (above and below), a fishing village which has various galleries showing the work of local artists, and we bought a framed print for our sitting room. We had a leisurely lunch – and how cheap it is, paying for just two of us!

Then we visited Kellie Castle (below) which was built between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, repaired various times, lived in by the Lorimer family during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – Sir Robert Lorimer was a famous architect - and is now open to the public. It was pleasant to wander round and imagine living there, and even more pleasant not to have to worry about the state of the roof and so on.

It has a lovely garden round the other side, which I covet. But I'll make do with mine for the moment.

You can tell that I teach Communication

Earlier in the week, I decided to invite my Aunt Jean for a meal at the weekend. She’s a widow in her eighties, though she has quite an active social life, and we quite often have her at the house for family get-togethers. Since she’s quite deaf and also goes out a lot, I usually email her instead of phoning.

So this is what I did. My email said:

Hello,

Feel we haven’t seen you much for ages. Would you be free to come to tea on Sat or Sun, or indeed lunch on Sun if that were more convenient?

Lots of love, Isabelle



A few days passed and I was a bit surprised not to hear back. Slightly concerned, I decided to phone my aunt, but just before I did so, checked my email.

To my puzzlement, there was an email from some cousins of my father, which said:



Wouldn't that be nice, however we don't have a rocket ship at the moment.

We will be off to Linda's wee cottage for some work in her yard and then I suppose she will give us some dinner before we head back to Spring
Thanks for the invite, maybe another time.

Love to all, Jewel and Alex



Yup, that’s right. I had typed Je (for Jean) into my “To” box, and the computer had helpfully filled in Jewel’s email address. And I hadn’t noticed.

Since Jewel and Alex, who are also in their 80s, live in Spring, Texas, and we live in Edinburgh in Scotland, they must have thought that I had gone completely mad. But didn’t they answer politely?

Marriages

Well, as you possibly expected, we didn’t crash and we got home safely. I was glad we went. The bride’s mum and I have been friends since she came to my school in 1960 – which seems a fairly long time ago, even to me. We were best friends all through school and university, and then she went south to teacher training college in London, to be with her then fiancé, later (though not for long) husband. She then remarried. The wedding was of the daughter of the second marriage.

It was a slightly unusual wedding. Both the bride and the groom are born-again Christians, so there was a lot of amplified guitar playing and much waving of hands in the air. The young couple were very pleased with each other, which was sweet. Their minister-type-person isn’t actually allowed to marry people, so they were married in a civil ceremony the day before and this service was really a blessing, I suppose, though it was conducted like a marriage. Or sort of. The minister chap – oh dear, how to write this without sounding really unkind? – was perhaps more of an enthusiast than an intellectual. His thoughts weren’t always expressed entirely grammatically. For example, they did the bit about vowing to love each other “till death do us part”, and he was later trying to refer to this. He said that they had “promised to love each other till…” and then you could see him trying to work it out – and then he plumped for “… till death do they part”. Hmm. Not quite.

My husband and I aren’t always perfect either, and spent quite a lot of Saturday getting lost in the wilds of the Somerset or Gloucestershire countryside. We hired a car at the airport and decided that we just had time before the wedding to drive to our Bed and Breakfast, which for some unaccountable reason we had booked from the list supplied in the wedding invitation even though it was in the middle of nowhere. Our actual reasoning had been that it wasn’t far from the reception venue. The trouble was that it was really quite a long way from the church. We got slightly lost on the way from the airport to the B and B, which meant that we were then a bit pressed for time. And Husband wasn’t taking the situation all that calmly.

The next part of the journey featured quite a lot of one-car-width country lanes with hardly any passing places and with high hedges on either side so that you had no idea where you were – except that it certainly didn’t look in reality like it looked on the map. At one point I persuaded my beloved that we should stop at a cottage and ask directions, and that helped till we got stuck going up a hill behind a tractor pulling a trailer full of stones which fell gently off the back and bounced down the road towards us.

Still, we made it to the church with quarter of an hour to spare and we’re still married.

Since then it’s been a rather frantic week with hardly any blog-reading time. We spent Sunday seeing the sights of Bristol and didn’t get home till late. Then on Mondays I have a full six hours teaching, followed this week by a meeting at the church in the evening. I teach till 9 pm on Tuesdays and then last night I took Daughter 1 to the supermarket. Tonight has featured a visit to my parents and now I must do some preparation for my “girlies” class tomorrow: 23 rather raucous school leavers who think they want to work with children. They are on the whole the 23 people you would least want to leave your children with, and I get them from 12.15 to 1.15 on a Friday, a time when their natural disinclination to do English is exacerbated by their need for their lunch. And I'm a bit the same. Still, the thing to do is to keep them busy with reasonably simple, but fairly time-consuming tasks. A couple of hours of preparation this evening ought to produce about an hour’s worth of things for them to do. Or fifty minutes’-worth, anyway.

Not saying there will necessarily be much educational value in it, but you can’t have everything.

Tremble...

We're off to Bristol tomorrow at some horribly early hour, and thence to Bath, where the daughter of my best friend from school - from the age of 10 - is getting married. We have to fly, since (being a teacher) I couldn't take time off work, and I'm TERRIFIED of planes. I won't be at all surprised to crash in flames. So if you never hear from me again...

On a more cheerful note, people looked at my blog on 59 occasions last week, and hardly any of them were me. I still haven't had time to respond, but - well, hello and (I hope) not goodbye. Keep your fingers crossed for us (does that help, I wonder?)

Plums

This time, I resisted the temptation to look at my blog after writing it, until this afternoon, so as not to skew the stats counter, but then did, and was so pleased to find such lovely comments in response to what I suppose was my rather shameless request for them…. Thanks so much. Scottish greetings to you all!

I will respond, but just now must go and make a plum cake. My neighbour, once a year, arrives with a huge carrier bag full of delicious, but very ripe, Victoria plums from her tree, and it’s a race against decomposition to do things with them before they become woolly little squashy blobs. I made a cake the other day, and we’ve been eating lots of actual plums (extremely good for the digestion…) and Daughter 2 is stewing some to freeze, but I do feel it’s my duty to make a further cake (the first one is in the freezer).

I’m just back from trying to explain to my 84-year-old mum how to use her new mobile phone. She’s very together for her age, but technology’s not really her thing and she doesn’t learn as easily as she used to. And I felt a bit wappit (Scottish word for “tired”) after a day’s teaching even before this. Bath and bed are more what I feel like. Still, can’t waste plums.

To the kitchen!

Speaking to strangers

Daughter 1 has got me a stats counter. I can’t claim that the world as a whole is clamouring to read my wise words – in fact, really not many are at all – but still, I was a bit encouraged to see that my blog was looked at 69 times last week. Now, granted, some of these occasions were when I myself, rather pathetically, looked to see if anyone had commented. And not many had. But even if I looked twice some days (which I probably did, I fear; how sad – but then I was back at work and checking one’s blog does function as convenient work-avoidance) then this still leaves 55 other – is the word “hits”?

Again, I have to take into account that some of these were probably Daughter 1, with similar boredom-induced motives. But they can’t all be.

Life is so busy that it sometimes seems rather silly and pointless to go on blogging, when there are so many really good blogs around. But I’ll continue for a bit. The statistics seem to suggest that there are some people who read but don’t comment. Hello there, whoever you are.

I got an email from a colleague the other day saying that a student in her tutor group, who was also in my Higher English class, was very anxious in case I should ask her to read aloud in class. She was very embarrassed if she had to speak out in front of others. I replied that I never do ask students to do this, for this very sort of reason; but that actually she didn’t seem to be in my Higher English class.


Colleague, emailing back: No actually, you’re right. She’s elected to be in your Oral Presentation Skills optional class.

Me: Umm. Well, I’m afraid she will have to speak in front of others, then… Maybe she should change her option?

Colleague: I’ve just checked with her but she still wants to do it. She’s hoping to become a teacher.


???

and...

I tried to add this to the picture of the shredded tickets, but it wouldn't work. So here goes - two blogs within two minutes. I should go to bed. It's after 1 am.

Another slightly mad tale about my generally quite sensible family.


Our son is a medical student and this week he’s been in Kirkcaldy, a town a bit north of here, living in at the hospital and having to get up at 6 am.

Yesterday at quarter to six in the evening he phoned me, sounding really terrible – groggy and worried.

He: Mum, can I ask you something?
Me: Yes. Are you ok?
He: No. What time is it?
Me: Quarter to six.
He: In the afternoon?
Me: Yes.
He: Oh no! I’ve slept for 24 hours and I’ve missed a whole day! I was supposed to meet my tutor this morning and….
Me: Oh dear. Are you ok, though?
He: I’ve got to go!

I then started worrying. How could that have happened? Had he got drunk the night before? (not that he ever has got drunk). Had a stroke? Gone into a diabetic coma?

One minute later the phone rang again.

He: It’s me again.
Me: Yes. Are you ok?
He: What day is it?
Me: Wednesday.
He: Not Thursday?
Me: No.
He: Oh, thank goodness. That means I only slept for 45 minutes!

He had come back from the hospital at 5, fallen asleep on the bed, woken up, seen it was 5.45, assumed it was the next morning, then looked outside and realised that it didn’t look like the morning, so assumed it was the next afternoon.

After the second phone call, he cheered up and decided to have his dinner.

Illustration to "Jigsaws in the morning" blog

I tried to add these pictures to the blog about my daughter and her shredded tickets - she took photos to amuse her friends in emails - but couldn't persuade Blogger to co-operate. Here they are, anyway. As you can see, we didn't get them quite perfect, but it wasn't bad work for 22 minutes, we felt.

Windows

Just for a change, here are a couple of photos of my sitting room. You can see that my beloved garden is really quite small, with the back wall at an angle to the back of the house. Nonetheless, I love the outlook from the sitting room windows. (The sofas and rug aren't actually such a bright blue as they look here.)

On another topic (though still window-related) I am very fond of my son-in-law. He suffers from depression sometimes, but when he's okay, he’s really good fun, very jolly and a generally lovely chap. And very very clever.

But he does like a bargain. This is an understatement.

He and Daughter 1 have recently moved into their own house. They’ve been furnishing it courtesy of Ikea, and have bought so much that they were awarded a £30-off voucher, to be redeemed by the end of August. At that point they had just bought two (more) bookcases – they have an enormous number of books, mainly Daughter 1’s – and couldn’t think of anything else that they needed immediately.

SIL therefore produced the idea of taking the most recent acquisition – one of the bookcases – back to Ikea and then buying it again, using the £30 voucher. We all derided this idea, suggesting that they just buy some sheets or something. We then forgot all about it.

Then today he phoned to ask if they could borrow our car (they don’t have one) to go to Ikea. That was fine. He duly came round and departed in the car. Some time later came another phone call. They had managed to crack the windscreen.

Yes, that’s right. He had decided to follow through with his cunning plan of taking the bookcase back and then buying a bookcase with the voucher. So, outside their house, they’d loaded it into the car and – well, into the windscreen.

Luckily our insurance company will pay for the repair, apart from the £60 excess.

So in the bid to save £30….

There’s very very clever and there’s sensible, and these are not always precisely the same thing, are they? Though of course, it's good to be thrifty, and thrift is the reason why they managed to buy themselves a house to fill with books.

I’d like to point out that he’s not Scottish, but English – just in case anyone was musing on the thrifty--Scot stereotype.

Ah well. I still love him.

The deserted garden

Well, this is the garden, and where do I have to spend my days? In a rather dark office, proofreading correspondence courses, answering the phone, marking work that's been sent in, doing various bits of paperwork, and preparing for classes. And the garden once more belongs to the birds.

And also, potentially, to Daughter 2, finishing off her architecture project, and her aspiring actor boyfriend, who's keeping her company and sending his details off to theatre companies and agents.

Ah well.

Clematis and hand

Well, pride comes before a fall: Gina tells me that she and her husband ripped out lots of agapanthuses in their garden because they grow like weeds in Australia. Hmm.

I talk to mine daily; water it; get excited at its every bud; point it out to every passer-by as if I’d given birth to it; practically take it to bed with me.

Truly things are very various in this world.

Actually, I have noticed before that on “Neighbours”, which I’m ashamed to say that I watch while making the evening meal, there are lots of agapanthuses in the gardens. But I didn’t realise that this reflected the true Australia, since if this were so, I would also have to believe that Australian houses have only one room (called, intriguingly, “the lounge room”), that all their windows have sort of tropical jungles immediately outside them, and that Australians’ lives are packed with near-death experiences and affairs with the (beautiful) folk next door.

Above you will see a clematis. I like it, too, though I never realised that I had a wrinkly wrist. How disturbing.

Agapanthus

The holiday went very well, thank you Els. It was quite energetic – all that tennis and badminton (once a day each), though I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that we’re a sporty family. Quite the reverse – we’re all very bad at these games – but we have fun hurling ourselves around, swiping madly and laughing hysterically. Also we walked quite a lot and danced (at the Hydro) some evenings and so on.

It was great being with the whole family (except my poor boy – see two blogs ago) and it was especially nice for my 84-year-old, but still slim and glamorous, mum to have all the kids around (except my son). My brother and sister-in-law were there too, with my niece (22) and nephew (17), and all the young ones get on very well, as if they were all siblings.

The only fly in the ointment was my dad. (Gosh, I hope none of my kids ever think of me with that particular metaphor.) He’s always been choleric and unreasonable – not all the time, but enough for him to be very hard to live with - and now that he’s 86, very deaf, hardly able to walk and beginning to be slightly slow on the uptake, he hasn’t had a personality change. Sweet old man? – I don’t think so.

However, to be more cheerful – but without wishing to brag – what do you think of the photo of my agapanthus? You can’t see its full glory in the picture – each flower head is the size of a football - though a much prettier colour. The plant is just outside my kitchen window and I admire it as I do the washing up. Lovely!

Ho hum

There are few people more gloomy than a teacher in the last week of her holidays. It’s bad enough when you’re a pupil, but at least (as I remember it anyway) you have the excitement of seeing all your friends again, of getting new jotters (I always liked stationery), of hoping that you’d get one of the decent teachers this year. But for the teachers… there’s just the prospect of lots of marking.

Actually, it’s not that bad. I do know that I’ll quite enjoy it once it starts. I like the teaching, most of the time. I like almost all the students. They’re almost universally sweet. It’s just that I like not teaching even better. And I hate all the bureaucracy and meddling from above. Also, some of my colleagues can be very difficult.

Why can I not lose weight? I’m ashamed even to mention it, but I’m not losing. I’m not gaining either: I lost a paltry amount about a year ago (10 pounds or something) and then stuck. I keep reading other people’s blogs and being inspired and then I forget the inspiration and absentmindedly put things in my mouth. Not six packets of crisps or anything, but the odd biscuit and the occasional bit of ice cream on my strawberries, and there’s no point in telling myself that I don’t eat vast amounts of calories, because the point is that I eat too many to lose weight. This is so obvious. And this blog is not keeping me accountable because I don’t write about it. AAARRRGGGHHH. Part of the trouble is my age: I hate being overweight but I don’t hate it quite as much as I did when I was young because… well, I suppose because my function is to do things for other people now, not to be attractive.

Oh dear, I don't really mean that anyone's actual FUNCTION is to be attractive. And I'd rather not make small children squeal and run away at the sight of me, even now. But I have no aspirations to be alluring. Unlike the lady of my age who claimed in a comment on “Half of Me” that she was "hot", I feel this would be a bit delusional. Certainly for me. I’d just like not to be wobbly and silly-looking.

Ah well, I’m off to garden. That should burn off a few of my Bite Size Shreddies and skimmed milk. Maybe today will be the day that I’m firmer with myself.

I'm off

We’re off on holiday for a week, as from tomorrow. We’re going with the extended family to two lodges in the grounds of Crieff Hydro (see above) – one lodge for the oldies and one for the young

Crieff is a pretty, small town about an hour north of here, at the beginning of the Highlands. My family holidayed at Crieff Hydro from 1953 (when I was 3) till 1961, and then intermittently since then. My husband and I went there for our honeymoon, and we’ve had various holidays with the kids and other family members over the years. Once the kids grew up, it became rather expensive (they were no longer allowed to share our room) so we’ve tended to take the self-catering lodges since then. We’ve done the extended family thing before too. We’re all going (our lot and beloveds, my parents, my brother and his family) except that Son can come only for the weekend, and his girlfriend not at all, because they’re back at uni and she’s on placement in the south-west at the moment.

So our poor son (check out the hardship):

1) can’t have the holiday
2) can’t have our second car, which is normally his to use, but which will be at Crieff
3) and most importantly – will have to spend all the weekdays WITHOUT SEEING GIRLFRIEND FOR TWO WHOLE WEEKS (reunited at weekends)

He’s being stoical about it, but he's suffering in anticipation. Ah, love. I hate leaving him behind, too (also love, of a different kind) and she’s a really nice girl, so it would have been good to have her along.

We have good fun at Crieff. We do our own thing during the day, though with frequent visits to and fro between the lodges, and then all eat together at night in one lodge. There’s plenty to do: tennis and badminton and squash and table tennis and swimming and hills to climb and so on. The only thing is that it’s really been too hot for strenuous activity recently, so we’re hoping for a bit more typically Scottish weather.

Better go. We had some Ugandan people to stay the night before last – Watoto Children’s Choir members (the children are Aids orphans or similar, and came to sing at our church). We had 3 children and their “auntie” here. They were really lovely kids – beautiful and giggly. So yesterday I had to unmake their beds and wash the bedding, and now must make two of them up again for Daughter 2 and her boyfriend, who arrive tonight, having been at his sister’s wedding. Then I must go and buy enough food for 13 people for the first two days of our holiday, to save going to the supermarket when we arrive. And I have to prepare dinner for those 13, or certainly 11 of them, for this evening (they came last night as well). And pack. And stuff like that. At least I’ve caught up with the ironing – not a fun activity for this weather.

You know how the compensation for middle age is supposed to be that you’ll have more time to yourself?

Jigsaws in the morning

My two daughters are very different from each other, though they get on very well.

Daughter 1 is dreamy and rather disorganised. Or at least, she was very disorganised when she was a child. As a little girl, she was forever getting lost. Well, not strictly lost. She knew where she was. It was just that I didn’t. I can’t count the number of times I agreed to meet her in a certain place at a certain time, and she would forget and wait somewhere else, or wander off home by herself. I attribute all my grey hairs to her. However, she’s also very good-natured, loves books passionately and is probably the world’s quickest reader. Her first degree was in English and French; her Master’s in Shakespeare Studies.

Daughter 2 is very efficient and can always be relied on to be prepared. She tends to be elected as secretary of school or university organisations and her room is usually a model of neatness. Her degrees are in architecture, and while she likes reading, she’s mildly dyslexic and doesn’t read particularly quickly. She’s also a lovely person and has a wide circle of friends with whom she keeps in constant touch by text message and email.

Which one would you expect to lose her train ticket?

Daughter 2 was going down south at 12.05 pm today to attend her boyfriend’s sister’s wedding on Wednesday. She bought the ticket a few weeks ago, packed her case last night and this morning gave her room a final tidy, since it’s being used by a visitor in her absence. At 10.30, she checked that her ticket was in her wallet.

It wasn’t.

Panic. Old tickets were there, but not today’s one.

She looked everywhere she could think, but no luck. Because she’s tidy, there were no horrible heaps of paperwork sludge as tends to accrue in her sister’s room, so there weren’t that many places to look.

“I must have thrown it out, “ she mourned.

I got ready to leap into motherly action by raking through the rubbish bags in the dustbin. “When do you think you threw it out?” I asked.

“Oh, a week or two ago. Remember when I was throwing out various bits of paper from my handbag?”

Not worth dustbin raking, then.

“You can get another ticket,” I suggested.

She went online. There were none available.

A later train? Same story.

“I’m such a fool,” she said. “Don’t you remember me saying that you should always shred airline boarding passes because criminals can find out all about you from them? Well, I thought I might as well shred these old train tickets, too.”

“You shredded them?” I said. “Well, they might still be in the shredder. Maybe we could …”

Even as I suggested it, I knew it was silly. But we took the shredder from the study into the kitchen, poured the large spaghettified heap of paper on to the table, and started sorting through it. It was now 11 am. We always allow about 40 minutes from leaving the house to stepping on the train. The train, you will remember, was at 12.05.

It helped that train tickets have orange bits on them and are printed on thin card, whereas most of the rest of the paper bolognaise was on white paper. Still, it took a long time to find all the bits of ticket and to separate the strips of today’s one from the fragments of the old ones that she also shredded. She needed her seat reservation card, too. But by 11.28 we’d got them both. We stuck all the slices on to a piece of cellophane so that the backs were visible as well, and tore out of the house.

The ticket-checker on the train had a good laugh, as did the lady in the seat beside my daughter. The chap didn’t punch the ticket. As he pointed out, it had enough holes in it already.

I think we need a new shredder, though. If we can do it, so could a master criminal desperate to steal our identities.

PS. Since writing this post, I've been on the phone to Daughter 1 in her new house, arranging to meet her at 10.30 tomorrow morning at a big department store, in the furniture department, which is at the entrance to the restaurant. I then told her the saga of her sister's ticket and as I was about to ring off, said, "Now when and where are we meeting tomorrow?" I know her of old.

"10.30," she said triumphantly. "But I don't think we arranged where - unless - was it the china department?"

See what I mean?

The Island of Bute

My husband and I have just returned from a few days on the island of Bute, which is off the west coast of Scotland. We'd never been there before, though we love the island of Arran, which is quite close to Bute - indeed, the mountains of Arran loom in the distance when you're on one side of Bute. Bute is less hilly than Arran, and indeed generally less inhabited, apart from in the (only) town of Rothesay. Rothesay has six thousandish out of Bute's total of seven thousandish inhabitants. The rest of the island is very peaceful: mainly just seabirds, cattle, sheep, sand and rustling grass.

These photos are views from our bedroom window over to the mainland. The weather was hot - it crept up to about 80F, 27C (or something) in some parts of Scotland, which is about as hot as it ever gets here. Our first morning there, however, we woke up to mist, which gradually lifted to reveal the ferry coming into Rothesay bay - above.
And this was the sun setting behind the hills. It made us glad to be alive.

Our bed and breakfast place was lovely. Most B & Bs I've visited have been heavily into frilly curtains and collections of horse brasses or novelty teapots. This one had neutral colours and furniture with clean lines and etched glass - all very stylish. It made me want to come home and throw all my old stuff away.

However, their garden was mainly paving and gravel. It was good to come home to my flowers.

Heatwave and snacks

The city from Arthur's Seat (a hill).

It's sunny and warm today, as it was yesterday. Don't know the temperature, but it must be about - oh, maybe 75 Fahrenheit or somewhere in the 20s Centigrade... Celsius... never really got the hang of these modern versions of temperature. Anyway, it's too hot to garden.

The cafe (don't know how to do accents, sorry) round the corner from us has a lovely engraved-effect slogan at the bottom of its window declaring that it sells "Coffee's". Ouch. And now it's sprouted a notice advertising "Scrumy snacks". Is it me, or does that sound rather revolting? Green and somewhat furry.

I'm wondering if I'm alone in not feeling like writing a post unless I've got at least one comment. It's strange, since I'm quite happy to write my handwritten diary for no one. Indeed, I very much hope that no one has ever read it, in its 40 year history. I now don't know why I go on writing it, but can't stop. (I don't write every day.) That diary may be pointless. But somehow it would seem even more so to do this blog to no audience at all.

Except that it's quite fun. Certainly more fun than most of the useful tasks I should be doing and am going to start on right now...

First chicken leaves the nest

At last I got round to taking Daughter 1's wedding dress to the dry cleaner's last week, and collected it yesterday. It's not the place I normally use but someone told me that it was good for delicate things. I was writing a cheque to pay for it, made out to the shop by name, and had the feeling that, although this name was "Prestige", it was spelt as a pun above the door.

"Is 'Prestige' just spelt the usual way?" I asked the lady.

"Yes," she said. "P-R-E-S-S-T-I-G-E."

Well, it probably seems usual to her.

Daughter 1 and her husband have moved out! Very exciting, though also a bit aarrgh. Unfortunately, not all their stuff has yet moved with them. They went on Sunday but have so far had all their evening meals back here, mainly, I think, to alleviate my separation anxiety. They're nice people. SIL is back at work, so that's good, at least till the next crisis.

Daughter 2 is on the train on the way home from Lisbon, via her aspiring-actor boyfriend's parents' (that's a lot of adjectives) home in Nottingham. Can't wait to see her. Of course, D1 and SIL have to come here to eat with us all this evening too. But tomorrow I'll let them eat at... home.

Toys back in pram

Many thanks to Dietgirl, Lainey, Anne and Gina for their kind words in comments about my previous, somewhat hissy-fit blog. They made me feel much better. I was just a bit overwhelmed with problems. The biggest one is the son-in-law's state of mind. He's a lovely chap, and very very clever, but is sometimes overcome with terrible depression which completely floors him. What he sometimes does, unless someone is around to catch him on the way down, is to go to the doctor, and since doctors don't have magic wands, they tend to sign him off. This hasn't happened much, and indeed this is the first time he's been signed off since he's had a proper, grown-up job. But he's had this job only since October, and he and Daughter 1 have just bought a house (not that they've moved into it yet) and he needs to keep this job, even though he says he hates it. Daughter 1's job, to add to the joys of the situation, was only ever a one-year contract and ends soon. But this isn't the main problem, since she'll get something else, though it may take her a while to get something in her chosen field.

This week, which is the first of my holidays and the only one for which I was expecting to be alone in the house (in blessed peace, able to please myself for once in my life) I've been jollying the SIL along, persuading him to get out from under the covers, leave the house and come for walks with me, and then taking him to their new house to do things such as construct their Ikea bed. He's really quite cheery once he gets going, or at least workably sanguine. And he can be great fun, though not necessarily this week. But it's hard work being relentlessly upbeat, especially when one doesn't really feel optimistic about the situation.

Plus the Daughter 2 Boyfriend's situation, plus the parent situation.

However, the diamond wedding party went well, and my parents liked their jug - see above. At the party, the slide show organised by Husband and Daughter 2 was a great talking point - pictures from all stages of my parents' lives - and the young people's songs went down a storm. We managed to borrow a good keyboard, which my brother or my niece played to accompany the singing.

Son and Daughter 2's boyfriend sang Flanders and Swann's "Hippopotamus Song" - which is a funny love song about two hippos. The boys both have lovely voices and are good friends, and the audience joined in the chorus, and it was great. Then D2's B (yes, I'm not above exploiting the lad even though I'm not sure that he's the right one for D2) sang a Stephen Sondheim song, "Marry me a little", and finally the five grandchildren sang words I'd written about my parents to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's (or in this case, just Sullivan's) "And now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navy" song from "HMS Pinafore".

I know this sounds rather toe-curling - children doing their party pieces - but they actually all sing well, and it was a great success. Much applause and laughter.

So life's not all bad. In fact, it's often good. One just has to get up each day and keep trying to be positive. And I've often found in the course of this life of mine that the things I worry about aren't the disasters that actually happen. Which is why I attempt to cover most possibilities in my spectrum of anxieties.