Silly people

At this time of year I’m mired in marking Higher English, our university-entrance level English exam. 210 scripts from all over Scotland sit on our dining room table. I do not have time to blog. Or garden. Meanwhile the weeds sprout liberally in the balmy air.

I’ve also been editing the church magazine and adding some little pictures here and there. They were in colour on my screen, so I printed them out to see what they’d look like in the magazine in black and white. It didn’t occur to me that since my printer is a colour one, this wouldn’t help much. (Should this woman be allowed to mark the nation’s children’s exams?)

A man at the exam board rang me up at work today to ask me to do an extra 13 scripts. My mind said “NO!” and I heard my voice saying “Yes”. Stupid voice.

“Where do you want to collect them?” asked the chap.

“At the parcel depot in – I think it’s in a street called Bankhead Crossway,” I said.

There was a pause while the chap consulted his list of depots. “Ah,” he said triumphantly, “that would be the postal depot in Russell Road.”

??

Must return to my toil. I’ll be reading you all at lunch times but won’t have time to comment much for the next two-and-a-bit weeks. Groan.

(In response to comments: yes, the shrub is a ceanothus. It's a wonderful blue, isn't it? I can see it from my position at the kitchen table as I plough through the scripts. Except that I'm not supposed to be looking out of the window, of course.)

Cats and holidays

From Thursday June 18 till Monday June 22, we’re off as a family to Crieff, about an hour’s drive north of Edinburgh. We’ve had holidays there for years, but this time we have the Cat Problem to contend with: what to do with our furry friends?

There are various possibilities – we have helpful neighbours who would feed them, we could take them to where our son lives (he can’t come to Crieff because he can’t get the time off) - but we wonder if by any chance there a cat-loving blogfriend out there who would like a long weekend in Edinburgh? Free accommodation; the only duties would involve feeding the two cats, patting them from time to time and, ideally, shutting them in at night (though they do occasionally stay out in the summer).

The last time I blogged this suggestion, Thimbleanna (http://thimbleanna.com/) and her husband came all the way from Indiana to stay in our house. This was last October. Isn't the blog world strange and wonderful? I somehow don’t think this is going to happen this time – but if anyone who lives a bit nearer would care to come, this would be lovely.

Our house is not palatial but it has a biggish sitting room, a smaller one, a biggish kitchen, two bathrooms and various bedrooms. And a garden. It’s detached, in a quiet cul-de-sac and is two minutes' walk from a bus stop into the city centre. There are frequent buses and the journey takes about ten minutes. Once you're in the city centre, you can walk to most things of interest. I should warn you that Edinburgh is being somewhat dug up at the moment because it has been decreed that we’re to get trams. However, it’s still quite possible to access everything and you would see the city in a period of transition with Princes Street, the main shopping street, devoid of traffic but full of holes and chaps in hard hats doing things in them.

This picture is taken looking down on Princes Street from the hotel that Daughter 2 has been working on for three years (the subject of a future post, possibly). If you click on it, you'll be able to see the red-and-white barriers that adorn the city's roadworks.

Anyway, I know it’s not likely that anyone will want to come but I thought I’d ask. Obviously this suggestion is open to blogfriends and their friends and family but not to random strangers…

Invigilators

A random kitten picture taken nearly two years ago.

Who knew? - well, lots of you, clearly, but not me - that "invigilator" wasn't the word used by English speakers worldwide for "grumpy person employed by educational establishments to sit glaring at students while they sit a national exam"? Various commenters have declared themselves unfamiliar with this expression. It has a verb form too: "to invigilate".

What do the rest of you call such a person?

It’s a standard English word, I think; not particularly Scottish. But we do have lots of Scots words, so I thought I'd make up a little Scots-flavoured story for a change. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.




It was a dreich evening. A snell wind blew a few leaves around. Mary had a bit of a hoast and so decided to stay in the house and do some knitting. She made a cup of tea and settled down. However, she’d been gardening the previous day and had a skelf in her finger, which made it difficult. After a while, her wool got into a bit of a fankle. “Ach!” she cried, getting into a stooshie, “I canna be fashed with this!” And she went off to bed, cooried down under the covers and went off to sleep. In the morning, things seemed less scunnersome and she was able to keep a calm sooch.

Need a translation?

It was a dreary, damp evening. A bitter wind blew a few leaves around. Mary had a bit of a cough and so decided to stay in the house and do some knitting. She made a cup of tea and settled down. However, she’d been gardening the previous day and had a splinter in her finger, which made it difficult. After a while, her wool got into a bit of a tangle. “Oh!” she cried, getting worked up, “I can’t be bothered with this!” And she went off to bed, cuddled down under the covers and went off to sleep. In the morning, things seemed less trying and she was able to keep a calm demeanour.

Like to tell me some words local to your neck of the woods?

(Edited to add: these are all traditional Scottish words, as used by my granny's generation and, to a lesser extent, my mother's and mine. Scots dialect isn't used nearly so much by the young. Which is a pity, I feel. Another word for "splinter" is "spail", now I come to think of it. Wood must have been rough in the past, I suppose, since they needed two words for this.)

Grrr

I’m not a person who is particularly easily annoyed, but I was a bit annoyed yesterday. I had a student who was sitting Advanced Higher English – only the one student. It's a national exam which requires an outside invigilator.

This exam may be an hour and a half (one question) or three hours (two questions) – depending on which other options the student chooses. This student was doing the three hour exam, in a room by herself with the invigilator. However, our exam section had misinformed the invigilator that she was only doing the one-and-a-half-hour version. So the invigilator wrested the paper from the student after an hour and a half and, despite her protests, sent her away. Fortunately the girl sought me out; a colleague fetched me from the class I was teaching; and I managed to get the paper back and the exam restarted. But by that time, the student was in floods of tears and probably not in the right frame of mind to do her best.

Now, goodness me, anyone can make a mistake and the original mistake wasn't the lady's fault. But it seems to me that if I were an invigilator and a twenty-two-year–old girl sitting Advanced Higher English assured me that she was supposed to be in the exam room for three hours, I think – even though that wasn't what I had been told – I’d at least investigate: let her start writing the second part and then go and find out what the situation was. Wouldn’t you? Rather than insisting the girl leave and just going off and having a cup of tea, as this lady did?

The invigilator wandered in from her cup of tea while I was sorting this out and didn’t seem at all worried. It was by then 3.30 pm and when asked if she could stay and invigilate for the next hour and a half, ie till 5 pm, she said well, only till 4.45 because she was being picked up then.

Another 15 minutes would clearly have been too much to ask. (We did get someone else to take over from her.)

I don’t mind mistakes. But I do mind sheer unhelpfulness.
Cats in drawers, however, I do like.

Animal Farm

I was marking essays and thought this was rather a fine example of a piece of writing that was doing all right until it unaccountably fell to bits:

"I feel Orwell is trying to warn us of the dangers of the way people act when they are in power. In the same way, the pigs can fool the rest of the animals because they are ederactected and speak with such fluencency."

One takes one's pleasures where one can.

Happy birthday, Mum

It's been a somewhat rubbish week, the kind when you think to yourself that it's all a bit much and it would be easier to go to bed and not wake up, "To cease upon the midnight with no pain", as Keats said. And then you pull yourself together and realise that this is ridiculous: poor young Keats was dying of TB and would have been happy if his worst problems had been ... well, anything but that. So you cheer up a bit and think about the white lilac in the garden, which smells like heaven.

And lovely Daughter 2, representing here lovely Daughter 1, Son, Mr Life and other friends and relations.

And cats. Happiness, or something very like it, is a warm cat.

And the garden helps a lot too.

The lawn is pink with cherry blossom.

The sitooterie* is an arbour of clematis.

The bluebells are very pretty, though getting out of control - must dig some up after they've finished flowering.

More lilac. Nothing could smell sweeter.

Lovely lovely irises.

Today we took my mother to Peebles to celebrate her 87th birthday. The weather wasn't exactly tropical.

But we had a nice lunch in the Park Hotel and then in the evening Daughter 1, Son-in-Law, my mum and my aunt came for a meal with Mr Life, Daughter 2, her actor boyfriend and me.

So life goes on and there are many blessings to be counted. It would be easier, however, to be a cat. Less interesting, though. And I wouldn't like not being able to read.

* A sitooterie is a place to sit out... oot... in the garden. A seat with a framework of some kind.

Things that happened

It’s been a beautiful weekend, if not exactly tropical. I’ve spent much of it doing un-green gardening duties: putting weedkiller on my mother’s and our paths and weed-and-feed on her lawns. I’m sure in 20 years’ time this is going to be thought very unecological (sorry, future) but it’s so time-and-labour saving, though not my favourite type of gardening. The actual gardens are very floriferous. What a lovely time of year!

The lilac is at its best and there’s a big vase of it perfuming the dining room.

Last Saturday, Mr Life opened the front door to find a big bird of prey – a sparrowhawk? - a couple of yards away from him on the lawn, clutching and indeed plucking another bird. It’s hard to say whether he or the hawk got a bigger fright, but the latter immediately flew off with its victim, leaving lots of feathers on the grass. Just as well Mr Life saw this or we’d have thought the cats were getting alarmingly successful in their hunting!

The scene of the crime... really quite near the house.

This past week, the gas company dug a hole right outside our driveway to facilitate the fitting, this coming week, of a new gas main for the street. (What do Americans call the stuff that fuels non-electric cookers – since they call petrol “gas”?) Fortunately I had driven to work in one of our cars, otherwise both cars would be now trapped in the driveway. As it is, only one is. Our son, who was at home at the time, asked if he should remove this car and the chap said no, they wouldn’t be blocking the drive. Hmm.

There’s another hole at the top of the street. So handy.

They also dug up our path and put a rather horrid gas meter box right beside the front door.

Still, I suppose I have to look at it as a plant-positioning opportunity ...

... rather than as a problem.

Son has now returned to his distant town, alas. He managed to fit in, as far as I can remember, two lunches with Mr Life, one with me, one with Daughter 2 and one with both of his sisters (who always lunch together on Thursdays) as well as an afternoon coffee with Daughter 1. He also saw various friends and on Friday took my mum to a funeral, for which he nobly donned his suit and white shirt (which happened to be here) and his father’s shoes (because Son’s smart shoes were in the distant town). Mr Life’s feet are rather smaller than Son’s. What a lad will do for his granny. (“He looked so smart!” said my mum proudly.)

He also let various gas men into the house to do gas-related tasks.

So he made full use of the time at home and gained himself some (more) Good Son/Grandson gold stars.

A squirrel has been enjoying the peanut feeder on our cherry tree. Who could grudge him his meal?

(Well, possibly the birds. But we enjoyed his acrobatics.) Photos by Mr Life, who has a better camera than I.

At the book group last night, a friend said that she’d been speaking to an animal psychologist who told her that cats don’t like their water bowl beside their food. In the wild, they wouldn’t drink water near their kill because of contamination. Our cats are never seen to drink from their bowl – the bird bath, yes; the taps, yes; the glass of water on one’s beside table, yes. So we tried moving it.

Et voila!

Daughter 1 has recently taken up knitting and decided to make herself a moderately complicated shawl. This evening, however, having spent some considerable time on it, she found a couple of mistakes and unravelled it to start again. I don’t know where she got this knitting perfectionism. Not from her mother. I couldn’t really see what was wrong with it but if I had felt the need to rip out that much of knitting I'd done, I would first have had to jump up and down on it and utter several piercing screams. This is why I haven't knitted anything for the past thirty years. She's made of sterner stuff and I'm very impressed.

Cassie* found the unravelling process quite interesting.

And those have been the highlights of the week chez Life.

*Daughter 2 says this is Sirius. Looks like Cassie to me, but she remembers that it was Sirius so I'll believe her. Normally we're astonished when friends don't know the difference, when to us, they're not alike at all. Apart from being, you know, black cats. Small black cats. Small black sleek cats.

Censored!

No, it's all right - we didn't let her swallow the wool. She enjoyed playing with it, though!

The very second that I pressed “Publish” for my last masterpiece, I got an email from Blogger saying that my blog was suspected of being spam and had now been locked. So I was unable to go back in and add the image I’d forgotten, which was our own cherry blossom, above.

I was to email Blogger and ask them to check my blog otherwise it would be deleted in 20 days. Ow! So I did, and now I assume they’ve scrutinised it and have decided that I’m not trying to persuade you to order cherry saplings from my black-market nursery.

Just imagine if I’d been away on a three-week holiday or in hospital with some lengthy disease. What a loss to the world that would have been. My little bloglet would have been obliterated. Well, maybe the world would have kept turning but it would have been a loss to me because it’s a record of the last three years of my life, or at least a part of it.

Occasionally I think to myself that if I want to have access to my posts, then there’s no use relying on Blogger. I have no real conception of what Blogger is, to be honest. A website? A server? (Could I define these in any precise way?) And I certainly don’t know why it kindly hosts my blog and millions of others. There doesn’t seem to be enough advertising to pay the salaries of those friendly and literate chaps who send us little messages about outages and improvements. I’m always amazed when people rail at Blogger when it’s so handy, so easy, so – free.

Anyway, from time to time I save and then print out a few posts, but it’s a boring job and I have a huge backlog. Though in fact if I ever do catch up and then regularly print them out, they’ll just be a burden on the children when I die. (“What’s this folder? Oh, it’s Mum’s blog. We can’t throw that away.” Yes, you can, darling offspring. Go on. Bin it.)

What do you do with your blog posts, people? Are you content to trust to the continuation of Blogger or whatever you use? Do you have leather-bound volumes of your blog on your study bookshelves? Would you care if your blog host (is that the word?) suddenly stopped operating and your words and pictures suddenly dematerialised like Doctor Who aliens, burst like soap bubbles on a windy day, vanished like a dream on waking?

Our son was to come home yesterday for a week but on Friday evening we heard noises in the hall and when I went intrepidly to investigate, it was him! (Or he, to be pedantic.) He’d come home early to surprise us. So we’ve had him all weekend. Lovely! Here he is just working up the strength to deconstruct the washing whirligig.

Some cat time, with the remains of a chocolate Easter bunny.

Oh, I've been so busy and haven’t had time to comment on blogs, though I’ve kept an eye on some of you from work. However, I have half an hour now so here I come…

I live about three miles from work. Four days a week I drive there, for reasons of speed and convenience. I do feel guilty about this, though, and so on Wednesdays I take the rather infrequent and slow bus to work and then walk home – as my gesture towards the environment and my waistline.

The car journey normally takes about ten minutes. However, Edinburgh is currently being extensively dug up and there are numerous red-and-white-fenced-off bits of road, each one featuring four chaps standing in a huddle, stroking their chins as they gaze into a hole.

On Tuesday, I left my mum’s house at 8.10 am but got snarled up in a huge, updigging-related jam and didn’t get to work till 9.20. Not good. Thank heavens for a mobile phone with which to communicate with colleagues and ask them to start off the 9 o’clock class. I don’t know whether it’s legal to use a phone in a car by the time it’s been stationary for twenty minutes but I’d be prepared to argue the case in court.

So on Wednesday, I decided to avoid the jams and walk to work as well as home again. Naturally, the traffic was now flowing freely past all the barriers so I was denied the feeling of smugness that I would have had if I had marched past queuing cars. However, fresh green leaves were frothing on the trees and the sun was glowing on tulips, flashing from windscreens and pinging off pavements. Even the Scotmid Funeral Parlour had a cheerful air as I stomped along. I didn’t stop to take photos of the spring-like scene; I’m not really a morning person and anyway my mind was focused on work.

Funnily, the route home at the end of the day seemed shorter. There was definitely more of a bounce in my step as I drew gradually nearer to the house, the kettle and the cats. Also I amused myself by selecting photo opportunities. Would you care to join me in my walk through the cherry-blossomed suburbs of west Edinburgh? The sun was no longer shining but nature was burgeoning away.

Near the college, there's nothing particularly scenic: biggish roads and open spaces. But some celandines were growing among the bushes beside the pavement. Sweet, though not if growing in my driveway.

I always try to convince myself that dandelions are pretty. But I never succeed. They're such pests.

There's cherry blossom everywhere. That's definitely pretty. And extremely pink.

More blossoming trees. I do believe some weak sunshine appeared at that point, but it didn't last.

What a wonderful fresh green on that sycamore, with its little tassly flowers.

Through the park; more cherry blossom by the bowling green.

Looking back over the park, towards the hills.

A bed of pansies. There were also weeds but you can't see them from this angle. Photography can lie, as we said.

Through the churchyard. More blossom.

A typically sad grave, telling of lives cut short: "Erected by John Greenock, in loving memory of his children Andrew, who died 18th Nov 1861, aged 2 and half years, and also Matthew, who died 25th March 1866 in his 18th year, also John Greenock, their father, who died 10th Nov 1893 aged 57 years, also John A Greenock, son of the above, who died 7th April 1901 aged 35 years, George Greenock. died 13th Nov 1901... " and I don't remember the details about him but I read them at the time and he died as a young man.

I wonder what happened to Mrs Greenock?

How glad I am that we live in the age of antibiotics and other life-saving advantages.

On the home stretch now, azaleas outside an office building. Bright!

The Zoo has this admirably ambitious flowerbed, with Edinburgh's crest made up of sedums and grasses, held up by a penguin and what appears to be some sort of small dinosaur.

Nearly home; the Pentland Hills to the south.

The road works. Note traffic flowing through unhindered.

The path up to Corstorphine Hill. It looks quite tempting but not as tempting as home.

Tulips in the front garden. Such a good red.

Magnolia stellata - blooms like little stars.

The new leaves of pieris - magically pink.

Round the back, these polyanthus have been blooming for weeks - and there's forget-me-not, so well-named because once you have it, you have it for ever.

Still in the back garden, the lilacs are just coming into bloom - my favourite scent in the world.

The colours don't exactly blend, but who cares?

Back to the pansies at the front door.

An impatient furry face. "Where have you been?" enquires Cassie.

The tulips as I go into the kitchen - again, you couldn't call the colours subtle, but they're exuberant all right.

And now it's time for a cup of tea.