Sedum "Autumn Joy"

You know how men hate to ask directions? Well, some men, anyway. One particular man not too far away from me at this moment.

I think I may have found a clue as to why this is.

I was walking along this evening when a car pulled up and the (male) driver asked for directions.

“It’s not far,” I said. “Just take the first right and then the first left.”

“Right and then right,” he said.

“No, right and then left.”

“Right,” he said, and got back in his car. Then he drove off and turned left.

Women are from Venus and men are from… well, it probably varies.

PS - My husband isn't like this at all. He always has a map of everywhere, and if by any chance we do get a little lost and I am (eventually) allowed to ask directions, he's very good at following them. (This is just in case he reads this. Though it's true.)

A post about my boy

Our son, a 22-year-old medical student, is a cheerful and uncomplaining sort of chap.

A few days ago, I bought some English muffins – which are flat, round rolls – bits of bread, basically, baked in flat lumps. I didn’t have any myself, but the next day I vaguely noticed our son wandering through from the kitchen eating one of them, spread liberally with strawberry jam (or, in American, jelly).

The next day, again in the kitchen, he suddenly said, “Oh!” I looked enquiringly at him and he held the packet of muffins towards me. I looked first at the sell-by date, since in my experience, young people lack my generation’s relaxed attitude to these things (if bread, cheese and other non-salmonella-carrying foodstuffs aren’t actually mouldy, then they’re fine. If, however, there are green fluffy bits on them, then cut these off and proceed as before).

“These are cheese and black pepper muffins,” he said. “I thought they tasted a bit funny with jam.” He considered. “They were ok. Just funny.”

You can see how his upbringing has given him a discerning palate.

This reminded us of the time he’d made himself a cheese and mango chutney sandwich to take to university for lunch. When he began to eat it, he discovered that it was actually a cheese and ginger preserve sandwich. “I ate it anyway,” he said stoically. “I was hungry and it was food.”

This is the spirit that made Britain great.

Autumn

I have been so busy! Lots and lots of marking, because I’ve been giving my classes lots and lots of writing to do. Very foolish of me. Must stop doing this.
As well as working full-time, I teach an evening class on a Tuesday and sing in a choir on a Wednesday. And visiting my dad in hospital rather deals with the rest of the evenings and weekends.


Dad's broken hip is mending but he has cancer which has now spread to his bones, his lungs and his liver. He doesn’t seem to be in particular pain, but he’s not really able to walk and is very fed up and predicting his imminent demise – with, it has to be admitted, some justification. So it’s all very sad. Remind me not to get any older.

On Saturday mornings, I usually take my mum out for a little expedition, but last week this didn’t happen. Instead my husband and I escaped to the Botanic Gardens for a walk. It was bliss: lots of autumn colours and a mild day with sweet, fresh air. I could feel tension draining out of the soles of my feet.

More Barcelona photos

Somewhat out of sequence, here are some more Barcelona photos of Gaudi architecture. It’s very photographable, even with my little digital camera.

Here’s Park Guell, which was intended to be a sort of self-contained estate of houses with a market place and parkland. However, it didn’t catch on and only a few houses were built, one of which was the janitor’s, by the gate. Gaudi himself lived in another house in the park – that was before he moved on to the cathedral site, to dedicate the rest of his life to that. For some reason I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of the actual houses – which are designed according to the gingerbread house style of architecture - but I made up for it by overdosing on the broken tile mosaics which are used liberally as decoration elsewhere. These were done not by Gaudi himself but by Someone Else, whose name, regrettably, I forget.

The site is now a sort of park (only not featuring much in the way of vegetation) which is much frequented by tourists, and possibly also locals for all I know. You go in the gate and are confronted by the above steps. At the top is what looks like a Roman temple – this was supposed to be the market-place. You can see that there are people on the top, which was intended as the estate's assembly place. Near the foot of the steps is the famous – well, it looks like a lizard to me, but evidently it’s a dragon. That lady isn't me, by the way.
If you go inside the market-place and look upward, you can see all these mosaic bosses.

This mosaic is one of many pictures I took of...

... the famous wiggly-waggly seats on top of the market-place, which are covered in more broken tilework. I’ll spare you the whole collection of photos but it’s rather pretty. I can see that one could happily while away large portions of one’s life breaking up plates and sticking them back together again.
On a different site, there’s Gaudi’s La Pedrera – the Stone Quarry. He built this as two blocks of flats with independent entrance ways. The design was very innovative, evidently. It has two big courtyards – of very non-standard shapes - so that all of the flats have windows to the outside and also into these spaces, which act as light wells. It would have been much better to have been in Barcelona with Daughter 2, who is a junior architect, because she would have pointed out all the clever features, but even without her, it was very interesting. The public are allowed into one flat – every single wall is curved – and into the attics, which were designed for drying clothes (and for keeping the apartments warm in winter and cool in summer, and which, again, have very clever architecture – something to do with how they’re supported); and also on to the roof, where the chimneys and the air vents and so on are very Alice-in-Wonderlandlike in appearance. There’s also a touch of the controversial newish Scottish Parliament building about some of the windows, we felt – the architect of this was a Catalan also.
Ah well, that was the holiday. Now back to the marking (or grading, as I’m told it’s called in America).

Maybe I should stick to gardening

One of the things that students have to do for Higher English is to write a reflective essay.

"Try to write an arresting first sentence in your essay," I said. "Catch my attention from the beginning."

First essay in the pile; first sentence:

"I don't know whether the first time I tried cocaine or the night I lost my virginity was the bigger anti-climax."

Yes, well, maybe I need to word my lessons more carefully.

This is a contoneaster, by the way.

Three seasons in the garden

Rather tired, having taught an evening class, so thought I'd just display three pictures of the garden this year: spring,
summer
and autumn. All lovely seasons in their way. There hasn't been any frost yet so all the summer bedding is bravely flowering on; though with the reduced light, the blooms aren't so profuse.

Tonight, however, it's quite chilly for the first time. The clocks went back at the weekend so that it's still light in the mornings but dark soon after work.

How impossible to imagine that it's spring - nearly summer - in Australia and New Zealand.

Acting and the art of cookery

Isn't my Christmas cactus pretty?

I’ve been married for 32 years and 9 months, and during that time I’ve done a lot of cooking. I say this in my defence, not wishing you to believe, as you read the following, that I’m a complete idiot.

However, I do occasionally fail to give my entire attention to my cooking. My mind is, I like to think, on higher things from time to time, and the result has been, once or twice, that I’ve missed out a vital ingredient. There was the time, for example, when I made cheese soufflé without the cheese. Or at least, I put the dish in the oven and, while clearing up, came across the grated cheese in its bowl. So I fished the soufflé out of the cooker and stirred in the cheese. It was fine.

As a variation on this theme, I once made a cheese soufflé without the egg yolks. This was when my mother-in-law was living with us. She had terminal cancer and had become unable to live by herself – she was a widow – so of course we had her to stay with us. My husband is an only child. I liked my mother-in-law but she was quite a formidable lady who didn’t suffer fools particularly enthusiastically, and though she was always very nice to me, I was always faintly worried that I wasn’t quite what she had in mind for her only son. She had been a teacher of cooking and sewing. She was a fantastic cook as well as making all her clothes, curtains and cushion covers and reupholstering her furniture. However, she wasn’t a reader. Though I could cook all right and make curtains that stayed up, I wasn’t hugely skilled or interested in those areas compared to my interest in reading and the arts.

When ill, she had very little appetite and so I thought to tempt her with a soufflé. On this occasion I didn’t come across the bowl with the yolks till too late. I have to report that yolkless soufflés rise very well. But they’re a little lacking in substance. I dare say they’d be very popular with size 0 filmstars, though I imagine that the really slender people would insist on the cheese being omitted as well. (I can do that too, as I’ve said.) Of course, I would have to make a dud soufflé for my MIL, the supercook. But she was very good about it.

We always have my parents (and now also Daughter 1 and her husband) to a meal on a Sunday. A short time ago I was musing about dessert and decided that, to accompany the raspberries and cream that I’d already bought for tomorrow, I’d make brownies. SIL is very skinny and needs calories, and Son is energetic and lean. Because cooking is boring, I was listening to a tape of Garrison Keillor telling one of his tales of Lake Wobegon – heartwarming tales of people to whom slightly sad (but funny) things happen, but it all turns out right in the end. This story was about Bob Anderson, who goes to New York to be a dancer, and for whom show business turns out to be a difficult and unprofitable business.

This made me think about a conversation that Daughter 2 and I had the other day. We’d been to the theatre, and I later said something about the strange life of an actor – its peripatetic nature and its uncertainty.

Daughter 2, correctly inferring the subtext of this (“Why on earth does your boyfriend want to be an actor? Why can’t you marry some nice lawyer or doctor?”) looked lovingly at me and made the following little speech:

“Oh, Mum. You need to realise that everyone’s not like you. You wouldn’t like to be an actor, but then you wouldn’t like to be a fire fighter or a mountaineer or a politician either. If everyone was like you, the world would be a far better place. But there wouldn’t be any fire fighters.”

Well, there was considerable daughterly bias in this assessment, but that last bit’s certainly true, and of course she’s right in many respects. But it’s just that I want her life to be safe and easy and perfect! And she understands this. She’s so lovely.

And as I considered all these things, I spooned the brownie mixture into the prepared, lined tin, thinking to myself, but only very very vaguely, that it seemed a bit… not quite right. I popped it into the oven, ran water into the mixing bowl and – only then – looked over the ingredients. I’d missed out the sugar.

Sugarless brownies would be a lot healthier, I’m sure, but would they cook properly?

I took the baking tray out again, scraped the mixture with considerable difficulty off the baking paper and into a fresh bowl, added the sugar, cut more paper to fit the tin and put it back in to cook. It’ll be fine. Cooking’s an art, not a science. Luckily.

Sagrada Familia

Well, once again the plane didn’t fall into the sea and we survived. I do hate flying, though. I hate the way that the plane seems hardly off the ground before you’re looking down on tiny dolls’ houses, giving you no chance to say: actually, I’ve changed my mind; can we go back? I really really don’t like the bumpy bits of turbulence. I always have to fix my eyes on one of the cabin crew to watch for signs of anxiety on his or her face - as long as the coffee-pouring continues, I feel somewhat reassured. But the descent is the worst bit. The part where the sound of the engines changes – clearly because one of them’s failed, if not fallen off; the bit where the pilot applies the brakes and it’s just a matter of time before we go into a spin; and the time when we’re zooming dangerously near the ground and the pilot’s teasing us, making us brace ourselves for that horrible crump as we hit the runway.

Anyway: Barcelona. It was amazing, at least to me, who hadn’t had time to read up on it before we went. Our reason for going was mainly to see the Gaudi architecture, which I knew about, vaguely. I’d seen pictures of strange, tiled buildings, and kind of realised that the cathedral that Gaudi had started to build was still not finished and was still being worked on. But I had no idea exactly how much it wasn’t finished. And visiting this on Tuesday – the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia (expiatory temple of the sacred family) - was a real highlight of the trip – in fact one of the highlights of my life. Maybe that’s putting it a bit strongly; though one has to bear in mind that my life hasn’t been all that exciting… .

Unlike my expectations - which were that there would be a plasterer or two patting the last tile into place - the whole cathedral is a huge, enormous, gigantic building site. Which sounds bad but which is actually fantastically exhilarating. Because you’ll never be on such a huge, grand, ambitious building site again. It’s as if you were transported back 800 years to the building of some mediaeval cathedral – Worcester or Lincoln, maybe – and could watch the workmen tapping out the carving at the top of the pillars high above your head.

Huge, soaring pillars, an enormous roof, beautiful stained glass - and meanwhile chaps down on the floor mixing moulds for leaf and tree trunk shapes, or standing around drinking cups of coffee or consulting plans or sweeping up messy bits. And birds flying in and out.
I’ve visited lots of very old cathedrals and thought – wow, what must this have been like to build? And now you can see what it must have been like – give or take modern scaffolding and cranes and cement mixers and protective headgear and – presumably – fewer unfortunates plunging to their deaths. But in essence it’s the same – men (yes, they were all men, at least when we were there) plodding on with their work and – very very gradually - achieving something astonishing. Gaudi died in 1926 when he was knocked down by a tram, but he was 76 at this stage and must have known that he’d never see his cathedral finished. Work then came to a halt and didn’t start again till 1952; but that was a while ago now, and it’s still only about a quarter built, I’d say. It’s hard to imagine that it’ll ever be finished – for one thing, they need to knock down a whole lot of the surrounding buildings to make the cathedral into the cross shape that’s planned. And the cost of it – completely unimaginable. And we live in a much more unbelieving age than that of Gaudi, so how many people still want to expiate anything in honour of the sacred family? I’ve no idea. And yet it goes on.
The temptation in the end – for some future government in some future Spain - will surely be to leave it as it then is, which even now is very impressive, with its strange spires which look like iced decorations on a slightly melted fairy castle cake complete with fancy spoons on the top, and its pillars which look like trees, and its various carvings and tiled bosses and its stairs which curl like apple peel cut off in one piece.
Was Gaudi right to devote – as he did – the last part of his life entirely to this project? I’d have to say yes. It was completely mad, but what do most of us leave behind when we die? Not a lot. A few memories with a few grandchildren for a few decades. Which is fine – it wouldn’t do if we all built cathedrals, and I’d personally rather have grandchildren. But… well, if you’ve not been to Barcelona, let me urge you to go, despite the possibility of the engines falling off your plane.

City break

My husband and I are off tomorrow morning to Barcelona, returning on Friday. I'm very anxious about this, since not only does it involve going on one of these flying machine things, but also I'm leaving with the "children" the burden of looking after my mum and taking her every afternoon to visit my dad in hospital. Dad got his hip pinned together on Monday and is still not making much progress. But this little holiday was booked ages ago, my husband is looking forward to it and my mum is urging us to go. So we're going, barring additional crises. But - sigh.

Autumn Watch

“Autumn Watch” is a nature programme which has been on recently. It’s hosted by Bill Oddie, a bearded, rather excitable chap who’s very keen on wildlife in general and birds in particular.

I saw a few minutes of it the other night. He was interviewing the rather taciturn warden of a bird sanctuary.



Bill Oddie: How many geese do you have here at the moment?

Warden (looking out over acres of goose-covered marshland): Oh, ten thousand, I reckon.

Bill Oddie: How do you estimate the number?

(Pause. Warden looks at him.)

Warden: Count the legs and divide by two.

Blogging

Scene: kitchen table, evening meal

(Explanatory note: our children get on very well indeed and have a very jolly relationship. For example, Daughter 2 and Son frequently address each other as “Smelly” - in an purely affectionate way, you understand.)

Me:… and did you know that your dad reads my blog?

Son (surprised): You’ve got a blog? What do you write about?

Daughter 2 (patting his hand): Oh, you, I expect.

Son (cheerfully): Hmm, yes, I’ve always felt there should be a website devoted to me.

Identity

I. My husband mentioned the other day that he reads my blog. Hello, dear. He knew I had one, because Daughter 1 and I discuss blogs, and he found it, I assume, by Googling something he thought would be in it. No idea how long he’s been reading it, though. (I could ask him, of course. Not really sure why I didn't.) Just as well I didn’t say anything rude about him! (not that there’s anything rude to say, of course).

2. I sometimes wish I’d chosen a less bland name for the blog. Occasionally, I can’t remember which of the less striking blog names on my Favourites list belongs to which more memorable writer. Names like Lainey’s “The Fat Party is O-V-E-R” or of course “The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl” are much harder to forget. I chose my name with no thought at all, on a whim.

3. I like seeing what other bloggers look like, but I myself hide behind a picture of mecanopsis. This is partly because it’s a really lovely photo – rather more so than one of me would be – but mainly for the sake of anonymity, in case of the remote possibility that one of my students should chance upon the blog. Being a teacher is quite enough of a public performance without that. I do occasionally wonder what I would do if I met Shauna or Lainey in the streets of Edinburgh, as isn’t impossible. I would be pretty sure to recognise them. Would I say hello? I’d certainly think about it but would probably still be getting round to it as they disappeared into the distance.

4. My name isn’t really Isabelle, of course. Or at least, it’s not my first name.

Another day at the hospital

Let’s start on a positive note. Isn't this coleus lovely? There it is, sitting on my lawn last Saturday, beautifully crimson, with one autumnally symbolic leaf fallen on the grass in front of it – not that I noticed it at the time. I just love the amazingly diverse colours and shapes of leaves.

However, my father – who got out of hospital yesterday afternoon despite his slightly cracked right hip– fell down in the bathroom at 5 this morning and broke his left hip. He really hated being in hospital last week and complained constantly, so when the combined forces of my husband, Daughter 2 and myself were unable to lift him off the bathroom floor this morning because it was too painful for him, he said that he was definitely not going to any hospital, that we couldn’t make him, that he would refuse to go in an ambulance… .

However, when the ambulance came, he fortunately co-operated, and all the time in Accident and Emergency he kept up this – for him, frankly unusual - attitude. I was so sorry for him, though. He was the dux of his school (top prizewinner); he was in Bomb Disposal during the war and won the George Medal – very prestigious; he was a top chap in industry during his working career as well as being a strong, tireless sort of man. And there he was on a trolley, a shrunken, deaf old chap in absorbent underpants. Oh dear.

Reasons to be cheerful

Goodness me, waiting for pictures to load on to my blog is like watching someone give birth. Come on, Blogger, just one more little push - you can do it. And the green worm thing painfully squeezes the photo out - Done!

Look at this petunia that Daughter 1 and SIL bought me months ago. Wouldn't that just gladden your heart? Nearly October and it's still shouting pinkly "Look at me!"

A few weeks ago I bought some bulbs and this morning I thought that it was about time I planted them. I'd forgotten that among these were two autumn crocuses, which I've never bought before because the leaves are enormous later in the year. However, I succumbed this year. When I opened the brown paper bag that the bulbs were in, one of the autumn crocuses looked like this.

But the other looked like this.

The poor thing had decided that it was time to flower and had just gone ahead, in its net prison, in the dark. And it was lovely! - actually pale pink, though it doesn't show up on my photo.

Isn't nature wonderful? I've now planted it in the garden.

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.