Son ironing his lab coat

Kittens just love to help.

The next time you see a medical student ...

with lots of little holes in his lab coat...

you'll know why.

There have been terrible floods in midland England. Thousands of people are marooned in their houses with no water or electricity supply. Here, it's been the best day of the summer: day-long sunshine. It's been so weird, seeing news reports of towns that have turned into islands, while the sun beats down on Edinburgh.

Much sympathy to anyone affected by these strange and awful events.

Holiday in the Borders

We're back. This was our cottage. We had a very nice time.

This was the view from our sitting room window. We are now quite expert in the habits of sheep.

This was our one sunny day - we visited Melrose Abbey.

This is the garden at Floors Castle. I want it. Do you think it's too late to marry into the aristocracy?

Back in due course.

(The kittens (left in the charge of Daughter 2, her aspiring actor boyfriend and Son) missed us, of course. They've now learnt to run along the work surfaces in the kitchen. Lack of discipline in our absence, that's the problem.)

PS - I've been catching up with blogs written by people who commented while I've been away, and for some reason I can't manage to comment in return on some: Aunty Evil, Meggie, Rosemary Grace and Connie so far. Others have been fine. So hello and thanks for the comments, you four. I remember this happened once before and I found a cunning way round it, but senile decay has set in and I can't remember what this was. Any suggestions, anyone?

Holiday ploys

My husband has been on holiday this week so we’ve had a few outings. He took the photos, since I never remember to bring a camera. On Monday we went to Newhailes House, a National Trust property. It’s a smallish mansion house, built in 1690 and extended a hundred years or so later. It was occupied by the same family (and its descendants) from 1710 till 1997, and they did very little redecoration in the last hundred and fifty years. When the National Trust took it over, with lots of the family furniture, possessions and pictures, the necessary repairs were done but it wasn’t restored it to its original state of smartness. It’s quite an interesting point – do we want to see it approximately as it was when first decorated, or as it was when the last owner lived in it: a bit scruffy and with some twentieth century alterations? Which is the truer version of the house?

I occasionally wonder this about people too. Which version of you is the real you? The six-year-old you? The sixteen/twenty-six/thirty-six/forty-six/fifty-six/ etc you? I thought about this quite a lot while watching my father in his last, sad days. Was that really him? Or was he more the brilliant and brave young man who won the George Medal for bomb disposal in the war, or the young, powerful Dad I remember carrying me upstairs to bed?

On Wednesday we went to Malleny, a lovely garden on the outskirts of Edinburgh, again owned now by the National Trust.

On Thursday we visited my husband’s aunt and uncle, who are lovely people. They’re both retired doctors and they live in a village in Fife, to the north of here. Their large house is absolutely beautiful: built in 1880, in stunning gardens and with a view over the water to Edinburgh. They took us in their new S-type Jaguar car – I've just Googled this and it costs more than my gross annnual salary – to a club in St Andrews where members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club can take visitors. It’s in a building which has been converted from an old golf club factory, and is really luxurious – fine panelling, squashy armchairs, big windows overlooking the 18th hole and the golden beach and the sea – and we sat gazing out at the scene and the milling throng below, as we ate a delicious lunch served by solicitous waitresses.

Ah yes, I could get used to living like that.

Our son – all going well – starts as a doctor next year, and in his first job he’ll earn more per annum than I do now, after teaching since 1973. Yes, I think doctors should be well paid, and yes, medicine is a very important and responsible job, but I do sometimes wonder why teachers get paid so much less than lots of other professions.

I know, I know. I get six weeks’ summer holidays, two weeks at Christmas and Easter and a week in October. No evenings to speak of, though – lots of marking.

My husband and I are off this afternoon for a week in a cottage near Selkirk in the Scottish Borders for a week, taking my mum, and I’m not packed yet, so – I must go. Have a good week. Sorry I haven't commented much on others' blogs - too busy gardening in the long light evenings.

(There - I've done a whole post without mentioning kittens.

Oops. Oh well. Here they are.)

Getting trained

The day that we got the kittens, we went up to the supermarket to buy equipment for them: a bed, a scratching post (so that they wouldn’t scratch the furniture – ha!), some toys, some dishes, a litter tray, some litter, some food…

We didn’t buy anything else, and the lady behind us in the queue noticed the exclusively feline nature of our purchases. She enquired about our cats, told us about hers and said as farewell, “Don’t worry. They’ll soon get you trained.”

Nonsense.

Training cats not to walk on tables - part 2:

a) Cassie and Sirius are now getting used to us waggling a finger at them in reprimand if they walk on a table, and therefore this is becoming less effective. (Well, it was never actually effective; but at least they noticed.) So we’ve moved on to waggling a finger and saying “No!”.

What they now do is to glance over their shoulders, like people in audience participation shows who’re being picked out by the host – “Who do you mean? Not me, surely?” - and, finding no other cat behind them, they gaze at us in innocent puzzlement and continue on their way.

b) Today they started climbing the dining room curtains. Very bad. But we were cunning. We hooked up the (floor length) curtains on to the table. So now there’s a nice soft bit of curtain on the table for the kittens to walk on, instead of nasty cold, slippery wood.

Oh yes, we’re getting these kittens trained.

Scones and things

I was born on the fourth of July, or as I suppose Americans think of it, the Fourth of July. Thank you, kind commenters, for your greetings. I think it’s a good day to be born. It’s not only that citizens of the USA celebrate it with gratifying enthusiasm; it’s also pretty nicely situated between Christmasses, so one has built up a list of wanted gift items in case anyone asks. And they did, as you see from the above haul. And also it falls in the college holidays and the second week of Wimbledon, and a birthday is a good excuse to sit and watch tennis, though this year it kept raining in London and there wasn’t much play.

Some of my cards had a certain feline theme, as you may notice.

I don’t think I’m very talented as a cat trainer. The only aspect of their behaviour we’re really attempting to change is to stop them walking on tables. Either they don’t understand or – and I rather favour this interpretation – they don’t care. My cat book says that we’re supposed to tap them on the nose when they do something undesirable, but this seems mean. Their noses are very small. So we’re trying finger-waggling instead. Promisingly, they don’t really like having fingers waggled at them.

They react slightly differently to this nasty gesture. Cassie looks aghast and collapses submissively on her side, thus revealing the extreme fluffiness of her tummy. Then I go “Oh, fluffy girl!” and tickle her tummy, and she purrs. Sirius, on the other hand, just stares at me with reproach and freezes. I then pick him up, he starts purring loudly and I give him a cuddle.

Somehow this disciplinary measure doesn’t seem to be working. How did we manage to bring up three law-abiding children? And how do I succeed in keeping the attention of lots of young people in the course of my job?

Scones

Yummers asked for a scone recipe, so here it is. I’d like to point out that this is pronounced with a short “o”, as in “hot” (think Scottish accents here, Joni). (Some?) English people pronounce it with a long “o”, as in “hope”. But these are Scottish scones. I’ve tried to translate the recipe into cup measures as much as I could, though how to measure butter in cups is somewhat beyond me. Or indeed why anyone would want to. Also, I never remember American flour names. I think “all-purpose flour” is what we call plain flour, but I don’t know what self-raising flour would be. Anyway, as the name suggests, it’s flour with some raising agent in it – about the same as you’d use for cakes.

I don’t do metric. But if anyone cares, there are 14 ounces in a pound, and a kilo is 2.2 pounds or something.

So, in ounces and things:

Ingredients

8 oz self-raising flour

2 oz margarine or butter

milk to mix – around ¼ pint

egg to glaze, or just use milk (it’s almost as good).

Or

1 and a half cups self-raising flour

¼ cup butter or margarine

milk to mix – around ¾ cup

egg or milk to glaze

Method:

Chop butter into pieces and rub into flour with fingers – or use a mixer/ food processor– till the mixture is like fine breadcrumbs. Then add milk until the mix is combined, but not too wet and sticky. You need to be able to roll it out on a floured board to a thickness of about… oh, I don’t know… an inch? … and then cut it into rounds with a scone cutter or biscuit cutter or if all else fails, a cup. Well, obviously you could make squares if you want.

Squash up the remains, roll it out again and repeat the process of cutting.

Glaze the scones in milk/egg, put on a greased baking tray and bake for about 7-10 minutes in a hot oven, maybe 450 F or 250 C, gas mark 8. Eat with butter/jam/honey/whatever. You could add various things to the mix, eg a handful of sultanas or raisins or a cup of grated cheese.

Hope this works transatlantically. Happy afternoon tea!

Being a bit dwelly

On Saturday, we had friends to visit who live near Glasgow. One of their daughters works part of the weekend at Glasgow airport. Mid-afternoon, the phone rang and it was this daughter, very upset. She was now home, but had been getting lots of text messages from friends asking if she was all right, because – I don’t know how much this has been in the news world-wide – attempted suicide bombers had tried to crash a burning car loaded with explosives and nails into the arrivals lounge at the airport. She had actually walked out of the relevant door on her way home half an hour before the attack.

By a miracle, or possibly by the ineptitude of the would-be bombers, everyone escaped injury apart from one of the terrorists, who had set himself on fire. The car got stuck in the doorway, the men were captured and the only result – and of course, it was no doubt one of the desired results – is major disruption of the airport (and other airports too) and huge inconvenience for many people.

Here in Scotland, up till now, I think most of us have felt reasonably immune from such events. Well, I suppose I can only speak for myself, but though I was of course aware that my complacency wasn’t really well-founded, I did half-believe that terrorists wouldn’t be awfully aware of Scotland. Goodness me, the BBC have only recently noticed that we exist – and even now, we all get told on the radio that it’s exam time (when it’s exam time only in England) or school holiday time (in a few weeks’ time, when English schools are on holiday) or bank holiday time (for purely English bank holidays). Scotland is just a wee bit on the top of England, and most of the time I quite like it this way. Rather like being middle-aged – no one really notices you and so life is peaceful.

That illusion is now gone. Saturday was the first day of the (Scottish) school holidays, so most of people at that airport would be families with children. How impossible to imagine the mind-set of those who would target specifically them. And Glasgow is, I’d think, the most cosmopolitan city in Scotland – still not all that cosmopolitan, but with quite a lot of Asian families, particularly. So it’s not as if the passengers would be wall-to-wall Anglo-Saxon.

It’s absolutely not that I think it’s all right to bomb London, or Baghdad, or anywhere else. But however much you empathise with people in other places, suicide bombers only fifty miles away seem horribly near.

At more or less the time of this incident, my mother was arriving at Edinburgh airport from a brief visit to Cambridge to attend my niece’s graduation. The plane was late, so our son, who was collecting her, spent a lot of time in the arrivals lounge there. Hmm. And if our friends' daughter had been a bit later leaving work...

I once said to Daughter 1, who as a teenager was sometimes a bit mournful, “There’s no use in dwelling on the gloomy side of life.” Well, that’s what I meant to say. What I actually said was, “There’s no point in glooming on the dwelly side of life.” This has become a bit of a mantra in our family. And it’s true. We just have to get on and hope for the best.

So here are some kittens.

My blog has become so much more visited since I started posting kitten pictures, but most people aren’t commenting.

I suppose that once the first person has said, “Ah, nice kittens”, there’s not much more to write. But go on, say it all the same. Come on, all together now: “Ah, nice kittens.”

(Look, there's Mr Life. He's looking a bit grumpy, but he's not really. He's a major kitten fan.)

Poppies

I realise that there are some people in the world who don’t like kittens, though I have to say that my Sitemeter shows a greatly increased number of hits since I started devoting my blog to Sirius and Cassie, the furry cannonballs.

However, I don’t want to become a total kitten bore, so above are some poppies...

and here’s another bit of my garden this evening. The weather has been cool and showery – nothing like the terrible floods in some parts of England, but nonetheless very unJunelike. My poor paeonies are hanging like limp handkerchiefs and my alliums are wetly drooping their big pompom heads.

Enough of that. Kittens.

Our pair spend their lives at the moment in our quite large kitchen and the adjoining dining room – which is also a living room. Theoretically they will keep out of the sitting room next door, since Daughter 1, Son-in-Law and my brother are all allergic to cats, which is a great pity since they all like them, particularly Son-in-law, who turns out to be even more allergic than we thought. Sigh. Anyway, we need a cat-free room. The twins’ litter tray is in the corner of the kitchen, and to access it from the dining room they have to go through the door between the kitchen and the dining room and turn left. They’re exceedingly talented at using their litter tray – how unlike 10-week-old children in this respect – but are often having such a good time playing that they wait till the matter becomes urgent. Then they rush through into the kitchen, skid to a halt using all four feet, just like in cartoons, slide to the left and take a flying leap into the litter tray, scattering the (clean) contents over the floor.

They’re very interested in new things but have a short attention span, so it’s a case of “Ooh, exciting! exciting! exciting! exciting! exciting! exciting! oh no, boring, boring.”

They love shoelaces, strings, boxes, climbing, warmth, cuddles, wrestling and sleeping.

What a simple life.

We’re having friends for lunch tomorrow so I must go and transform the house from a kittens’ playground to a stylish and elegant home.

They don't sleep all the time

As preamble to this post, you need to know one of those stories that has become family folklore. Some years ago, our whole family went on holiday to a rambling old house in France: my parents, brother, wife and two children and us with our three children. Not long before, there had been a horrible incident in a youth hostel in France in which a young girl had been murdered by an intruder as she slept.

One night, I woke and went to check on the children, all five of whom were sleeping in one big room. Daughter 2, aged 14, wasn’t in her bed. I checked downstairs: not there either. Not in the bathrooms; not anywhere. I panicked and woke my husband and we searched together. No sign, though no obvious break-in. But I became convinced that she’d been kidnapped.

And then eventually my husband found her. Asleep underneath a bed on the opposite side of the room from her bed, squeezed against a wall and under a pile of blankets. And fine, though unable to explain how she got there.

This is the reference at the beginning of the email my husband sent to me at work today. By the way, I sleep at my mother’s house to keep her company on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, so hadn’t been at home this morning. The chap had been in charge of the kittens – Daughter 2 had gone to work and Son wasn’t up yet.

You also need to know that I have an ambition to have a cat-free room: the sitting room. Yes, I know it'll never work.

Read on - my husband's email follows.

Subject: Kitten report

From one of their owners (traumatised)

I had a "Daughter under the wrong bed in France" few minutes this morning. Cassie managed to escape from the kitchen without my noticing and make her way to the sitting room. She has learnt to scale the cardboard washing machine protection both ways (i.e. in and out) and as I left the kitchen to go to the bedroom she was climbing in. I was sure, wrongly, that I had shut the kitchen door and, for once, didn't shut the dining room door to the hall.

When I came back only Sirius was in sight and, after I'd checked all the usual places, panic set in. I couldn't be sure that there wasn't a way out round the back of the sink unit (there isn't - the mouse ingress was filled in by me years ago). She wasn't in the dining room and so I rushed upstairs to get [Son]. He also looked in the usual places and then hauled off the cardboard and pulled out the washing machine and the dishwasher. Plenty of dust but no pussy. Sirius was just looking on and keeping dumb. I then decided to try further afield and found her nosing round the sitting room.

Panic over but as a consequence I didn't get to work until nearly 25 past 9!

Also when I went in first thing they were sitting in their new basket which had been put on a chair under the table. However, a geranium (still in its pot) was lying on the floor with compost scattered all around. The kittens were very interested when I cleared it up in a "Goodness. How did that happen?" sort of a way. They were then fed and watered (by me) and toileted (by themselves - although at one point they both tried to occupy the tray at the same time which didn't seem like a good idea). I'm beginning to calm down slightly and had better do some work.

The twins

This is their bed. They quite like it, though possibly not as much as they like flying through the air, swiping at things with their paws.

I think this is Sirius.

The two-headed kitten.

Look at the bird box - one of two that our son made the other day. He's fond of birds and feeds them regularly. I wonder if the kittens will understand this?

We did eventually get out of our pyjamas.

The efficacy of pester power

You think we finally gave in and got a kitten, don't you?

Look more closely.

The house is in chaos. Grandchildren would be much less work.

Also, it's very hard to take photos of black cats.

I think this is Sirius - a Harry Potter allusion, I'm told. On the other hand, it might be Cassie, short for Casseopeia - continuing the approximate constellation theme. Son chose the names. We had a cat when I was a girl who was actually named Dido but always called Pussy. The children point out that we can't call them both Pussy, though at the moment I can't really tell which is which, so it would be less trouble. And I think they're going to be quite enough trouble as it is...

The offspring are very very happy. Son is especially delirious. He says that he'll take them with him when he has a house of his own. Hmm.

We ordered new sofas for our dining room a few weeks ago. They're due to arrive in a month or so. We've had the old sofas for over 20 years and I wouldn't mind them being attacked. But my nice new ones...

I'm not good at being brief

Several days ago, I got tagged by Tanya the Art Butcher (sorry that I still don't know how to do the underlining thing) for that one word response meme, so here I go.

1. Where is your cell phone? Handbag

2. Relationship? Supportive

3. Your hair? Wavy

4. Work? Teacher

5. Your sister? Sadlynonexistent (What? Is that not one word?)

6. Your favourite thing? Family

7. Your dream last night? Forgotten

8. Your favourite drink? Tea

9. Your dream car? Free

10. The room you're in? Study

11. Your shoes? Comfortable

12. Your fears? Accidents

13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Interested

14. Who did you hang out with this weekend? Family

15. What are you not good at? Directions

16. Muffin? Shrug

17. Wish list item? Time

18. Where you grew up? Edinburgh

19. The last thing you did? Gardening

20. What are you wearing? Beads

21. What are you not wearing? Earrings

22. Your pet? Husband

23. Your computer? Precious

24. Your life? Busy

25. Your mood? Calmish

26. Missing? Youth

27. What are you thinking about? Son-in-law

28. Your car? Useful

29. Your kitchen? Pretty

30. Your summer? Scottish

31. Your favourite colour? Blue

32. Last time you laughed? Recently

33. Last time you cried? Slightly

34. School? Boring

35. Love? Lots

As for whom to tag... I can't now remember who's done it and I must go, but how about Beakus, Positively Mom and Yummers - if you're there, any of you!

It's the longest day. Ater I'd visited my mother this evening, I walked home. It was eleven o'clock, and still more light than dark, though twilightish under the trees. I love the long, light summer evenings in Scotland. It's dark now (midnight 02) but in about three hours the sun will start to rise again. Now that's not quite so welcome... birds singing lustily at three in the morning...

By the pricking of my thumbs...

Our college music department (plus a few staff, eg me) is having an extra performance of the “Dido and Aeneas” opera that we did a few months ago.

We’ve had a couple of brush-up rehearsals, and today the young lad who plays the Sorcerer remembered that, in the previous performances, he’d had a big stick that he waved menacingly around. Where was this stick? It couldn’t be found, but someone produced from the props cupboard a Victorian-syle walking stick – not right at all. He took this, but said with a sigh….






“You just can’t get the staff these days.”

Which is the sort of thing I’d have thought of some days later.

Sophisticated toddler in Tesco

In the supermarket today I heard a mother say to her toddler, who was in the child seat in the shopping trolley: “Do you want asparagus tips or baby sweetcorn with your mange-tout peas?” He said, “’Sparagus.”

And I thought: not a question my mum ever asked me, back in the days of austerity. As I trudged 100 miles to school, barefoot, dressed in cast-offs…

I’m exaggerating. But our vegetables were potatoes, carrots, turnip. And cabbage, peas and leeks in season.

Gosh, I’m cold – must go and have my bath and heat up a bit. How can this chilly weather be June?

Mecanopsis

I’ve been away with the family for a long weekend and must go and sort things out, but in brief, to answer a couple of people's questions on a recent blog post: this is a mecanopsis – in the above case, a blue Himalayan poppy.

How kind of some of you, by the way, to admire my infant chubbiness of two posts ago. Alas, the chubbiness is still with me (or at least, it departed for some years but has now returned), but I don’t think I’m at all recognisable from those photos. Hair is still brown on the whole, but with grey streaks at the front - it was never as dashingly dark as it looks in the photo with the bow – and it’s wavy, though the Shirley Temple look has gone, which is probably a good thing. My cheeks are still rosy (yes, I know those are black-and-white photos so you’ll have to take my word for it); I still have two eyes (brown) a nose (unremarkable) and a mouth (small). But I now look like a boring 57-year-old.

I remember Germaine Greer saying that the worst thing about being middle-aged is that you become invisible, but I quite like it on the whole – the invisible bit. It’s quite stressful to be young and self-conscious, worrying that people are looking at you. Now I know they’re not. I would probably like to look just a trifle less boring, though. But not enough to do anything about it.

Oh and - again referring to a comment from a few posts ago - Daughter 2's aspiring-actor boyfriend has done his two years at acting school in New York and has been back in Britain for a year now. But success has not so far crowned his efforts. It's not that he's not a good actor - he really is, as far as I can tell. But I fear it's a crowded profession.

Cats and dogs

I’m a cat person – not a great fan of dogs. Except of course, dear reader, your dog, who is doubtless quiet, fluffy, loyal, obedient, a soothing presence and not too large. More or less like a cat, in other words. Well, all right, cats aren’t really loyal.

The kind of dog I don’t like much is the size of a small horse, with rippling muscles, a bark fit to break the sound barrier and strings of drool swinging from its jaws. Like the one that woofed hungrily at me yesterday as I passed the college janitor’s garden. It was a Rottweillerish sort of animal, but with a bit of Great Dane in there somewhere. Fortunately it was in the garden and I was not, though it was clear by the way that it bounded up to the fence and hung its front paws over that it was just a matter of time till Fido was on the path beside me, munching on my leg. Or indeed my head.

However, the janitor’s wife was in the garden too, digging away. She’s a lady of about my age, though she generally makes a lot more effort with her appearance than I do: carefully blonded hair, a fair amount of mascara and blusher and a lot of gold jewellery. On this occasion, she didn’t look her best - in her shorts - but she was in her own garden, wielding a spade, so shorts were no doubt a practical decision.

Seeing me saucer-eyed with horror, she called the slavering hound back and said, as owners of such animals always do, “He wouldn’t touch you.” Yeah, right.

Just then two lads came towards me on the path. They were eighteen or nineteen and clearly dog-fanciers, because they looked appreciatively at the hound and one of them said to the other in ringing tones, “He’s gorgeous”. Then he glanced at the janitor’s wife, whose gaze had fallen on him. Suddenly his face was suffused in horror as he clearly thought that she thought that he had called out to her that she was gorgeous. He went bright red and said loudly to her, “The dog. He’s gorgeous.” She smiled proudly, in obvious agreement, and the poor lad hurried mortified away.

Sometimes – not very often, but sometimes – I’m quite glad to be no longer young.

PS - by the way, Person from Salford, I dreamt about you last night! We were at a lecture and you introduced yourself to me. You were young and sort of Gothy looking. Most surprising.

Procrastination

At my book group this evening, Susie, a student counsellor, said thoughtfully, “I’ve got to deliver a seminar next week on how to stop procrastinating.”

“Oh yes,” we said encouragingly. “What are you going to say about it?”

A pause. Susie looked slightly worried.

“Haven’t quite got round to working it out yet.”

Memory

I’m currently reading the autobiography of John Simpson, a television journalist, who claims that he can remember things from when he was very small – in his pram, in his cot and so on. And I remember someone commenting on one of my posts that she, too, could remember very far back. I can’t now find the comment; was it Velcro?

I think my first memory is probably of having the above photo taken. How old was I? Three, maybe? It was very exciting because the photographer came to our house. Some of the pictures were just of me, some of my big brother and some of both of us. I can remember clearly what it felt like to stand up and hold on to the back of that chair, which had a fawn, slightly slippery cover. The dress was what my mother called my Coronation dress, because it was white, with red, white and blue smocking and also little tufts of these colours. The Coronation was in 1953 and I was born in 1950, so this figures. My mother persisted in putting bows in my hair for some years, but I always hated them. They kept falling out and anyway I thought I looked silly. I was very shy and a lot of things made me feel silly.

Of course, we had the chairs till I was about ten, and the photos were there as a reminder of the day. So maybe that's the real reason for the memory.

But I don’t remember the one below being taken. I look about two, do you think? The age when it's socially acceptable to be short and plump.

.

Another early memory, though I have no idea how old I was: I was crouching down in the bedroom I shared with my brother and suddenly realised that I didn’t know the word for what I was doing. I asked him, the fount of all knowledge – two years and eight months older. “That’s crouching,” he said. And that was another word added to my vocabulary.

I’ve been told of the time when I carried an opened newspaper while toddling past an electric fire with radiant bars. My mother had to wrap me up in a rug to put the flames out. I wasn't permanently injured, but still, you’d think I’d remember that. But no. Strange thing, memory.

Blue

Well, hallelujah, I’ve finished the marking and can rejoin the civilized world. The poor souls who sat the exams will have to wait till mid-August for the results but I hope that they’re currently enjoying the summer.

Life has been not uneventful in other ways in the Life household. Our son-in-law is still pretty unwell, with only intermittent good spells, which is a huge worry. Daughter 1’s work contract ends in July and there has been nothing to apply for in her field, archivism. This doesn’t help, though doubtless something will come along in due course. Daughter 2’s singer/actor boyfriend came up to stay for the weekend; he has hardly worked this year. You’d think that at least one of our daughters’ significant others would work regularly; but not at the moment. I do wish he would just give up this acting idea and get a proper job!

Just before he became Daughter 2’s boyfriend, or at least before they’d come out as an item, he was our son’s university flatmate for a year (though he’s older than our son). Our son has a lovely voice and he and the chap in question used to be in a university light opera group together. One evening, I remember, after a show that they were both in, I gave them a lift back to the flat, and the future boyfriend said that he was about to go to a theatre school in New York. I remember saying something like, “Oh, how exciting!”

Now, I suppose he might reasonably have thought that I meant this. In a way, I maybe did, in a well-if-that’s-what-you-want-to-do-but-fortunately-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-me sort of way, but really I was just giving a conventional reply. I certainly didn’t mean that it was exciting, desirable or in any way remotely a good thing for the boyfriend of one of my daughters. I have definite double standards here.

What would I have said if I’d known about this burgeoning romance?

“Oh, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

“Well, don’t think that you’re going out with our daughter, then.”

“You do realise that we think salaries are a good idea, do you?”

“How are you ever going to get a mortgage?”

No, I don’t suppose I’d have said any of these things. But ah, the satisfaction of imagination.

More and more I feel like the mamma in some Victorian novel: “And pray, how do you propose to support a wife and family?”

Meantime it’s June. Though the weather is currently not all that summery, little birds are tearing around the garden with beakfuls of unmentionable squashy things, the garden is blossoming - isn't this ceanothus a zinging blue? - and the summer holidays are in sight. One foot after the other, Isabelle, and keep on breathing in and out.

Working hard

Our son has been revising for exams in obstetrics and gynaecology, breast disease, haematology, oncology and palliative care, renal medicine and urology.

It seems no time since he was just a little blob of gynaecology himself. How can he possibly be almost a doctor? I can barely spell these words he needs to write exams on, and I'm much older than he is.

There’s a lot to learn, all in medical language. I don’t know how he remembers it all. He was a bit anxious that he wouldn’t. Here he is, surrounded by books and other marking detritus in our kitchen, looking unaccustomedly stressed. Now that I look at the photo, I rather like the juxtapostion of the half-eaten apple and the Apple computer. Anyway, the exams were yesterday and he seems reasonably sanguine about them now.

My jug cupboard is behind him. I like jugs, as you may guess.

I’ve been marking exams at the other end of the table. Here are my marking “toys” – things that I twiddle with my left hand while marking with my right. It eases the boredom somewhat.

One of the passages that the students have to answer questions on is about libraries and how great they are. The extract – from a male writer - begins: “I have a halcyon library moment. I am sitting under a cherry tree in the tiny central courtyard of the Cambridge University Library, a book in one hand and an almond slice in the other. On the grass beside me is an incredibly pretty girl”.

Question: What mood is created in these lines?

Student’s answer: A dull mood.

Well, I suppose it’s all a matter of personal taste. This candidate might not like cherry trees. Or books… or girls...

… or indeed almond slices.