Cats and other familial matters

We had a lovely visit yesterday to Son and his family, the UnBloggables. Normally I would crop a photo or two to prove their existence without showing much of them, but with the new excellent system of taking pictures straight from Google photos, I don't know how to. (This isn't to say that I haven't been shown. But if so, I can't remember.) Anyway, these are their cats, who were fairly unimpressed by us, but nice and furry.  (Goodness, Blogger has changed the way to enlarge photos again - just as I'd got used to their previous change.)

Here is Mr L getting to play with Son's ride-on mower. He liked that! Son and his family live in a pretty place, but it's quite a drive away and very much in the country - which no doubt has some advantages, but from our point of view has some major disadvantages, the main one being (in)accessibility. However, it's near our daughter-in-law's family, which is nice for them. We got a lovely welcome from Middle Granddaughter, which was very heart-warming, and though Little Grandson was somewhat suspicious at first, he relaxed quite quickly. I don't worry about him so much as I did about Middle Granddaughter, because she now remembers us and I assume he will too, eventually. Though of course it's doubtful if he'll remember us once he's a grown-up, unless we live for quite a long time. However, he's very delicious and I just try to enjoy him and his lovely big sister for the moment. Who knows what the future holds? 

Here's the tiny toad that Son rescued from being in the way of the ride-on mower. 

It was a very nice day. 

Today - excitement - we had a viewer for Daughter 2's flat. It was a girl with her mother, who came along for advice purposes. They took quite a while to look around - we waited outside after the initial showing round - and then went back again for another look, so I suppose they were serious viewers, but they didn't express any opinions, which doesn't seem a good sign. Anyway, we came home via the Botanics and enjoyed the autumn colour, such as these phloxes. 

The leaves are only just beginning to turn, but it was quite a lot chillier today than it's been recently. 

 

This viburnum's leaves are turning purple.

  

and this hydrangea gave a good show,  

 as did the Japanese anemones. 

My two choirs have both started up, on Zoom. It's not ideal, singing away with everyone else on mute. But it's all that can be done at the moment. 

Getting around in a lockdownish way

Yesterday we climbed up a bit of a Pentland hill to Swanston. It was a sunny day but very windy. 

It must be peaceful to live up here, apart from people taking your cottage's photo. 

There are two golf courses, though it must have been quite difficult to play accurate golf in the stiff wind.  

 And there's the city, suddenly stopping at the main road. It feels a long way away. On the horizon are Arthur's Seat and the sea. 

Since lockdown, we never seem to have any change to give to the grandchildren as pocket money, so today we walked along to the bank to get some. There was a queue of about ten people waiting outside, most of them fairly elderly, and it took about forty minutes before we reached the door. Not ideal, especially if it had been cold. However, the chap gave Mr L £50 in pound coins, which will last us for a while.

Then we walked home and Mr L washed the coins, to be on the safe side. This is presumably the nearest he'll come to walking into a bank wearing a mask and demanding money which he later launders. 

I'm having quite fun quilting my very bright quilt. 

Today, somewhat on an impulse, I decided to go to visit Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter at the weekend. It involves taking a bus, a train, a tube and another bus, but on the other hand I have a nasty feeling that if I don't go soon, the opportunity to do so may not arise for a while. Mr L decided to stay at home. He's not the mad, reckless fool that I am. Also, Daughter 2's flat is quite small. I sleep on a sofa but he's a bit larger and needs a mattress on the sitting room floor, which is all a bit more of a faff. 

Her Edinburgh flat, by the way, is not selling. It's been on the market for, I think, six weeks now and has had two viewers, both in the first week. Sigh. There are just too many similar flats on the market at the moment and evidently mortgages for first-time buyers are hard to get. Still, we only need one buyer, and maybe Mr L will be showing him/her around this weekend. You never know. 

Still in the virus phase, walking old haunts

Well, unsurprisingly we've now been restricted to having a maximum of 6 people from 2 households in our houses. Just to make it different from England, where children do count in this calculation, children aren't included in this 6 here. Wouldn't do to have all Britain the same, would it? Too simple. Wales and Northern Ireland are also slightly different, I think. (Edited to add: as Relatively Retiring pointed out, I got this wrong the first time, claiming that children do count here but don't in England. I rest my confused case.)

We went out for lunch today with the Edinburgh family to celebrate Daughter 1's birthday and afterwards took a walk up the River Esk. We passed the house where Mr L spent his teenage years. There's his father at the back window. Mr L and his parents lived in the lower part of the house, which was absolutely beautiful, and huge (and also cold in winter - no central heating). His father worked for the Coal Board and the Coal Board owned the house. 

Here are his mother (the little one standing on the step) and his Great-Aunt Chris (standing on the ground). Auntie Chris - Mr L's father's aunt - was very tall for a woman of her generation, as were her sisters. Tall genes, which I married into because my ancestors were all on the short side. (There were other reasons, too, why I went for him.) Look at the immaculate garden.

However, as we knew, the house was bought by a developer a few years ago and this is what's there now. The front garden has been built over. Only the gateposts and parts of the garden walls (but not the fence) remain. It's very sad and also very, very disorientating. 

This is where the back garden was. 

At least the river looks much the same. 

 

And we had a nice walk, just where we used to walk 50+ years ago holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes. 

Beautiful - but pernicious - Himalayan balsam. It grows by rivers, and the seeds float down and spread on to the banks downstream. There's a lot of it here. 

And the lovely reflections in the river in the middle of this photo are of Japanese knotweed, another awful pest which was imported, planted in gardens and has now spread widely. 

Still, these willows are lovely. We walked three and a half miles. Let's assume that this cancelled out our lunch intake. 

Daughter 2 and her husband put Littlest Granddaughter in her big girl's bed tonight for the first time. As you can see, she found this very exciting. She got to sleep eventually. 

I've posted this using the new, easy, whizzy, non-blurry system of Google photo-using worked out yesterday by SIL 1. He's a treasure, that lad. 

 

The distant chains are clanking... but we're still out and about

Well, I've returned to using Picasa because Google Photos makes some of my pictures very blurry. I Googled the problem and it's clearly a common one, but we couldn't find an easy explanation of what to do about it. Annoying. Anyway, we climbed Corstorphine Hill yesterday, looking longingly at the golf course... .

It was a beautiful day - almost like summer, except that the sun's getting low in the sky. Look at the length of those shadows, and it was still the morning. 

This oak tree was completely leafless at the beginning  of lockdown and look at it now. What happened to those months? - gone like a dream. We were so pleased that at least it was spring when everything was shutting down. It's not spring now. 

The willow herb is almost over now - just a faintly pink haze in the distance. 

But it has a silvery beauty in the sunlight. 

Today we walked in the Botanics. Autumn crocuses. Hmm. 

There's still colour in the herbaceous border, but look at those shadows again. It was only about 11.30.

Google seems to think these are tulbagia, which I'd never heard of. They seem to be a kind of allium. 

 And these viburnum berries are spectacular. 

I've bought quite a few bulbs and put them in pots, prior to planting them out in front of the proposed fence which is to go behind the ex-hedge. 

The virus figures are up again. England is having more stringent restrictions imposed on it from today - only six people are allowed to meet together either inside or outside - unless in a pub or restaurant... . I'm sure we'll follow suit soon - though our Great Leader will probably want to make it slightly different, just to show how independent she is (and incidentally, confuse us). 

Meanwhile I'm having fun quilting my very bright quilt. 

(The Lassie! You're still there! I do think of you from time to time. Your little ones must be quite big now. Lovely to hear from you!)

Walking the Tweed

Well! We've had the most tremendous palaver to write this blog post, and I'm sure it's not worth it, but if you're reading this at all - goodness me, you nearly weren't. 

To go back a bit - part of this is due to our (well, my) having decided that to use a single bedroom as a study only was a bit of a waste. We do have four other bedrooms, but with two distant offspring plus partners and three distant grandchildren (the Edinburgh ones don't have to stay the night), these aren't really enough - and that's not mentioning my brother and his family, who come sometimes from Surrey. So I thought maybe if we did away with one of the desks and desktop computers in the study, we might squeeze in a single bed, which would help, if only marginally. 

(How do people manage to downsize? We need to upsize. Anyway... .)

One thing we would need to do, with only one desk instead of two, would be to share a desktop computer, and since Mr L's is newer and faster, this would be his. BUT I like to use Picasa for my photos and this is apparently ancient technology, which wouldn't work on his computer. So SIL 1 and Mr L have been trying to teach me Google photos and show me how to use these on my blog. Which seemed to work, but when I did it, the photos appeared on my computer screen in my blog, but nowhere else. Mr L then worked out that it was because I hadn't saved them on my computer, but only in the cloud or something, in which only I had access to my photos. So Mr L then saved them to my computer, put them in my blog post - and they were all in reverse order. 

After much experimenting, he managed to work out how to get them in the right order but - really! 

I feel there should be a special circle in hell devoted to young men (or indeed women) in California who muck up systems which work perfectly well for elderly ladies because they need to justify their enormous salaries. I also feel this about complicated cars. We have cars. They work. Why mess with them, apart from making them less polluting (which I'm fine with)?

The chaps also kindly swapped me to New Blogger (again, what was wrong with the old one? - but it seemed inevitable) so there's another possible way for me to get things wrong. We'll see. 

Anyway, yesterday we drove down to Peebles, 45 minutes away, to get a change of scene. It's a pretty little town but we didn't go into it, except to park. Instead we went for a 5-mile-ish walk up the River Tweed, across it and back down the other side. 

We passed Neidpath Castle, built in the 1260s. It's owned now by the Earl of Wemyss (pronounced Weems) and March. You can hire it for your film or wedding, should you wish to pay for the privilege. As you can see above, it's built at the top of a steep slope down to the river, and I wouldn't have liked to be the 13th century builders who balanced on (I assume) wooden scaffolding held together with ropes while constructing it. But it still seems to be standing. 

So we wandered happily along the river, and eventually...

crossed the Old Manor Brig (bridge) built in a relatively recent 1702. It's quite high above the river and again, I wouldn't have volunteered to be among the building party, especially as the roadway slopes quite steeply up from one side to the other. However, it still feels very solid, which it wouldn't if I'd built it. 

Then we climbed up steeply. I don't know why this photo is so blurry, since it wasn't originally (sigh, grinding of teeth) but anyway, this is where we had our lunch. The view was lovely but there was quite a chilly wind, up this high. 

The countryside was quite autumnal, with (I think) knapweed, 

haws on the hawthorn, 

and hips on the rose bushes. 

I recently noticed a comment from Doll in India, who says she's been reading this blog since about 2007! This is very astonishing. A long-service medal is winging your way, Doll. 

So... this post has taken my two assistants and me a total of about five hours to do - never was so much effort expended by so many people for so little point - but anyway, here it is. Thank you for reading this far. Now I'm off to have a coffee. 

 

Venturing out - week 24

And so life trickles on. We had a walk to Saughton Park yesterday. There's still plenty of colour, but things are beginning to go over.

Lots of oranges and purples lend an autumnal feeling to the park.

This is a beautiful hydrangea, though.

And this lovely thing - I can't think what it is. The pink is actually the seed heads. It looked like -

this when it was in flower. Not an astilbe - wrong leaves. Must ask our gardening expert friend. [Edited to add - he says it's persicaria polymorpha. And it is.]

Today we went to a garden centre, which felt daring. Everyone wore masks and kept distant from one another. I wanted to buy a verbena, which is still flowering at this time of year in other people's gardens, but there were none for sale. We could have bought a fake Christmas tree, though. (No!)

I did buy some bulbs to go in front of the fence we haven't got yet, but which in my mind will be behind the new turfed area that we haven't got yet either, which will go where the hedge was, that we got cut down. Planning ahead, that's the thing.

I've finished my African fabrics quilt top and it's VERY BRIGHT. (And needs an iron.) I would never have chosen any of those patterns, and certainly not together, but in a strange way I'm getting used to it. My half-Zambian friend wanted me to use the fabrics, though, so I had to get on with it. It's probably good for me, a wishy-washy pastelly person, to be forced out of my comfort zone. (Way out.) I hope my friend likes it. It'll take me a while to quilt, and then I've got two cot quilts to make: one for Daughter 2's friend and one for my best schoolfriend's grandchild. He/she is a fourth baby, so it seems a bit late to me, but my friend asked me to do it so I will. But not next: the other baby is due first.

A friend's grandchildren have been tested for Covid-19, having developed a fever - so they're isolating and the friend can't come for coffee in the garden as arranged. The coffee date is a minor thing but I can see this happening all winter and beyond - why would children not get infections at school and, till given the all-clear, have to quarantine? We're not nearly out of this wood yet.