Bup my buppoo

Grandson and I went to Saughton Park today. It was damp but not raining. He dressed for the weather. "Boots," he said appreciatively.

We admired the crocuses. Well, I did.

He admired this lawnmower. "Wheels," he said. Then it began to rain very slightly so we put up our hoods.

After a while, we went into the greenhouse and walked round admiring the plants. "Flowers," he said.

Then we went home and he played with his toys. This is his Thomas. It speaks when you press its funnel. It says, "My name's Thomas. I'm a really useful engine. Bust my buffers."

Grandson has lots of words and joins them together to some extent - for example, "Hello Gaga", "Go lights". But his only actual sentence, it occurs to me, is "Bust my buffers", or as he puts it "Bup my buppoo" (giggle giggle). I've no idea what he thinks it means; in fact I don't really know what I think it means.

There's an educational lesson there for teachers if I could only think what it is: concentrate on your pupils' interests? Or possibly: rote learning is useful but only if the pupil has the remotest idea what they're learning.

(PS I think some modern architecture is lovely. As Daughter 2 points out, architects often can't design what they want to because of various constraints: the site, regulations, money - it's often money (old buildings were built by exploited and underpaid labourers with materials from countries we had conquered), the client's wishes. I don't myself think that this excuses the orange panels but hey, some people like orange.)

Architecture

Today Mr Life met me after piano and we wandered home by a circuitous route along the canal. This architecture, we observed, is very unEdinburgh: mainly modern flats.

It's probably very pleasant, however, to look out on the water from your living room.

We admired the half-barriers they've put there, presumably to discourage cyclists from whizzing too fast and ending up in the canal.

It looks almost rural at this bit. Actually it's not very far from the centre of town.

Crocuses opened their petals to the sun, though it was still rather chilly.

After leaving the canal we came upon these very new flats, which we'd only seen in the distance before today. We thought they were horrible.

To the right of this picture is Mr Life, reading a plaque on the wall which says that the buildings have won a Saltire Society award for architecture.

There's no accounting for taste. I really don't like orange, which doubtless prejudices me against them, and I'm not very keen on purple, the colour of the other panels - well, violet, though they look grey in the photos.

Maybe they're very nice inside. I sincerely hope so.

Can't help adding these photos for Nanny in Worcester. Granddaughter looks as if she's having lovely dream.

"Smile for Granny!" I said. So he did.

Noise and nonsense

We had a rather child-centred day. Son and Daughter-in-Law were here for the weekend and met up with Granddaughter again.

Daughter 1 and Son-in-Law 1 looked at thirty-plus-year-old books with Grandson.

"Aw," I said. "She's gazing into your eyes."

"No, actually," said Son, "she's looking at my hairy chest and saying What is that?"

Grandson demonstrated that he likes sitting on Granny's benches as well as those in the Botanics.

A certain amount of what my father would have called "noise and nonsense" then took place.

This is what GPs get up to at weekends.

Grandson decided to remove, one by one, the stones in my little pebble fountain. I'm not sure that his uncle and aunt were really discouraging him. "Will I switch on the water?" asked Mr Life. No.

We missed Daughter 2.

We've tidied up now.

Tac-tahs on big screens and small

This is, as you will readily recognise, a tac-tah. Daughter 2 drew it the other week and sent it to my mobile phone for Grandson, who is one of the world's greater fans of tac-tahs. The result is that every time I take out my phone to take a picture of him (which is, I must confess, quite often) he requests politely to see the picture of the tac-tah on my small unsmart phone screen.

This week it's my turn to arrange the flowers in church so we went down there this morning, taking Grandson with us. Mr Life came too because he wanted to have a go of the church's new whizzy audio-visual system. He's in charge of working it tomorrow and wanted to make sure that he knew how it worked. He took with him a compilation DVD of YouTube films of tac-tahs that Son-in-Law 1 has made for Grandson. As I busied myself with flowers, Grandson sat happily in the front of the church gazing at the two enormous and two very big screens, all of them showing the same film of tac-tahs. He didn't seem to think it at all odd. I suppose everything is somewhat odd when you're nearly 20 months so you just accept it all.

I fear tomorrow's church service may be a bit of a disappointment to him.

So much better than working

Daughter 1 and I took the children to the Botanics again yesterday. Granddaughter slumbered, wrapped up in two Dianne-knitted afghans and wearing a hat knitted by her mum.

Grandson decided that he would sit for three seconds on each of the very many benches in the gardens. He can't climb up by himself so this was a full-time job for his doting granny. My back is now killing me... .

Ducks, he observed. Wack wack.

At this point, Granddaughter awoke and suggested that it might be lunch time, so Daughter 1 returned to the car with her to provide this. Grandson and I admired the rockery. Water, he said. True.

After a while, I realised that my parking ticket was nearly up so we left the rockery. Or, we almost did so. He had other ideas. It's amazing how fast small people can move if they want to. Grannies, however, can also put on a turn of speed, provided the distance is fairly short.

Parking ticket? We laugh at parking tickets. Or as my mum might have said, san fairy Anne. Or that's what I used to think she said. Later I realised that it was "Ca ne fait rien" (imagine the cedilla, please) - but it was mispronounced deliberately to suggest something slightly different: that someone was blithely uncaring: "She just went ahead, san fairy Anne." Was that just an our-family thing or is this familiar to anyone else?

We made it, though, with three minutes to spare.

Oh, isn't life fun when you're one?

Sitting in my baffies

Here's another picture of the woobie, a word which has now entered my vocabulary along with "go dights" for green traffic lights.

The other day we were having a family blog-related discussion about language, sparked off by our son's using the word "outwith". I don't think that's a word that's survived in Standard English but it's quite common here. It means "outside" though is often used in a non-physical sense, eg "If you have a medical emergency outwith the normal consulting hours...." or "It's not outwith the bounds of possibility that... " I remember being at a Book Festival event featuring Garrison Keillor and he mentioned his surprise at seeing this word on a notice: something like "Please do not stand outwith the area marked for queueing".

"Queue", there's another word - fine in Standard English but not, I think, in American English. When my friend and I went to America in 1970, we had to go to a Social Security office to get a Social Security number and asked a group of people, "Are you in the queue?" Incomprehension on all sides. Mind you, our accents probably didn't help.

It's funny that even in Scotland we don't use "inwith", but instead "within". And yet we no longer use "without" to mean "outside" except in the hymn "There is a green hill far away / Without a city wall", which was always confusing when I was a small girl.

"Bauchles" is a Scottish word. It refers to baggy but comfortable old shoes. I'm fond of wearing bauchles myself. And Mr Life says "baffies" for slippers, though he's from a different part of Scotland - a whole - oohh - fifty miles away. It's not a word that my family would have used before meeting Mr Life, but my baffies are on my feet as I type.

Finally today, let's consider the word "daidlie", which means napkin. I had no idea how to spell it so I've just looked it up. I was offered: daidle, daddle, dedle, daidlie, daidle and dedley. It may come from dialect English dwile, dwoile, dowly, meaning a washing rag, and Middle Dutch dwele, a towel.

So now we know.

It was a lovely day today - sunny (though not actually warm) - and I got the garden tidied up and the grass cut. It made me feel fair joco; or as you might say, really quite jolly.

Doting [Gr]Anny

Now this, bloggy friends, is Granddaughter sleeping peacefully under the afghan and woobie so very kindly made for her by Dianne of "A Month of Sundays". Sorry that Granddaughter doesn't look particularly grateful at that moment, but I'm sure she will be once she takes more interest in the world, and we certainly are. Thank you so much, Dianne! And now everyone knows what a woobie is: a security blanket, I suppose we'd call it. It has lots of interesting ribbons round it. The afghan we'd call a shawl, or at least I would. (Like some commenters, I think of an afghan as a sheepskin coat, apparently not long separated from the sheep and not greatly altered from its original state, as worn by hippy types in my youth.)

Today I took Grandson to the Botanic Gardens. He's been there often but mainly, in the past, he's been in the pushchair. He had a lovely time rambling around, as did I. It's so wonderful being a retired granny. When I was a young mum I always had an eye on the clock and needed to rush off to collect someone from school, take someone to a ballet or piano lesson or just go home to clean the house or make a meal. Now, I devote myself to him. He enjoyed walking on the chipped bark...

 ... but then discovered a pile of dead leaves, which provided a lot of fun. I don't suppose he'd ever kicked his way through dead leaves before, because last autumn he wasn't really walking. It's such pure joy to watch him discovering the world and such a luxury to have the time to allow him to do so.

It was chilly, though, as you can see from the jacket, hat and little pink nose.

Then we went home. His speech is coming on fast. He likes to narrate a car journey ("Bus! Car!"), his latest topic being traffic lights, which combine his favourite  interests - vehicles and lights (or dights). We approach a red light and he remarks, "[S]top!" It changes to green: "Go dight!"

And at last - AT LAST!!! - he has given me a name. Mr Life has been Gaga for months. The other granny, Nanny, has been Nan for months also. Daughter 2, whom he sees once a month, he calls by a name which resembles her own. Son, whom he sees even less, gets the first syllable of his name. Goodness me, he even called Niece by her name last weekend and he hadn't seen her since Christmas. But me? - just that anonymous old lady who turns up at his house a lot.

As from today, however, let me present myself: 'Anny. [Bows]

Seasonal

Spring has come very late in Britain (if you can call it spring - it's the coldest one for 65 years, according to the paper, so therefore even for someone as ancient as I, it's unprecedented). I've just been gardening and my fingers are frozen. The air temperature isn't too bad but the soil is very cold. Above, the garden today...

... and this was 25 March last year.

I can see why American ladies have sewing rooms.  I had a further fiddle with my Anna patches last night and Cassie was very keen to help. The table isn't big enough, anyway.

I think I've decided that I don't really like red and green together in large quantities (yes, I do realise that this is supposed to be a Christmas quilt and that red and green are kind of traditional) so I've separated the very red ones out with the thought of making a separate quilt. (Pause for laughter. Yes, it's taken me since August to think about making this quilt.) I like the quieter effect better, though it's not supposed to be quite as quiet as it looks here - some of these white pieces of paper have things like "green spots" written on them to remind me that I'm going to cut the larger pieces into squares and place them in the pattern. Or, I might.

Of course, removing the red squares means that I don't have enough material so I went up town today with the thought of acquiring some more. They don't make it easy for a person, do they? There were no packs nicely cut into squares in the shop that I decided to patronise, which was a pity as I had carefully calculated how many little squares I needed. There were, however, oblong bits of one size and long bits of a completely different size, and one could also buy cloth in multiples of 10 centimetres. It's all in centimetres in Britain and I'm really an inch person. I had to go and have a cup of coffee and do sums on my napkin and I've yet to find out if my arithmetic was right.

Do you all prewash your material, o quilty gurus? Having looked at various patchworky/quilty videos on the internet (so much easier than actually doing anything myself) I decided that I should, so I washed all the ones you see above. But I suppose I'd better do the new stuff too. Not that it's a problem. I'm good at washing things.

Yes, I definitely prefer the mainly green (and, separately, the mainly red - though don't hold your breath for that one) to the exceedingly-festive mixture. It may be, though, that I don't feel very Christmassy at the moment.

Quite Eastery, though. Happy Easter!

What a difference a day makes...

Twenty-four little hours... .

Oh ye of little faith!

(Did I mention it to them? Well, yes, I fear I did. I popped my head round the door and said - "Your sign - has anyone mentioned the spelling mistake?" and three voices chorused "Yes!"

Our area is quite heavily populated by retired people with nothing much to do.)

Unmoving paper goods

This sign went up yesterday. I wonder how long it'll stay like that?

The idle life

Today we went to the Botanics with Daughter 1, Son-in-Law 1, his mum, our visiting niece and the grandchildren. Granddaughter's first visit there - but not her last, I'm sure.

In the afternoon Mr Life and I went to Falkland Palace with our niece. It's rather impressive but not exactly cosy and it has lots of lovely carved wood that I'm happy I don't have to dust. Bits of the Palace date from the 1300s though it's been much added to over the years. Various kings and queens of Scotland have stayed there from time to time.

We had a little wander round Falkland village afterwards.

There's not a lot to it but it's quite sweet. I imagine it's busier during the tourist season.

It's been such a cold spring in Britain. The flowers are hardly out and most of the trees are still bare.

This house had a date of 17-something over the door.

Someone has a sense of humour.

Mr Life showed niece the hill that he might have climbed on a school outing in the early 1960s, but it was cancelled. We decided not to try doing it today either.

Then we went to have dinner with Son and Daughter-in-Law at the Glover Arms (very nice).

Niece ordered a big pie.

And ate it. We were impressed.

Later, Son chose a pudding. We lead such an exciting life.

And now we're home again.