Change and perhaps a bit of decay

Blogging used to be such a community - it felt like a conversation. In fact, it was. But - as I've said before - so many of my bloggy friends have dropped away - though some are now Facebook friends - that it feels a bit daft to keep putting out into the ether pictures of mundane old-lady activities. People are reading (according to the stats, which I occasionally look at) but on the whole I don't know who they are. So I think I'm inclined to stop. I started in 2006 and things change. 

However, I'll record yesterday, when I saw a consultant about my arthritic hip - he was very nice, if disconcertingly young. I'm now on a long, long list to get a replacement hip. It's not that bad, though, and after seeing him, we went on a 7.72 mile walk (according to Mr L's device) to do a recce for the walk we're leading in a few weeks. It was, frankly, something of a struggle towards the end! It wasn't easy walking because it started along a beach, which was at first sandy (not easy to walk fast on) and then stony. I really love the wonderful variety of colours of stones - but they make for uncomfortable walking. Is it just Scotland that has such a colourful selection of stones on beaches and riversides? I don't know - probably not.  

Then the route led along the cliff top. The flowers, particularly the campion, were beautiful but the path was somewhat imaginary - consisting mainly of slightly squashed long, wet grass - again, a bit of a struggle to wade through. 

One didn't want to fall off the cliff. 

After a few miles the area became wooded but was still slightly precipitous, as evidenced by this somewhat discouraging sign. 

It was still pretty, though. 

Then there was open country, with lupins growing wild. Considering how I have to nurture lupins in my garden, defending them valiantly from slugs, snails and aphids, I'm always amazed at how they seed themselves in rough grass in the countryside. 

We passed a field which from a distance I thought was planted with tulips, but as we got nearer I realised that it was red clover - grown, I assume, for green manure. Isn't it beautiful? 

And there were one or two tiny villages. 

And then we looped back along the cliff "path" and beach for the final three miles or so - which seemed quite long. 

We were pretty tired. We might be getting old. And then we have to do it again in a couple of weeks! 

 

Then and now

You'd think retirement would hold lots of quiet, uneventful days, wouldn't you? And yet it's packed with activity - for which I'm on the whole very grateful. Lots of gardening, family things, coffees and lunches with friends, emails to write. Not to say books to read and quilts to make. But I'm not getting on with the archiving/decluttering.... We went up on Tuesday to visit Son, meeting him and Little Grandson in the Dundee Botanic Gardens, which are very pleasant, though not as extensive as Edinburgh's. 

In the afternoon, Son cut his grass. You can't see, but Little Grandson is riding the mower in front of him, complete with little ear defenders. 

Down south, Daughter 2 was spelling out words in the bath for Littlest Granddaughter (at the little one's request), with foam letters - bus, cat and so on. This was a surprising one, though. 

Today we went with our walking group in the East Lothian countryside, based round various places where the 1745 Battle of Prestonpans happened (Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that). We gazed at fields green with growing crops and imagined shouts and yells and chaps with tartan plaids and dirks and claymores. Poor things, how horrible for them. 

The hawthorn is beautiful at the moment. 

As are the campion and cow parsley.

You would never know that men had fought and died in these lanes and fields. Peace - so much better. 

 

New

We're back from a few days down south, visiting Daughter 2 and family in their new house (6 days after they moved in. They were impressively organised). It had been empty for nearly a year and the grass at the back was extremely long! The house was worth all the wait and stress, though - it's very nice and very suitable for their needs. 

There was the odd snag - Mr L is a tall chap, but not that tall. They're going to change the light fittings anyway. 

They got a gardener to come and cut the grass - it took him nearly three hours and generated a lot of clippings, which he took away. The garden is not fancy at the moment but has great potential. 

We went to a park which had a railway. This was very popular, especially with the oldest and youngest of the party. 

It's a beautiful park - up quite a big hill, but not really far from the new house. 

There's another playpark, just round the corner from the house, which I imagine they'll visit a lot. 

This is the view from their top windows. 

And then we came home again and as usual, having been with them, I miss them even more than when I haven't seen them. However, I'm happy to have seen them settled in the house. Their previous home, a flat, was nice but small - this has so much more space. We met various of their neighbours and they all seem very pleasant too, which was a great comfort. 

My dear bloggy friend, Thimbleanna, was to have come to Edinburgh for a flying visit with her cousin yesterday on the way to the west of Scotland to walk the West Highland Way - quite an energetic enterprise. However, because of plane delays, they had to go straight to Glasgow instead. Alas. So we went to the Botanics to cheer ourselves up and found that 1000 tulip bulbs had been planted in the beds where there are usually annuals. 

They were beautiful - food for the eyes and the soul. 

 

Blue

Littlest Granddaughter has settled happily into her new room in her new house. 

Here she is, having a slight picnic in the garden. That grass is going to be cut soon!

And she's now a commuter, back to pre-school every day where she used to live. 

Meanwhile, my mecanopsis is flowering. I have three plants and so far one bloom, so it's a case of "try harder" at the moment. But this one is pretty. 

I took Big Granddaughter to bounce; her brother wasn't well, poor chap. 

 She borrowed my phone. I do not have pink hair - among other things. 

A number of things

We went up on Tuesday to visit Son and Little Grandson - DIL was at work and Medium Granddaughter was at school for much of the time, which was the snag. But we had a lovely time. Mr L pushed the little chap on his swing in their garden and we went for a walk. My boys! 

Little Grandson didn't fall into the burn, though I thought he might. 

We collected Medium Granddaughter from school and she had a play in the playpark. So that was all nice, or as nice as distance allows. 

Mr L and I visited the Audubon exhibition at the museum. I didn't know much about him except that he'd painted the birds of America and that his work is now extremely valuable, but it was very interesting. It turns out that he didn't get enough recognition in America and then came to Britain for a while, including Edinburgh (good choice) and we all thought he was great. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (as was my father, for different reasons) and generally did very well. 

I was somewhat disconcerted to find that he painted the birds by first studying them in the wild and then shooting one and wiring it into position. However, different times, I suppose. 

Also some of his "new species" - though by no means all - turned out to be the female or juvenile version of species already known. And then there's this one, the Bird of Washington - which has never been seen by anyone else. Did he make it up? Or was he just mistaken? 

We then walked down to Princes Street, admiring the city in the sunshine. 

In Princes Street Gardens, it turns out that Edinburgh Parks and Gardens don't share my view of orange flowers. 

Meanwhile in London, Daughter 2 and her husband packed up all their stuff...

and moved to their new house- yesterday.

It's not quite organised yet but they like it very much (thank goodness). 

The buying process has been so long that the grass needs a serious cut. But the garden has definite potential. It's much bigger than it looks here, somehow - the shed down at the bottom is quite large, though looks small. 

And in our garden, Mr L has kindly put up some trellises so that I can grow everlasting sweet peas up them. This involved drilling into a stone wall and lots of kneeling on the ground. He's now having a rest. Poor chap. How he loves my ideas... .

 

Flowers. And music.

It's been an uneventful week, partly because I've spent a long time on the computer trying to find a suitable holiday house for all the family to go during one specific week in August. The main problem is that I didn't start nearly early enough to find one house that will house 12 people, somewhere that we want to go and that's fairly accessible from various places; but a further problem is that the Edinburgh family are very allergic to dogs - even if the dogs aren't actually in the house, but had been present fairly recently. Reasonably enough, people with dogs like to rent holiday accommodation and, sadly (for us) most holiday houses allow them to do so. So this cuts out a good nine-tenths of the possibilities. 

Eventually we managed to find two cottages in Northumberland. They're not next to one another but they're not far apart, so we settled for them. One of them is a no-pet house, though the other isn't. It's the best we could do and I hope it'll be fine. 

On Friday, however, we decided to award ourselves a day off and went down to the Border country to visit Dawyck Botanic Gardens. We were there in the autumn, for the wonderful colours, and I thought this would be the time of year to see the rhododendrons and azaleas in flower. On the way down we became caught in a sheep jam, which was quite entertaining. 

Interestingly, we'd got it wrong, since most of the rhododendrons and azaleas weren't out yet - though a few were. Since Dawyck is south of here, we assumed that the season would be more advanced, but maybe because it's on higher ground (850 feet above sea level as against Edinburgh's coastal position), it seemed to be less so. 

I

Still, those that were flowering were very pretty. 

We also reacquainted ourselves with the wonderful lichen that drapes itself over the trees in the clear upland air. 

There are some wonderfully enormous trees. Can you spot Mr L standing at the foot of this one? He's wearing navy for camouflage but you may see his white hair and beard. 

Today we went to Edinburgh's Botanics, where there were lots of blooms. 

There's a moral there somewhere...

Yesterday was the concert of one of my choirs, so I spent some time going over the music to make sure I was confident with the tricky bits. We sang Rheinberger's Ave Regina and Stabat Mater and Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs, which are set to George Herbert's wonderful poems. I didn't know any of this music before - indeed I'd never heard of Rheinberger, and he's fantastic. We also sang the Verdi Requiem - much better known but also splendid. 

In another couple of weeks it's my other choir's concert - the Mozart Requiem - lovely again - and Mendelssohn's Psalm 42. I'm sitting here listening to the seventh movement of the latter, which I felt I didn't know well enough. Letting it filter into the brain while doing something else works to some extent, but doesn't help with fitting the German words into the notes, so I shall go and do that now.