Lockdown (ish) week 16 - engineering

Yesterday - because we now don't have to socially distance from children - I took the Edinburgh Two to a local playpark. Here is Big Grandson excavating.

And here is Biggest Granddaughter swinging.

Then we went to a nearby beach. It's a bit stony and shell-covered, but they had fun.

Grandson excavated. He was building a car park.

Granddaughter built a forest from driftwood.

Grandson pretended that his spade was a drill, and screwed it into the sand.

Then we came to our house to play and for tea - we're still only allowed to be in the garden. But from tomorrow, they're allowed to come into the house. Which will make things so much easier. How we all long to get back to normal. There's hardly any Covid-19 in Scotland any more, though it's more prevalent in England. I wish we could see Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter!

Today we went to Ikea to buy a mirror for the bathroom of Daughter 2's Edinburgh flat. We thought we'd go when it opened, to avoid the crowds. So did everyone else.

They didn't have the mirror she'd chosen, so there was some messaging to and from before she decided on this one.

Ikea has a nice view of the Pentland Hills.

Then we came home and I started playing about with the African fabrics. After a bit, I started to feel sick and a bit dizzy. It was like car-sickness, which I do suffer from. I thought at first it was an overload of clashing colours (these fabrics are really not to my taste, though I do like the pots) but I think it was actually the fabric on the right, with those wheel shapes, that did it. They have a slightly strobing effect on my eyes. I had to go outside and walk about a bit to lessen the nausea. I'll have to just not look at that pattern.

Someone posted this yesterday on a Facebook group. It's from a newspaper from September 9, 1933. This is the house that my grandparents bought - in 1933! £850 was quite a lot of money then. My grandfather was originally a tinsmith, but then became an engineer and worked for a bus company - mending buses. I'm surprised that he could afford this house, especially since I know from my aunt that when she won a scholarship to a senior school - this would have been in about 1937 - she wasn't allowed to take it up because her father owned his house outright and so had too much disposable income. As Daughter 2 has just reminded me, Auntie told us that Grandpa didn't approve of debt so wouldn't have a mortgage.

I don't think he can have inherited money. His father was a house painter who died at 40, leaving five children.

It's very mysterious. And now there's no one to ask.

I never knew this grandfather, who died five months before I was born. I did know the other one, who was also very strong-minded, with definite ideas. Why on earth am I such a wimp? Where did those strong-minded genes go?