Miss M

For us, as for most others, life is very eventless at the moment, but we usually go for a walk with Daughter 2 and her family at the weekend, which is our only opportunity to see her at any length. On Sunday we walked along the river to Stockbridge. The children had a happy time playing, whenever we stopped, as children always do. 

It was quite busy with others finding limited opportunities for recreation, but it's always pleasant down there.

You often see tourists here in normal times - there are clearly books on Edinburgh featuring this as a place to walk - and even on Sunday there were a few foreigners among the locals. 

So it was a nice afternoon. Then I gardened much of yesterday, when the weather was beautiful. There's quite a bit of spring tidying-up still to do. Spring and autumn are busy times for the gardener, or at least it is if you have our sort of garden, with lots of herbaceous perennials. Our new grass (where we got the hedge removed in the autumn) was looking great till the snow, which squashed it down and seems to have killed bits of it. But I expect it'll recover.

And then home-schooling started again for me yesterday afternoon. Big Granddaughter's been back at school for a week and a bit now, and seems happy. Big Grandson is due to go back on the 15th, so I'll have a bit more time to do other stuff after that (till the Easter holidays begin). 

The other day, I came across in a drawer the death announcement (from 2000) of my maths teacher. She was an absolutely horrible person - tyrannical and bullying and sarcastic. She was 85 when she died, and the announcement said she was the beloved aunt of some people (she was unmarried) and the beloved adopted "aunt" of another family. It seems really hard to believe that her family - and even some non-family - loved her! I just can't imagine her being anything but nasty. But presumably she was. I wonder what made her that way to us. Our class, anyway, was quite academic and very well-behaved - indeed, too terrified of her to be anything else. Aren't human beings strange? I wonder if she'd missed her chance at marriage because of the war - quite likely (she'd be 24 in 1939) - and was embittered because of this and thus jealous of us girls, with our lives before us. But then - she must have been nice at home: no one needs to use "beloved" twice in a death notice. It's a mystery... .

It's not really that I still bear a grudge, but I'm quite pleased to be alive in a world that doesn't contain her.