Aaah

A very self-indulgent post (mind you, what other kinds are there?) - I took Grandson the other day to buy a white shirt because he was to be page boy at a wedding (at which Granddaughter was to be flower girl). He was intrigued by the different views of himself in the mirrors.

Then he looked at his feet and enquired, "Why are my feet in the reflection when the mirror doesn't go down to the ground?" Granny was unable to think of a succinct answer... ok, an answer. But we found a suitable shirt.

Before the bride's arrival, Granddaughter was clutching her fluffy blanket, which wasn't part of the outfit.

A certain amount of finger-sucking took place but they behaved impeccably.

Can you tell the difference between Grandson and Uncle Son? There were lots of men in kilts, Thimbleanna!

Daughter 2 and her niece enjoy a cuddle.

They pose with their dad, Son-in-Law 1.

In a quiet moment, Granddaughter admires her bouquet,

and Grandson stands on a plinth. It was a lovely day.

New dress

Granddaughter is going to be a flower girl at a wedding soon, and the other granny and I took her to try on her dress. Granddaughter was intrigued. The other granny and I went "Ohhhh" in unison. Granddaughter will be more elegantly tressed and shod on the big day.

It's spring. Hurray.

The Botanic gardens are bursting into bloom.

Daughter 1 and her husband decluttered their old house last spring for selling it by bringing a lot of non-essential possessions round to us and storing them in a spare bedroom. These included quite a lot of toys. Today, Daughter 1 packed a lot of them neatly into baskets and put them in our hall to take back to their new house. They didn't stay packed for very long... .

Next stop, the Golden?

Thank you very much, kind commenters, for your anniversary wishes. We are fortunate to have found each other and to enjoy each other's company still. Considering that I was only 16 when I first thought seriously about Mr L, I'm glad that I had such good taste... or maybe it was just luck. It's now just over 46 years since our first date. (Amazing, since we're only about 30 now - aren't we???). There was a pretty cake.

There were beautiful flowers - red roses as in my wedding bouquet.

And relevant confetti on the tables.

And a lovely room with a view over the city. And, more importantly, our extremely nice extended family, some of whom got there by trying journeys in much delayed trains, or a car battling through driving rain. Thank you all so much for laying it on and then coming!

And it don't seem a day too much...

Well, that was a quick forty years, I must say.

My Granny's wedding ring, with added ruby. Thanks, Mr L! (He got a watch. Not so interesting, in my view, but he likes it.)

John Anderson*, my jo, John,

When we were first acquent;
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonny brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld**, John,
Your locks are like the snaw***;

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a cantie day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot****,
John Anderson, my jo.

Robert Burns

*This is not actually his name

** Only a bit

*** Not completely. Mine are also a touch snawy

**** Not yet, however, I hope. 

Love you, old chap! And here's to a few more cantie days before we're finished.

And happy anniversary also to Thimbleanna and her chap!

Also - good luck to our various family members attempting to get to Edinburgh this afternoon for our celebration dinner tonight - by train and car, through flood, wind, fallen trees, downed power lines... . Hope to see you all soonish!

Saggy pants

TATTOOS??? SAGGY PANTS??? HAT ON BACKWARDS??? (actually, that doesn't sound so bad).

Oh, my commenters, no no no. Grandson actually looks very like Son as a baby, so I'm assuming that he's going to grow up something like the above. (Though Grandson's dad is a handsome chap so looking like him would be fine too.)

On reflection, the photo above does actually feature saggy pants-with-the-British-meaning, doesn't it...? (see post for July 22).

The flowers came out quite well. Daughter 2 and I have developed into a wedding flower team: she does the bouquets and the small table arrangements and I do the bigger ones.

I think that's us finished now. Three weddings. That seems enough.

Man in kilt

This is Son and DIL leading off the dancing at the start of the wedding ceilidh. Now, of recent years there has been a silly "tradition" - not traditional at all - that Scottish men don't wear anything under their kilts. I haven't conducted any research on this, you'll understand, but I seriously doubt that anyone sensible would fail to wear pants (or underpants, as I believe Americans would call them) in a kilt-wearing situation. Apart from anything else, men aren't so good at sitting with their knees together as ladies are; and also, this is Scotland and it can be chilly.

So you'll be relieved to know that Son was wearing his Wedding Pants.

These are boxer shorts that his big sister (Daughter 2) gave him before Daughter 1's wedding in 2006. I now can't remember exactly why, except that clearly everyone needs Wedding Pants. (They're green with red and yellow cars on them.) After the wedding, they entered his pants drawer and were rotated with his others. In due course they were retired - to be brought briefly out of retirement for Daughter 2's wedding last year.

When he inspected them before his own wedding, he found that the elastic had perished somewhat. However, you can't get married without your Wedding Pants, obviously, so he put them on and used a safety pin for - well, safety. And they didn't fall down.

They weren't on display so I didn't know that he was wearing them till later.

I think they might have served their purpose now.

PS: Having written this, I was struck briefly with doubts as to whether Son would like his underwear described to the world of Blog. So I texted him: Can I blog about your wedding pants?  He replied: Of course!  So I will.

Ah!

It seems like only yesterday that my baby boy was born and now he's all grown up.

(And, for Anna, a picture of swinging kilts at the ceilidh in the evening.)

Change...

Yesterday we went up north to visit Son's future in-laws and discuss the wedding. He is is the third and last of our children to get married.

We drove over the Forth Road Bridge. It makes a nasty clunking noise as you pass over the joins. It looks a long way down.

We passed the Lomond hills.

.

The in-laws are very nice but discussing one's children's wedding isn't the most relaxing thing to do. We were all trying to be very "Oh, whatever you think" about it.

.

Then we collected my brother at the airport on the way back.

.

Today the house agent phoned to say that my mum's flat sale has gone through and is now final. Hurray!

.

We have till May 4th to dispose of... quite a lot of things.

Here we go again

Still don't have the official pictures while the bride and groom are honeymooning. This picture is from my brother.

Yes, I'm the dumpy person in blue looking as if she doesn't like having her picture taken. Or wearing high heels.

Moving on...

Two exchanges from yesterday:

1. I was at the mini-supermarket, standing still in the middle of the aisle, when a severe lady looked at me as if wondering what I was doing.

Me: I'm just trying to think what I came in for.

Severe lady [severely]: You should have a list.

Me [humbly]: "Yes, you're right."

Severe lady: "I don't have a list either."

Later

2. I'd just come back from the dry cleaners with Daughter 2's wedding dress and was still weak at the knees at what it had cost to clean. (I did remember that Daughter 1's dress was expensive, but not that expensive.) I climbed out of the car and said hello to my neighbour, whose daughter has just got engaged.

Neighbour [over hedge, seeing me carrying dress]: You still doing wedding things?
Me: Do you know how much it costs to get a wedding dress cleaned? £75!!!!!!
Neighour [blenching - it's not often that you get the chance to type that word]: I was thinking we might buy a dress for about that much.
Me: [laughs uproariously but with a touch of pity].
Neighbour: So that's just the small change, is it?

Kind of. Still, she did look lovely.

Our church is very green...

Some of the reasons why our recent family wedding was a bit complicated.

1. The bride lives in London while the wedding is in Edinburgh. The bridesmaids live in 1) London 2) Cambridge 3) Edinburgh.

2. The bride didn’t like any dress available in Edinburgh or London so one was made by a dressmaker in Edinburgh. (Let me remind you that the bride lives in London.) It’s not that she’s difficult, but she wanted a non-strapless, non-plunging dress, which doesn’t seem to exist in shops.

3. One of the bridesmaids, Daughter 1, was pregnant for most of the lead-up to the wedding so her dress had to be made, shortly before the wedding, in material to match, as far as possible, the other bridesmaids’ dresses.

4. The groom, an actor, was in Edinburgh for much of the previous month, busy doing improvised musicals, so therefore nowhere near the bride.

5. The bride works in a 3-person architecture practice, one of whom (the boss) is hardly ever in the office. She therefore single-handedly designed a restaurant which opened the week of the wedding and also a shoe museum. Thus she was in the office till 9 o’clock most evenings.

6. She was nonetheless a perfectionist regarding to the artistic details of the wedding stationery.

7. She therefore designed the invitations, drawing (on the computer, using a special architect’s program for drawing things) a leaf pattern to be used (with elegant variations) on every single related piece of paper: thank-you letters, place cards, menus, table plan… all of which had to be printed out. In aqua ink. On our computers. On special paper. Mainly in the day or two before the wedding. With the assistance of cats.

8. This included having badges with fun facts about everyone pinned to the back of the place cards (which each, of course, had the person’s photo on them, culled from various sources.) This, for 100+ people, requires a lot of organisation.

9. As for Daughter 1’s wedding, I arranged the flowers in the church and for the reception. This had to be done on the evening before. The church is a fourteen-mile round trip from our house. I just had to pray that they didn’t collapse overnight. (They didn’t. Above, flowers in the font. Below, flowers on a stand.)

10. As for Daughter 1’s wedding, Daughter 2 and best-friend-bridesmaid made the bouquets on the morning of the wedding. This was all quite fun but really quite messy.

11. They also decorated the cake on the morning of the wedding. I think some girls visit the beautician on such an occasion. Ours dealt with rose thorns and discussed the exact shades of ribbons for the cake.

12. There were quite a few people around the place, all needing to be fed. Which was nice. But also quite time-consuming. Which is why I couldn’t go to the church to arrange the flowers till the customers had all dispersed. Flower arranging started at 9.30 pm.

13. I’m sure I could think of some other little facts – the time that Mr Life and I spent picking some of the pink bits out of the table confetti because the proportion of pink and aqua wasn’t quite right comes to mind, for example – but I expect you’ve heard enough about the wedding for now. I’ll show more pictures once you’ve recovered from this post. If you're very lucky.


(Photos by my big brother. Thank you, bro. I didn't actually take any pictures of the flowers.)

A week after the wedding

It was only a week ago. It seems much more. They're having a lovely honeymoon. Which is good. But we do miss her. Mr Life was very reluctant to give her away. I felt the same. Still, she was happy.

Another kilt for Anna

Urgh, it's been one of those weeks. I haven't had time to visit most of my favourite blogs or even to look at Mr Life's photos of the wedding. Frustratingly, the official photos were taken by a friend of New SIL and for some unaccountable reason she probably feels that the happy couple should see them first... . The HC are on a Greek island in the sun. I'm sure it's much like autumnal Edinburgh. Or not. Anyway, here are the three bridesmaids (Daughter 1, Best Friend and my lovely niece) with the bride. And the bouquets, complete with hastily tied ribbons.

So these are my rubbish photos but look who came to his first wedding, in a special wedding outfit and a Very Silly (but cute) Hat. The hat came from friends in Spain. Maybe Spanish baby boys are more in touch with their feminine side than ours tend to be.

And here's my nephew being silly with his sister's bouquet. He's half-Scottish and half-American but he wears the kilt well, despite its being my brother's old kilt, bought when he (my brother) was 20 or something. Kilts don't date, though as Nephew complained gently, he is built on rather more hunky lines than my skinny brother.

The new Mrs P.

Daughter 2 got married yesterday. Here she is with one of her bridesmaids, decorating the cake.

Here is my niece, another bridesmaid, folding orders of service.

The wedding was lovely but complicated. The guests were mainly architects and actors so artistic considerations had to be adhered to at all times and production values had to be high. A lot was achieved by d-i-y rather than vast expense; though expense did also feature. None of this was conducive to a tidy house.

Various house guests came and went. Much tea was drunk and food consumed. Many dishes were washed. Much washing of sheets and towels has been done and much still remains to be done. Ribbon, paper, flowers and other remnants are all still in evidence.

A few tears were shed, though not by the bride or groom.

Miraculously, the sun shone.

More will follow, including possibly some pictures of men in kilts for Anna.

Now I must go and have a restorative bath.

(Two weddings down, one to go - Son gets married next July. He says that his wedding will be less exhausting.)

Another weekend older

It's been a busy weekend, though not (for me) in any productive way. Daughter 2 came home at the weekend for a wedding dress fitting and to discuss various weddingy arrangements with her husband-to-be, who's in Edinburgh appearing in the Fringe. The fitting was on Saturday morning and Daughter 1 also had the first fitting for her matron-of-honour dress - Grandson having been up till now a limiting factor in this process. Here he is, above, recovering from his exhausting life. (You can almost imagine from this photo what he'll look like when he's 80 and having a nap in his armchair with his hat at a rakish angle.) And here he is below, having a kick on his mat. Those socks didn't stay on for long.

Then she and the chap discussed cakes and hymns and ... well, I'm not quite sure but it took a long time. Then they went off to discuss photos with his friend the photographer, and then Daughter 2 came home again while he appeared in a show and then she went off again to see him in another show. Meanwhile they were going to be here for a meal, and so were Daughter 1 and Son-in-Law (who was going to come over on his bike) but then Daughter 2 and future husband didn't have time for a meal and so SIL decided not to come over and Daughter 1 thought she'd better go home...

It was that kind of weekend. Today Daughters 1 and 2 spent the afternoon with Daughter 2's Edinburgh friends in a mini-refined-hen-afternoon-with-various babies and now Daughter 2's gone back down to London exhausted, poor lamb, for another far-too-busy week at her very tiring job.

Big sigh.

Mr Life and I spent this afternoon with friends in the country, which was nice. Because Daughter 2 had our (one) car, Mr Life and I used a car belonging to the City Car Club, which we've just joined. You book a car over the internet and then go and collect it when you want it. We joined mainly because now that Grandson has joined the family, we can't transport Grandson, his parents, my mum and us, all in one car. So this seems like a useful way round the problem.

What a boring post. Sorry. Never feel full of inspiration when Daughter 2 has gone. And she'll arrive in London at midnight thirty or something. Alone. Hmm.

Festive rain

Daughter 2 is up in Edinburgh for the weekend for a wedding dress fitting but also to see her family (including her nephew) and her actor husband-to-be, who's up in Edinburgh for three weeks to perform in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (while she's down in London - yes, quite).

The morning was quite sunny but then it deteriorated. Above, you see our local hill, Arthur's Seat, swathed in mist. Very seasonal. After the fitting, she met up with her chap and they got very wet. Later we picked her up and all went to see Daughter 1 and the baby.

They bonded.

He napped in a somewhat melodramatic attitude. "Ah," said Daughter 1, "the Death of Chatterton pose."

I can see what she meant.

Daughter 2 tried on Daughter 1's veil, with a view to borrowing it. Her jeans were still somewhat damp so she had rolled them up. "My bottom's wet too," she mourned.

"You need a better fitting nappy," suggested Son-in-Law.

Then things got a bit silly.

A sonsie dish

In the midst of the weekend's trauma (is trauma too strong a word? well...) of our failing to find Daughter 2 a wedding dress, she provided us with a smile.

In her research, she came across a range of wedding dresses called "Sonsie". Now, this is probably funny only to Scots, but "sonsie" is a Scots word which means "solid" or "chubby". It's admittedly not inappropriate for this comely young lady, but it's not a word that a Scot would aspire to be called. One would really not be tempted to buy a wedding dress thus labelled.

My darling and beautiful Daughter 2 isn't sonsie at all.

You might have come across the word in Robert Burns's "To a Haggis". This poem starts:

Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the puddin' race."

In other words:

Blessings on your honest solid face,

Great leader of all the puddings.

You will probably know that a haggis is a savoury dish made of unmentionable bits of animals mixed with oatmeal and stuffed inside a sheep's stomach. Not quite the connotation I'd want for my big day...

Edited to add - many thanks to Loth, who has reminded me in her comment that the poem goes on to describe the haggis further - Your hurdies like a distant hill. Hurdies are... well, buttocks.

No - still not doing it for me.

Preparations for various vital events

Up town today with Daughters 1 and 2 (up from London for the weekend), trying to find a wedding dress for Daughter 2. Complete failure. For the second time. (The picture above is not her and neither is it her dress.) She doesn't want a strapless one (that's 98% of the available dresses ruled out) and nor does she want a plunging neckline (that's 99% of those with straps. And she doesn't like the other one).

"So," she said to her sister, changing the subject, "are you organised for the baby yet?"

Daughter 1 considered. "Mum's bought him a book and a cuddly Moomin."

"That's the essentials covered, then," said Daughter 2.

PS - Did you notice that Daughter 1 said "him"? She had her 20-week scan this week and he seems to be a boy.