Fun and games

I love how busy small children are. The offspring were all here at the weekend and when the grandchildren are busy, there's not a lot of relaxation for the rest of the family either (but who needs relaxation? Plenty of that in the grave...).

Grandson decided to write down all the numbers up to 100 in grid form. I provided the grid but he did all the rest. "That's the 1 column, that's the 2 column," (etc) he informed me.

Then he taught Daughter 2 how to draw traffic lights. She proved an apt pupil.

Granddaughter-the-Elder did her own thing...

but then added a face and stegosaurus spikes to the dinosaur that Daughter 2 drew at her request. Note the sticking-out tongue for added concentration.

We played hide-and-seek in the garden. Our garden is not large and doesn't offer many hiding places. You may be able to spot Son, hiding behind this bench.

But can you spot Granddaughter-the-Younger, who was also playing this game (with a little help)?


It was lovely to have them all. The house is now much tidier, but it takes me a while to recover from the sadness when they go away again.

Time flies like an arrow

It's been a busyish week or so, during which: the children conducted scientific experiments in the paddling pool;

we visited Granddaughter M (and again today. She's so lovely);

Daughter 2 has visited us twice (it was hardly worth her going back to London for four days);

This three-generation-in-a-heap photo was taken (how discouraging that I look about 90, but facts must be faced);

 
the garden bloomed on and on, belying the shortening days;

 
(phlox: can't you just smell it?);

Granddaughter L and I went to the museum, where she dressed up in the Explorers room;

(here she seems to be Dr Livingstone wearing a lifejacket and cosy gloves - she was rather warm, hence the rosy cheeks);

Grandson had his first full week AT SCHOOL;

some art happened in the kitchen;

Son-in-Law 1 dressed up in the crawl tunnel, while Granddaughter L wore my shirt and sun hat;

the sun continued to shine. 30 degrees in London, 21 here. I know which I prefer.

And Grandson fetched a torch to look down the hole that my washing whirly line stands in. He didn't find much down there but enjoyed looking.

So: not much spare time really; for which I'm very grateful. What joy these descendants give us.

Stone walls do not a prison make

We have a path round one side of our house and decided to put a high fence, with a gate, across it so that Grandson and (in time) Granddaughter wouldn't be able to escape from the back garden on to the street. Mr Life considered putting up this barrier himself but then we decided that what with his incipient arthritis, preference for sitting doing crosswords in chilly weather and perfectionist tendencies when it comes to doing-it-himself, it would be quicker to employ a chap.

So in due course two big strapping young chaps came along. They came, they sawed, they concreted and now we have a gate with a catch on it, nice and high up so that Grandson won't be able to reach it for fifteen years or so.

There is one snag. That's me on the other side of the gate. I can reach the catch fine as long as I'm on the same side as it but once I'm in the front garden and the gate is shut... no.

You'll be relieved to know that there's a cat-sized hole cut specially in the fence. So that's all right.

(Also, when I reread yesterday's post I saw that I'd said I wiped the remaining trace of yogurt in Sirius's nose. Ugh. That would be mean. It was a typo. I wipe it on his nose, of course, and then he licks it off.)

PS  Son and Daughter-in-Law heard last night that they'd passed their very final medical exams and are now fully-qualified GPs (or will be when they've finished their current work placement in August). Woo hoo! Well done, Dr P and Dr A!

Sorting out

Today has been rather tedious and tiring but I suppose we've achieved a bit. We tackled some of my mother's things and took another load to charity shops, which was horrible but feels a bit better now it's done. We then went for a little walk in the Botanics (above) to cheer ourselves up a bit.

In the afternoon, we sorted and purged some of the stuff which used to be in our study and which got dumped in my mum's cupboards when we had the study redecorated. Then for some reason I decided this evening that it would be a good idea to take down all the books from the shelves in the dining room, dust them and the shelves, and select a lot of them for charity shops too.

You know how it is when you "tidy" - the house looks a lot worse afterwards because of all the things that you don't want to put back where they were, but you're not sure what to do with? That's the stage we're at just now with my mum's room, the dining room and the study. Groan.

Daughter 2's present to us was two Quality Street chocolate bars but we absentmindedly ate them and failed to take their picture. You'll have to take my word for it. But they were very fine.

Now I must return to tackle some of the chaos. I would really prefer to - well, do almost anything, really. I HATE tidying. (I mean, I do it. I'm quite tidy. But I hate having to sort out difficult messiness such as currently lies in little drifts all around.)

Plates

This post is mainly for Thimbleanna, who loves plates, but also for my children, who haven't seen them yet. Mind you, if Thimbleanna can't see the photos again today, then it will be more frustrating for her. Sorry, Anna!

Anyway, a second box of crockery arrived (o me of little faith) later in the day and now we've got it all.


Playing with new plates is so much more fun than doing other, more laudable things, don't you think?

And finally - this picture has two minor differences from the previous one. Well, three, I suppose. Cassie got off me. I stood up. And Mr Life pointed out that I'd missed one mug from my mugs-in-front arrangement. Oh, and someone must have moved the flowers for some reason, so that's four differences.

I think that possibly exhausts the blog potential of my new tableware. I like it, though.

Stuff

Whenever I’m in a holiday cottage, I marvel at the amount of stuff I don’t have with me. Don’t have and don’t need. I take books, paper, a few changes of clothes, nightwear, camera and that’s it apart from the furniture and kitchen things supplied by the owner of the property. Yet at home, I am very far from being a possession-free zone.

This feeling wasn’t so acute in our first cottage this year, which was old, beamy and filled with little knick-knacks of the pottery duck or Toby jug variety. But it came strongly upon me in the Beadnell house. This was much more fashion-mag-like. It had wooden flooring downstairs and what might have been seagrass upstairs (like some horrible endurance test on the bare feet but neutral to the eye). It also had white walls; striped curtains or blinds; and white furniture. No knick-knacks, though a couple of artificial plants, which I disapprove of on principle but which looked fairly realistic and decorative from a distance. And I thought: why don’t I live like this? (Not the fake plants; I refuse to go that far. But the clear spaces.)

Then we came home and I was aghast at the number of books, photos, paintings, bits of china and glass which ornament – or from another point of view clutter – our house.

Now, one person’s knick-knack is another person’s objet d’art and I like my stuff. I love each individual piece. But I think I need a rotation scheme. However, to institute that, I would have to clear out a cupboard, which would involve getting rid of such things as the rosy-posy tea-set that a friend of my parents gave us as a wedding present. I never use it but then again, I might some day.

Some of my bits are inherited, such as the vase (above) that my Granny’s brother gave her for a wedding present shortly before he died from the effects of being gassed in World War 1. Others have been given to me by my husband and children, who know my weaknesses. Others have been things I’ve fallen in love with and requested for birthdays. They’re all pretty and of course in the best of taste. Well, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

And then there are lots of family photos, which are even more precious now that the flesh-and-blood versions are no longer in the house. And far too many books. Every now and then we get more bookshelves and these immediately fill up with the books that were lying along the tops of the shelved tomes. In the end – like now – we revert to this horizontal book-stacking again. I need to have a clear-out because although I do reread favourites quite a lot, there are definitely some which I won’t. About ten, actually, but getting rid of them would be a start. There are lots of books belonging to Mr Life that I would quite happily dispense with, but you know - live and let live.

And plants… the trouble with real ones is that they drop little bits of leaf and petal constantly, like manna from heaven only messier and less edible. Some are genuinely decorative, but some flower only once a year and sit there glumly the rest of the time while I don’t have the heart to chuck them out, and others are cuttings which I can’t quite bear to put on the compost heap.

And let’s not even mention the study, which is… gah. Mind you, a lot of that belongs to Mr Life.

Maybe what we need is not less stuff but a bigger house…

Not cleaning the oven or defrosting the freezer

This is a picture turned sideways by my camera or possibly Picasa. Tilt your head to the left and admire it.

I hit a low – or possibly high – spot on my rather blank decadence record yesterday when a chap came and cleaned my oven. While not appallingly filthy, it was definitely on my mind as needing attention the other day and then I came home to find a leaflet on the doormat offering this service. Reader, I was tempted and reader, I succumbed.

It felt horribly bloated-plutocrat-like, but this cheerful oldish chap with a Lancashire accent turned up at the appointed time and spent an hour and a half making it gleam. He was happy to tell me how he did it – basically hard work, not chemicals. And certainly it’s a long time since I spent an hour and a half on this task – well, in fact, let’s be honest, it’s never happened. (The hour and a half, not the cleaning. I have cleaned it. Occasionally.) I felt slightly less guilty when he told me that on the scale of dirtiness, mine was quite unmucky. Sometimes he has to spend three hours on the job.

Which made me glad that I’d resisted – with some difficulty – the urge to give it a quick scrub before he arrived just to spare my embarrassment.

I don’t think I was born to be a lady but actually I think I could get used to it. I found myself wondering if I could kidnap him and force him to defrost my freezer.

The oven-cleaning cost £55. It's more than I get for an hour and a half but I don't think I'll swap jobs with him.

This morning I put off defrosting the freezer by taking pictures of flowers and the fluffy garden inspector, Cassie. Clematis above.

Paeonies.

More paeonies.

Petunias, begonias and lobelia.

Cassie inspects the undergrowth of geraniums.

Vanished.

Back again.

Why is her dish of clean water only the last resort, after the birdbath and the kitchen tap?

I'm not really a fan of purple but I like it in flowers.

Pretty yellow daisy things whose name I'm not going to look up because I have Better Things to Do.

Enough of this footering. To the ice, ho!

Houses and getting old

Marking finished, hurray hurray.

Next urgent tasks: rescue the garden from the neglect of the past few weeks and find a care home for my confused aunt. Currently she’s in her own home with 24-hour, privately-funded care, but this has to be fairly short-term for financial reasons and I need to find a nice home which will have a room some time soon and which she will agree to go to.

She would much rather stay in her flat but her short-term memory is gone and she’s not safe. Since she doesn’t see the need for any of this, she hasn’t got her name on any waiting lists. I have to do something about this pronto and go round visiting homes to find somewhere that will take her and where she’ll be happy (I hope). She used to be a missionary / doctor so it has to be somewhere with a definite Christian ethos, which cuts the choice down considerably.

I’ve already visited a couple of homes. My mother came with me to give me the benefit of her advice. When we came back from the second one, she said to me – but in a jokey sort of way – “I suppose I ought to put my name down for some of these places!” And I didn’t like to say… and didn’t.... “Well, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.” She is 88, after all – the same age as my aunt (my dad’s sister). A care home wouldn’t be the first option for Mum – she would come and stay with us if possible – but still, it would do no harm to have one’s name on the waiting list, just in case.

I wonder if it would be too soon for me to put my name down…? A nice room looking out over a garden; meals made; housework done; laundry taken care of… . Would they let me bring thousands of books, my computer, Mr Life and the cats? (Perhaps I’ve put these items in the wrong order.)

I’m approaching a Big Birthday which my brother suggests that I should regard as 59a (and then proceed to 59b, c, d etc) and I do think from time to time about the next house. The last house, I suppose. Rachel of Slow Lane Life (http://attica-slowlife.blogspot.com/) is boldly entering the next phase of her life and planning to move down near the south coast. We wouldn’t move far from Edinburgh, but I’m torn between thinking that we should buy a really practical house for our old age and thinking that we should buy one we really like. I want to move back to the other side of the city, near the sea, where I lived till I was nearly forty. Or a nearby seaside town?

What would you go for? Sensible or the dream?

I would like a bigger garden, but how practical is that? My parents moved twenty years ago to a big, elegant flat, the bottom of a very large divided house. It seemed suitable enough then but now my mum is rattling about in it, worrying about redecoration and dry rot and elderly pipework. Not to say the garden, which seemed manageable when they were in their sixties but which Mum can’t do now. My aunt, in contrast – my other, non-confused aunt – lives with friends in a wonderful big shared house with an enormous garden in Norfolk. It wasn’t a practical move but it was a fantastic one.

She did have a secret weapon, though: one of the friends had a husband who was – and still is – almost thirty years younger. So I just have to trade in Mr Life for a chap in his early thirties and I’ll be fine. It’s a thought….

No, it’s all right, Mr Life. I couldn’t face holding my stomach in for the rest of my life. And you’re a nice old chap. (Or maybe not old; just 59c.)

Now: off to haul up forget-me-not and plant begonias.

It's pretty, but...

Hmph. I am now officially fed up with this snow. We're not used to more than the occasional, mildly diverting fall - "Oooh, look! It's snowing!" - which causes a bit of a nuisance for a day or two and then melts. But it's now been around for the best part of a week and we are NOT AMUSED.

Part of the trouble is that we're not geared up for it. As you can see from the pictures of Daughter 2 valiantly trying to clear a way out of our drive and up the hill, the council don't see our little street as a priority for gritting. (Gritting, whoever it was that asked, is when the council drive a lorry along which leaks salt and grit on to the snow, melting it and giving something for tyres to grip on to.) We live in a cul-de-sac with only five houses in it, so you can see why we might not be top of their gritting list. The street is on a hill, steeper than it looks in the picture, and unless you get your car up the hill before the snow, that's you more or less stuck till the snow melts. The street at right angles to ours is also ungritted and also on a hill. After Daughter 2's efforts yesterday we managed to get the car up to this street, where it now languishes at the mercy of any other car which may skid into ours as it passes. But at least I can get to the supermarket, my mother's house and so on.

Of course, no one has snow tyres or chains or anything because we never need them. Or so we thought!

The cats are EXTREMELY FED UP! They're bouncing stir-crazily around the place, galloping up and down the stairs and risking their lives by tight-rope-walking along the banisters. They keep deciding to go out and then coming in again pronto, shaking their paws disgustedly and looking pleadingly at us: make it go away!

Even Cassie, who normally has a bit of dignity about such things, submits to being held like a baby and cuddled. Might as well. What else is there to do around here?

Daughter 2, who stayed with us really quite a lot over the holiday season, has gone back to her flat. She and Mr Life started work today. And I'm back to work tomorrow.

And I don't like January. It's dark and cold and ... mutter mutter mutter...

The Queen and I

We’re about to go off to the south-west of England - Cornwall for a week and Devon for another week - taking my 87-year-old mother with us. It’s been jolly hot in Britain – I’ve just looked it up and it was 83 degrees here yesterday, which is 28.333333333333335 Celsius, according to Google. And let me tell you, we were aware of every one of those 3s. It may not sound hot to you Australians and Midwesterners, but we’re fairskinned Celts and we don’t have air conditioning or houses that are designed for hot weather. We’ve been wilting, especially those of us who’re covered in black fur. No, I don't mean me or even Mr Life (well, maybe him a bit). Cassie and Sirius Cat have been spending the days lolling in the shade, proving the scientific truth that black colours absorb heat and that it’s better to be a white cat if the weather’s hot.

And it’s all very well if you can loll, but some of us have been cutting the grass, ironing and so forth.

Fortunately my mother is one of those people with no fat on them – unlike me – who doesn’t feel the heat.

It’s my birthday today, or rather, my official birthday. My actual birthday is tomorrow (Happy Independence Day when it arrives, American friends) but we have to go to the airport at 7.30 am and get on one of those nasty flying machines, so I decided to celebrate it today instead. Look at my nice cards. I usually take my own bodyweight in books on holiday, but since we’re flying I need to be a bit more circumspect.

Look at my nice presents too. Just what I wanted.

And a couple of DVDs.

I don't know why this is sideways. I didn't take the picture sideways and then I rotated it on Picasa when it came out this way. Still, you get the idea.

Ditto.

I was hoping to celebrate becoming 59 (eek!) by getting the new carpet laid in Daughter 2’s room. The saga of this room is a long and tedious one, beginning with Mr Life putting up a cornice and preparing the room for decorating. If Mr Life has a fault (surely not! you cry) it’s that he doesn’t quite have the stamina common to people in my family, and so this has been a very very very long process – I think it began in January - during which Daughter 2 has been camping in Daughter 1’s vacated bedroom. Eventually, however, the painter came and painted, the carpet layer came and laid – and the carpet was faulty. Today, a fortnight later, the replacement carpet was laid -and it was faulty. Same fault. Much has been the grinding of teeth, the heaving of furniture during heat waves, the filling up of our sitting room with said furniture and the general dissatisfaction with cruel fate.

Still, nil desperandum, it’ll all be the same in 100 years, every cloud has a silver lining (really?) and suchlike clichés. Meanwhile, I’m off to see if Andy Murray can beat Andy Roddick to get to the final of Wimbledon. See you in a fortnight, everyone. Have a good time in my absence and be sure to tell us all about it.