Life is nothing but fun...

The main reason we went to Galloway was to visit The Book Shop in Wigtown. Wigtown is a pretty little place which has reinvented itself as a book town, with lots of second-hand bookshops and a Book Festival, which is happening shortly. 

The owner of The Book Shop - the largest one in Scotland, he says - is Shaun Bythell, who has now published two books about his experiences while running the shop: "Diary of a Bookseller" and "Confessions of a Bookseller". I would greatly recommend them - they're very funny, and it's also quite interesting (and sobering) to read what he says about the effect that Amazon has had on the book trade.

We follow him on Facebook (The Book Shop, Wigtown) and he posts funny videos set in the shop so it was SO EXCITING to be there.

On that vintage typewriter on the table is a piece of paper which says
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY
I AM NOT A TOY

and there are various other admonishments and wry quotations posted around the shop.

I'm an avid reader of published letters and diaries so was very happy.

Shaun wasn't there, which was a minor disappointment, but we would have been much too shy to tell him how much we enjoyed his books and anyway, he can be very scathing (in his writing) about customers so we'd have had to be on our best behaviour. Which of course we were anyway, and bought lots of books. (Oh dear.)

Though we didn't meet Shaun, we did meet Captain the Cat, which was almost as good and less scary.

Yesterday we visited friends who took us to The Hill House, designed for the Blackie family by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and built from 1902-4. CRM was a wonderful architect from the artistic point of view but not so good on the practicalities, and the house is now, as the director of the Scottish National Trust says, "dissolving like an aspirin" because of various issues with the way it was built.

So a huge roofed cage has been built around it to keep the rain off till it dries out and then some lucky person will decide what to do about it.

The cage includes a walkway so that you can go up round the outside of the house and look down at it. This walkway is made of slatted metal so that you can see how far up you are, which is a bit AAAAAAAGH,  which is why my photos are mostly from lower down.

There's a nice view over Helensburgh to the sea.

Inside it's just the same as before, marvellously preserved with much of the furniture. Here's the sitting room...

and here it is a hundred years or so ago, with a ghostly Mrs Blackie reading her book. Well, the house has lasted longer than the people, so that's something.

London places

The only good thing - and it's not nearly good enough, mutter mutter - about Daughter 2's living in London is that, when we visit her, we're working our way through the slightly less flying-visit-type things to see in London. Last month we went to the Geffrye Museum, which is a museum of the home and how people live. It's based in former almshouses and comprises a series of rooms furnished in period items from the seventeenth century through to modern times. It's very nicely done and definitely worth a visit, should you be in London and at a loose end.

I don't know why this photo is the only one I took.

The other place we went was the Foundling Museum. As their website says:

"The Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram, was established in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to care for babies at risk of abandonment. Instrumental in helping Coram realise his vision were the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel. Their creative generosity set the template for the ways in which the arts can support philanthropy.


The Foundling Museum is a history and art museum, which through a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events, celebrates the ways in which artists of all disciplines have helped improve children’s lives for over 275 years. If you’re looking for unique things to do around King's Cross, or places to take children, this hidden London gem offers a wealth of activities."

I would also recommend this. Again, it's very interesting and beautifully laid out, though also extremely heart-wrenching. Thomas Coram returned from living in America, was shocked by the numbers of abandoned children he saw in London and was determined to do something about it, but it took him 17 years to raise the money needed to set up the Hospital. 

Parents who brought their babies to be looked after were asked to bring a token by which their children could be reclaimed if circumstances altered. Some of these tokens are on display and feature on the front of the booklet, below. They range from coins, keys, scraps of material, cheap rings and chains through to, in many cases, playing cards cut in half. They're absolutely fascinating but, oh dear, so sad. Some parents did come back for their children (though sometimes found that their little ones had died) but these are tokens of unclaimed children.

What a contrast to the lives of these little ones, surrounded by love.

Places

Mr Life, Daughter 2 and I were up town this afternoon and paused to listen to the band of the Central Lakes College from Minnesota, who were playing in the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street. A lady handed us a programme and we were very excited to see lots of Scandinavian names, just like in Lake Wobegon. Minnesota sounds very intriguing to us, what with Norwegian bachelor farmers, ice fishing and the Chatterbox Cafe (imagine the accent).

If you're actually from Minnesota, then Edinburgh Castle might seem more unusual to you, though we see it all the time.

While they were playing, three small children came out to the front and started dancing. A compilation from "Star Wars" wasn't the most danceable music, but they seemed to find it perfectly satisfactory.

Edinburgh's child(ren)

Son and Daughter-in-Law came down yesterday and stayed till today. We all went with Daughter 1 and the grandchildren to the local playpark. It's particular fun in the playpark when your fit young uncle is prepared to go on the equipment with you.

I've just finished rereading a book I found in a second-hand bookshop a few years ago. It's called "Edinburgh's Child - some memories of ninety years" and it was published in 1961 when its author, Eleanor Sillar, was 92. She was born in 1869, not all that long before my grandparents (1880, 1885, 1893 and 1895). It's a series of essays about the Edinburgh of her childhood as the child of a Sheriff - a judge in the lower courts, as opposed to one who would deal with very serious crimes. I've just looked up the current salary of a Sheriff and it's about £130K. So her family was quite well-off. They had at least three live-in servants - mind you, there were six children and the mother died when the youngest was born, so they would certainly need help in the house.

Edinburgh as she describes it is clearly recognisable, though almost all of the shops have changed and the customs and attitudes are in some cases extremely different. As you get older, you realise how short a period of time a century is - if you remember 50 years back (and it doesn't seem such a long time ago) you are aware that 100 years is just twice not-very-long (and 1000 years just ten times that...). And yet she describes being a debutante - I never knew that Edinburgh people used that term - and going to balls at the Assembly Rooms. The Rooms are still there - I've been to a couple of dances there in my youth, but not with chaperones, candles and corsages as she describes them. And when she got home, at four in the morning, her nanny/maid was "awake and alert, ready to unlace me and to brush my hair, and eager to hear all about it. She pulls the flowers in my bouquet off their wires and puts them in water."

Eleanor writes very appreciatively of the three woman servants who were with the family for over fifty years. However, she writes that "they had been bred to think that to earn their living in this manner was their high calling". That doesn't feel too comfortable nowadays. She says that "our maids shared in all our holidays and outings" which sounds good, but adds "my memory pictures Christina weighed down with her enormous basket stuffed full of picnic fare and Ann wandering along, her arms laden with our discarded coats". Hmm.

Ann had joined the household when the writer's mother heard that she had had a baby by her betrothed, who had been killed in an accident before the wedding. The writer's mother, being a kind woman, immediately "sent for her, and kept her, earning thereby the selfless gratitude of a gentle being". But there's no mention at all of what became of Ann's child. This child had been born in Ann's mother's house so presumably remained there with its granny (no mention even of whether it was a girl or boy). When Eleanor Sillar married, Ann went with her to help with the next generation of children, not retiring till the age of seventy. I wonder how she really felt about all this?

But things were hard even in an affluent family. Two of the writer's brothers and her only sister died in infancy before Eleanor was born; her mother died in childbirth with Eleanor's younger brother; and her father died when she was thirteen. My grandfather too had several brothers and sisters who died before he was born; I remember asking him about them and he couldn't be sure even of their names.

In some ways it's not long ago. The buildings are much the same. I can Street View the addresses she mentions. And yet in other ways it seems a very long time ago. So interesting.

The sea, the sea

This is Auntie Daughter 2 and Grandson by the sea yesterday in Joppa, the eastern suburb of Edinburgh where we go to church. What's he looking at?

This! The tractor that goes along the beach every morning removing any rubbish and smoothing the sand. Grandson is a great fan of vehicles. I think he must be a boy.

 
This is the same sea, but west of Edinburgh, ie up river (it's a tidal estuary) at South Queensferry, where I went today to visit a friend. You can see the famous Forth Bridge.

 

This is the main street, built before the days of cars.

The bridge is very much a presence in the town. Even where the shoreline has buildings along it, you catch glimpses in gaps between them. My friend's house is higher up the hill and her kitchen window looks straight out on it. I'm not sure whether it was thought beautiful in its early days but somehow we're so used to it that it's thought of as an attractive rather than blotlike.

At the bus stop on the way home, a chap asked me what the fare was to Edinburgh. I didn't know because, as an over-60, I get free bus fares now. I detected a slight foreign accent so I thought I should be friendly to offset the uselessness of my fare knowledge. "Where are you from?" I asked.

He frowned slightly. "Here, for 25 years," he said. (It seemed strange to me that his bus knowledge was nevertheless so insufficient, but I let it pass.) "I have another home in Warsaw," he added. "I commute."

"That's a long commute," I said.

"I have another in New York. That's even further," he said. And the bus arrived and we got on. He went upstairs and I sat downstairs.

South Queensferry, Warsaw and New York. I bet that's unique. I had a lot of questions in my mind but we'll never know the answers now.

I'd like to be...

I'd like to be…

in a pretty and tidy cottage near Loch Assynt in Sutherland, in the north-west of Scotland. Ideally I’d have Mr Life and our offspring with us but I’d settle for Mr Life by himself. It would be sunny and not too windy and there would be a big window with this view over the mountains and the loch. We would just have come in from a health-giving walk during which the Great Scottish Midge (so called because of its minute size and famous ferocity) failed to bite us. And we’d be drinking a cup of tea, possibly with a small cake (which we would deserve because of the walk). Dinner would be a long way off (because of the cake).

There would be a big pile of interesting books – biographies or really amusing novels for me with no sad or gratuitously naughty bits, and books about narrow gauge railways or mediaeval detectives for him. It would be cosy. There would be nothing worklike to do. Someone would be at home looking after the cats.

My mother, who isn't really a fan of bracing walks, would be on a nice holiday somewhere warm with one of her friends. My confused aunt would be no longer confused. There would be nothing to worry about.

(I’d also like to be thin and rich, and preferably twenty-five, but I don’t think my imagination can stretch that far.)

Monday

On Monday, I left Cassie Cat busy in the garden

and ignored that tempting chair in the sunshine

and the lilac, filling the air with the sweetest perfume in the world

and the clematis scrambling over the sitooterie

and the dicentra, nodding in the shade

and got on a train to Glasgow for a markers' meeting.

It was a pleasant journey.

The meeting was in a hotel beside the River Clyde, with its rather futuristic buildings.

BBC Scotland - how exciting to work there. (Or so one fancies.)

But then I had to go in. Crowne Plaza - why CrownE, I wonder? Is it a Ye Olde Shoppe sort of spoof archaism? And why Plaza? Not exactly a British word.

Some hours later, back on the train.

Cows grazed bucolically near fields of startlingly bright yellow rape.

A rural nook near a little town.

And home. A vase of lilac; and another of lily-of-the-valley, the most fragrant thug in our garden.

200 scripts, two and a half weeks to do them. And now it's raining and I have a cold.