It's time for another cat post

Look at those catlets cuddled up together.

See! Cassie gives Sirius a lick.

And another.

Then Sirius licks her too.

They fall asleep, nose to nose.

Sweet.

But…

I took Daughter 2 to the airport on Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn and, on my return, came into the dining room to find Cassie with a little brown dead bird clamped between her slavering jaws. Well… in her mouth. Or at least, it was on the carpet and she was looking complacently at it. Sirius hovered guiltily in the background.

But I’m a vegetarian! Now I’m torn between my love for them and my feelings of moral disapproval.

Oh, you think that this is what cats do? Really?

Suddenly they seem less like fluffy toys.

You don’t think that she just found the bird lying in the garden, having passed away after a long and happy life? Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Or at any rate it must have been a pretty deaf bird because the terrible twins have bells round their necks and we can hear them coming from several gardens away.

I always think that how people behave in a crisis is a measure of character. Naturally, I dealt with the situation by letting out a yell. On cue, poor old Mr Life leapt from his warm bed and came to my rescue. I don’t do dead things. It was part of our marriage vows that he should.

Bigger bells? Extra bells? Flashing lights? Sirens? Hob-nailed boots? Balls and chains?

They haven’t done it since. Maybe it was a one off... .

No time to read

The Sunday when we were in Norfolk and it snowed, we saw this snowman in a neighbour's garden. I love the way the snowman's clutching a daffodil - not a common combination even in this unpredictable climate - and the somewhat gloomy expression on his face. Perhaps he knew that a thaw was imminent.

During that week, I made splendid inroads into my to-read pile: all of the above (the Betjeman only part-read) and lots of magazines and copies of the "Spectator" and also a book my aunt lent me: C S Lewis's "Surprised by Joy". The Kate Atkinson was especially good. She is such a wonderful writer - her novels are so cleverly and intricately plotted.

But then we made our traditional visit to the second-hand bookshop in Burnham Market. Fatal. I read the top one, the Alice B Toklas - very interesting.

Since coming home, I haven't even quite finished the Betjeman.

Spring blossom and silly things

This has been the second (and last) week of my Easter holidays and I've spent a distressing amount of it marking my Advanced Higher students’ dissertations and creative writing.

However, on Monday I walked to collect the car from being mended and saw - above - the Pentland hills with some cherry blossom,


a forsythia bush in full bloom

and this flower shop. All very springlike.

On Wednesday I had coffee with my friend Maggie and she told me about something silly she did with her spectacles.

And today I had lunch in Haddington with some other friends and we did something embarrassing.

Maggie’s silly thing? She likes having candles in her house, and has discovered that a good way to get wax splashes off the glass candle-holders is to put these in the microwave to melt the wax. Works a treat, she tells me.

The other day she’d been tutoring a student and her brain was rather frazzled. She then rushed to pack to go away for a few days with friends, blew out a candle – and wax spattered on to her spectacles. So, still thinking about her tutorial session and her little holiday, she popped them in the microwave.

The lenses, she reports, were fine. The titanium frames melted completely.

The embarrassing thing? Today, five friends and I were lunching in Haddington, which is a small town in East Lothian, east of Edinburgh. Above you see the river that we walk along. My friend Janet lives near the town and some months ago, on a similar occasion, she took us to look at a show house (ie a new house, fully furnished to show prospective buyers what houses in a development can look like). Various of us have occasional thoughts about retiring to Haddington or somewhere round about. And it's always fun to have a snoop round a show house.

Today, she announced that she had another show house for us to look at on our after-lunch walk. There it was, in a row of new houses – the one with a For Sale notice in the window and another saying Open Viewing.

So we went up the path and opened the door – six of us, talking loudly as only six teachers who’ve known each other since 1973 can talk. We stood in the hall and looked round. I thought to myself that it was odd that on the wall was a school photo.

Someone called from upstairs – the sales lady, clearly. Then she came down, looking a bit surprised. Janet asked if we could see the house; the lady agreed but said, “It’s just that… people don’t usually walk straight in.”

Because it turned out that…no – it wasn’t a show house. It was this lady’s home. Yes, she was selling it but she was also living in it and had been for a year. The houses were newish, but not actually brand new as Janet had thought.

Were we looking for a house? asked the lady (who was clearly hoping to sell it, though equally clearly didn’t think we looked like six women who were necessarily going to buy a house together). No, no, we said, backing out rapidly. We were just… so sorry… goodbye.

And we continued our walk. Giggling. But a bit horrified.

Norfolk

Fifi from Australia guessed that we were in Norfolk. Spooky! I’m ashamed to say that I would have no chance at all of recognising an area of Australia unless it happened to have Sydney Harbour Bridge or Opera House in it. I think my appalling ignorance is because till very recently I was sure that I would never get to Australia or New Zealand – a bit phobic of flying plus having three offspring to educate expensively . But now I’ve read all your blogs and seen how lovely it looks… I’m tempted.

(Norfolk, by the way, is the top part of the big lump above London on the map of England . We were on the north coast of this lump.)

We were staying with my aunt, which is something we do every two years, sometimes at Easter but more often in the summer. She lives in this beautiful old house with a huge and wonderful garden. The story of why she lives there is a long and complicated one, but basically she retired there 26 years ago with friends, sharing the house, in three separate flats on the upper floor. The downstairs is for communal use and for visitors. My aunt, who’s unmarried, lives in one flat and until very recently another unmarried lady lived in the second (she’s now in her nineties and has moved to a care home. This year we stayed in her flat.)

The third flat is occupied by a married couple. The husband is much younger than the wife, which is very useful since he does all the maintenance of the whole house. Meanwhile my aunt, who is 83, does most of the gardening, which I think is extremely impressive considering the enormous size of the garden. (I spent much of yesterday tending my small town garden and was exhausted.)

Disconsolate ducks on the lawn.

The gateway through to the walled garden at the side. These are all views out of our bedroom windows, one of which looks on to the back and one on to the side garden. The snowy picture in the previous post was of their front garden.

Then the sun came out and the snow melted.

They’re all lovely people and I’ve known them since I was a child, and the atmosphere of the house is one of tremendous contentment, faith and generosity. It’s balm to the soul to be there. The village they live in is pretty and quiet and the surrounding countryside isn’t “very flat”, as Noel Coward famously said, but gently hilly.

Because we’ve been going for so many years, we know all the places of interest – stately homes and gardens and pottery workrooms and galleries run by artists and second-hand bookshops and so on – so it’s very restful, since we just keep going back to places we know and like.

It snowed the first day we were there but then it brightened up, apart from Friday, when we went to Sandringham, one of the Queen’s little places. It has a wonderful garden, which on that day we had more or less to ourselves since it was raining fit to drown a duck.

Or Mr Life: here he is with his own personal raincloud. But it was lovely, in a very drenching way.

Every time I go to Sandringham, I remember why it might have been a good idea to carry out my childhood plan of marrying Prince Charles. However, I’m not sure that he would be prepared to get quite as wet as Mr Life just so that I could admire daffodils.

Where have we been?

We've been away for a week. At first the weather was as above...

... and then it improved somewhat, though frankly it was still a bit chilly and wet at times.

No time to write more just now. I'm looking forward to reading what you've all been up to.

But come on, someone. Where do you think we were staying?

Buddy Johnston

My Grandpa C died in 1982 at the age of almost 89 and this is a story that he used to tell me.

Grandpa was born in Edinburgh in 1893 and one of his best friends was called Buddy Johnston. Or possibly Johnson or Johnstone. Buddy must have been a nickname but if I ever knew his real name then I’ve forgotten it.

When he and Grandpa were mid-teenagers, Buddy emigrated with his family to Australia. The boys kept in touch by writing letters, though these must have taken a long time to go to and fro. Then in 1914 the war broke out and my Grandpa enlisted in the Royal Scots Regiment. That's Grandpa above. I never saw a photo of Buddy.

Buddy wrote that he too wanted to join the Royal Scots and fight for his homeland alongside Grandpa. So he set out by boat, going via Canada (not sure why). He started to cross Canada but on the way decided to enlist in the Canadian army instead. I suppose the journey on his own was just too difficult.

He landed in France with his Canadian regiment and was killed in their first battle. He’d be 22 or 23, much the same age as my son is now.

This sad story made a great impression on me and I’ve always wondered if anyone but me knew about him any more. For some reason I’m the only one in my family who remembers Grandpa speaking about him. I presume that Buddy wasn’t married and had no descendants. I have no idea if he had any siblings and if so, whether they or their children or grandchildren still talk about their Great Uncle Buddy, as I do sometimes about my Great Uncle Alex and his blue vases. (See post for January 5. That's Uncle Alex below, with his sister my Granny C and the aunt who brought them up.)

Anyway, here I am like the Ancient Mariner, passing on Buddy's story. I think he deserves to be remembered and celebrated – even if it’s in a bloggy world which he could never have imagined. Can I ask that you tell someone about him sometime, too?

Happy Easter, one and all.

My boy lies over the ocean

Our boy and his girlfriend are in New Zealand for nine weeks. These are his Mother’s Day flowers. Sniff.

New Zealand doesn’t look too far away on the map.

But they set out on Saturday afternoon, touching down in London, Bangkok, Sydney and Auckland, and didn’t land in Nelson, South Island, till Monday morning our time (Monday evening, NZ time).

It took them nearly two days, whizzing dangerously through the air, to get there. I find it hard to believe that anywhere in our earth can be so far away from here.

When I read blogs the world seems very small. When I think of my boy’s long journey, it seems very large.

Still, he has his girl by his side for company, his handy phrase sheets (see January 8 post) to help him communicate with the patients and the driving badger for all other emergencies.

The driving badger?

When he was 17, he sat his driving test. The examiner began by telling him to drive out of the test centre and take the first right. He wasn’t familiar with the area and didn’t know that the first right was a one-way street. The sign had got bent so that it was turned to the wall and he couldn’t see it. So he drove up the one-way street – the wrong way - and immediately failed. This did seem a bit mean.

Not being a lad who’d had much trouble in his life, he came home rather downcast.

His big sister, Daughter 2, was in town when she heard the news. Arriving home, she announced, “I know why you failed. You didn’t have a driving badger!” – and she produced this finger puppet.

Sure enough, the driving badger has accompanied him on all vital occasions from then on. It helped him pass his second driving test. It’s successfully sat all his medical exams with him. And now it’s keeping him safe in New Zealand.

I hope.

Where I'm from

This is in response to Molly’s “Where I’m from…” meme. It’s been a long time coming – not because I’ve been honing a masterpiece but because my recent posts have been five-minute nonsenses, dashed off in brief intervals between horrible busy-ness; and this one required a little more thought.

I feel a bit silly presenting it. It’s rather solemn. Doesn’t seem very British. But anyway. Here we go. Mumbling slightly and shuffling our feet. Don’t read it, dear son-in-law. There aren’t going to be many pictures of cats.

I’m from the little house in the big garden where lilacs bloomed, lupins swayed, apples thumped on the lawn and, in the winter, birds’ footprints patterned the snow.

I’m from the big house by the railway where the white cat slumbered in the sun and the air was full of promise.

I’m from my grandparents’ garden: sweet peas, gyposophila, cabbages – “All that out of the earth!”

I’m from three other houses: the first furnished with wedding presents and cast-offs, the second ringing with children’s voices and the third full of books and plans and purring.

I’m from a childhood full of funny words and stories, of worries and insecurities, of sleepless nights when the sun hardly set and or when the frost scribbled on the windows and the darkness was black indeed.

School had high windows, tiled corridors, girls in navy uniforms and 100-year-old teachers (or so it seemed).

In my head are holidays in Perthshire – sheep safely grazing and tiny blaeberries on the Knock and picnics by the wide river among the towering hills of the Sma’ Glen.

I’m from Smiths and Campbells, from Boyds and Watts, from May and Jim and Tom and Ella and Isa and James, from tales of wars and bombs and of a green island with a mountain in the middle.

I’m from a city of spires and domes and hills, a university built round a city garden and from years of chalky fingers in classrooms with young learners.

I’m from a grey church by the sea with a twinkly-eyed minister where there were lots of ladies in hats and husbands in sober suits.

I’m from a long beach where the sand blew up into the gardens, and from the Quarry Park, where we played rounders on long, balmy Scottish summer evenings.

I’m from books and diaries and now from blogs, all trying to preserve a tiny part of what we are and what we were.

And just in case anyone did struggle through this far, a reward: kittens.

Edited to add: I tried to edit this the minute I'd posted it, but Blogger wouldn't let me. And now it's probably too late because many of the people who visit me have read it already. What I would have said was: how about someone else doing this meme? Lots have already done it. Anyone else care to?

Cats, cake and other profound thoughts

I’m sure there was no mystical significance to my dream about my dad, by the way. I’d been thinking about him and feeling a bit sad and this no doubt translated into my dream. He was a difficult man in many ways – very brilliant but not very empathetic and not, in our later relationship, very huggy. But when I was a little girl he was great fun. He made up stories and drew funny pictures and invented words and phrases that have stayed part of our family lexicon. A “fluggy”, for example, is a generalised word for a mythical animal of the monsterish variety, and “wurfles” is another useful term for any part of one’s anatomy (eg “I have a pain in my wurfles”). Even when he was dying in a geriatric ward, he still had that spark at times. At one point the nurses tried to get him walking with a Zimmer (walking frame) and he would say, “They had me Zimming around the ward today.”

When are we truly ourselves? Is the twenty-year-old person, full of health and vigour, the real us? Or the slightly creakier but possibly wiser forty-year-old? How about the sixty-year-old, the eighty-year-old? Ah, questions, questions…

Daughter 2 and her actor boyfriend are in Pickering, Yorkshire, for a non-stag weekend. (A stag party is a party for the groom and his friends in advance of the wedding. But this is a weekend for male and female friends, hence a non-stag party. The groom has an ambition not to spend the weekend naked, tied to a lamp-post.) Daughter 2 and actor boyfriend were out on Thursday evening and when they came back, she decided to make a cake for the event, which began the next day. She is known for her cakes.

It was chocolate, iced with chocolate butter icing, and then they made a road sign for the top – based on the one warning motorists of deer, but with a line through it. If this version existed, it would mean “No deer permitted”. (I have no idea whether any of this is self-evident to non-British people. Or even non-mad people. And I never know how carefully you're reading. No deer = non-stag. Yes?)

It was a work of art. (Daughter 2 is an architect. ) The kitchen became very sticky. So did they. Daughter 2 changed into the bottom half of her pyjamas for some reason connected with stickiness.

It was one in the morning before they finished it, put it in a cat-proof plastic box and went to bed.



By breakfast time, our son had left a little note on the box.

(He was joking.)

Remembering Dad

I'm not one for ascribing great significance to dreams but I had a very strange and vivid one this morning just before I woke up.

I was at some sort of function and went into a room to find my father - who died on April 1 last year after a sad decline - standing leaning against the wall on the right, looking at me. He was an old man, as he was before his last illness. But then, standing behind him in a line were different versions of him - slightly younger each time. I walked down, just looking at them all. The last one in the line was him as he was when I was little, with his hair slightly ruffled as it is in a photo we have of him standing in the garden. He would be in his early thirties.

When I got to the end of the line I put my arms round this youngest Dad, and we stood hugging, not speaking, though I had my head turned away into his shoulder and couldn't see him.

Then I woke up. I have tears in my eyes as I type this, but it was actually a nice dream. "Nice" is such a feeble word but I can't think of a better one. Comforting, maybe. But also sad.

Shakespeare and Mrs Shakespeare

Cassie shows up nicely against Daughter 2's red top, doesn't she?

First two sentences of a student's essay:

"The theme of insanity has been present in many of Shakespeare's plays and literary works. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon where at the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway."

Yes, well his parents probably thought he was mad to marry her.

Happy Mother's Day, British mums

Scenes from Life family life today:

1. Daughter 2 recalls going out for a drink with Daughter 1, her husband and his brother last night: "J [her brother-in-law] said he likes to eat salt and vinegar peanuts by sucking off 'all the salt and vinegar goodness' and then crunching the peanuts. "

2. Daughter 2 writes something on a post-it note and sticks it to a packet of jelly beans at J's place at lunch. (He likes jelly beans.) I read the note. It says, "Happy Mother's Day, J."

3. Daughter 2 considers the words of a piece in Latin that her choir performed last night: "'Christus factus est' - what does that mean, now?"

Son-in-law: "'Christ is a postman' presumably."

(That only makes any sense if you know some French.)



Yes, well. I'm sure every family has its eccentricities. Maybe not everyone celebrates half-birthdays.

Now I must go and read Advanced Higher dissertations.