The garden show in the sunshine

Thoughtlessly, the Edinburgh Garden Show is always arranged for the weekend in the middle of my marking marathon. However, a girl has to have some time off, so Daughter 1, my mum and I spent a few hours there yesterday. It was hot and sunny and the crowds were out.

Look: some natives talking to a man in a hat.

One often has to go inside the flower hall to shelter from the rain but on this occasion, it was pleasantly cool compared with outside. Why do my clematis not look like these?

A bank of fuchsias. Delicious.

Veg art.

Alliums aplenty.

The bonsai stall - never very sure about bonsai but I think I like them. This azalea or possibly rhododendron was pretty, anyway.

Back home, the cats were enjoying the sun.

It's hot being a black cat.

Sometimes you have to catch a bit of shade...

... before returning to a sunny spot.

My spring pansies are still looking good.

However, this is Scotland and today it's raining. It makes the plants grow. Mr Life relaxes on the sofa with his fluffy friends and the Sunday papers.

Life's exhausting when you're a cat. Or a man.

I've marked 70 out of my 210 papers.

The Marking 08

On Tuesday, I went to the markers’ meeting in Glasgow, an annual event attended by the hard-up, hardworking or just plain masochistic teachers who volunteer to mark (in this case) Higher English – the English exam taken by Scottish pupils who hope to gain university entrance.

Markers come from all over Scotland and you meet some people there year after year. Rather pathetically, it feels like a bit of a day out. I get the train through to Glasgow, which counts as excitement in my life, and a taxi – a rare event – to the venue. We then get free coffee and muffins! Later, even more thrillingly, there’s a free lunch.

We’re paid £2.67 per script and the first evening it took me three hours to mark seven scripts. I reckon that’s about 60 pence per hour. This is the point in the process when you think about how free that lunch actually was… .

I’ll speed up, though, once I become more familiar with the passages and the questions and stop agonising so much over the exact shades of wrongness of some of the students’ answers.

On the train on the way home I talked to a fellow marker whose teacher husband left her for the school secretary a few years ago. Now the deserted wife has a new partner, a millionaire businessman. He’s actually an old flame who sought her out after thirty years apart. You couldn’t put this in a novel because it would seem unrealistic, but there she was, glowing with happiness and prosperity.

I bet she won’t be doing The Marking next year…

And now I must ignore my garden in the evening sunlight and get down to work with a red pen.

Travelling in New Zealand

I would love to show you lots of wonderful pictures from our boy's trip to New Zealand, but my computer is going through a difficult phase when it sometimes - not always, mind you - not often enough for me to remember to get a chap down to look at it, but sometimes - won't save things. So after much struggling, this is the only one of his emailed photos that I've persuaded the thing to save and therefore that I'm able to post.

So instead, here are some extracts from some of his emails. These are from when he and his beloved were travelling in South Island, though they did fit in work experience at the hospital at Nelson. In their final week they went to North Island.

They had a lovely time but I was so glad to see them back again.


****

Just a quick email to let you know that I’m still ok.

We went in to hospital this morning (or yesterday evening to you, I suppose) and got told that they had an audit on, so could we go away and come back tomorrow? This is somewhat typical of being a medical student, but somehow, when it’s 25 degrees Celsius outside and you feel like you’re on holiday, you don’t mind so much.

We came back, got changed and went for a walk. This took in the town centre, a bit of beach, some Japanese gardens, a historic park and the “centre” of NZ. We were quite tired by the end. During the time we ought to have been watching Neighbours we went to a supermarket and bought quite a lot of food, then ate some for tea and sat around for a bit.

*****

Tomorrow, I suspect we may actually have to do some medical studenting, but I suppose that’s technically why we are here…

Someone said G’day to us today. It made me happy.

*****

(This accompanied some photos.)

1. A view over Nelson from "The Centre of New Zealand"
2. One of the many crossings of the Buller River in the Buller Gorge
3. The Pancake Rocks at Punakaike on the way down
4. Your favourite son/brother in front of the Franz Josef Glacier
5. A rather atmospheric shot on the glacier
6. Guess who at the foot of the Fox Glacier

*****

G'day,

Now in Queenstown. Arrived safely, although the landing seemed to come perilously close to mountains. We've seen several other planes take off/land and they all did that, not just us.

Our hostel has two cats, plus one who comes and begs for food from the kitchen - very nice, though obviously not quite as good as our cats.

*****

Somewhat time-limited right now (there's no such thing as free internet in NZ, apparently, and what we have in this campsite is rather slow). Today we went on a cruise on Milford Sound - very big, very pretty, very wet below, fairly wet from above. I also wrote you a postcard - are any of them getting through? This [picture above] is it - rather misty but very atmospheric. You probably can’t get how impressively big it was in a picture.

Tomorrow we're off to Stewart Island off the South coast, the best place in NZ to spot a kiwi, apparently.

*****

Hello there,

Just to let you know that we're still alive. We are. Yesterday we went to Stewart Island off the south coast. It was very nice, although the weather was somewhat changeable. Very choppy journey there too. We're now in Invercargill and about to drive to the Catlins National Park. The weather is currently sunny.

*****


Hope all are well back home. We are currently in a campsite in Timaru, which is sort of halfway between Dunedin and Christchurch. There's not a lot to Timaru, so we're really just stopping off in between the two cities (Christchurch is our target, where we will drop off our little Suzuki Swift tomorrow - sniff). For those who I haven't spoken to recently, since Saturday we have covered Queenstown, Milford Sound, Invercargill, Stewart Island, The Catlins, Otago Peninsula, Dunedin and Oamaru. It has been somewhat whistlestop. Over that time we have seen tui, fur seals, albatross, sea lions and penguins. No kiwi though.

*****

We're now back from Nelson Lakes, which were lovely, but VERY cold! It was beautiful weather, but if you weren't actually in the sun (ie when we were walking through the forest, which was much of the day) it was really fairly chilly. We walked up one side of a valley on Sat, and we could see our breath (and snow on the ground) towards the top. This morning the car (a Mitsubishi Colt this time) was completely frozen up. However, we barely saw a cloud.

*****

We made it back from Picton - which is where I last phoned from - driving the scenic coastal route. Those who get car sick would not have liked it much, but it was very pretty. Since Sunday the weather has been pretty cloudy and exceedingly humid, but still pretty warm, at least. Yesterday we went on an 8am ward round in the morning, wrote some discharge summaries and then both worked on our elective reports. Mine is currently about 3 pages long (maximum of 5) and very waffly.

In two weeks and two days I'll be heading back across the world - very odd. But nice. I'm looking forward to seeing you all and the cats. I'm intrigued by what you say about Sirius’s entirely logical fear of hot water bottles. Is it the mere presence of a hot water bottle, or does it need to be a particularly aggressive one?

This is not a cat

Various people have kindly enquired about our son's sojourn in New Zealand. He had a fine time and visited many places, the names of which have not lodged in my brain because they tend to begin with W, feature NG somewhere along the line and end in I. These are hard for a person used to places called Edinburgh and Fraserburgh and Peterburgh to remember.

He's not currently here to ask for the details, since he's at his young lady's house up north to celebrate her birthday. (He did manage four whole days without her between coming home and rushing to her side once more.) But meanwhile, here's the suggested guest post - or at least the caption he sent us with this picture.

"A fur seal on the beach at Porpoise Bay. It looks slightly like it’s been shot and is dramatically recoiling, but I thought this was better than the other photos of it, in which, frankly, it looks a bit dead. It wasn’t. It was just lying and rolling about a bit on the beach."

He also took lots of pictures of stunning scenery which I don't have access to just now.

(By the way, talking of photos - can you tell which one of the photos in the previous post was taken with Mr Life's very expensive new SLR digital camera and which with my little not-very-expensive non-SLR one? It was the first one. It does look quite atmospheric, I suppose. Not that I have any idea in what ways SLRs are better than anything else.)

Mr Life is 60 and a bit

Above, the cake on the actual day.

The second cake on the official birthday with the extended family.

My mother, Mr Life and his cousin, with cake.

Cousin, Daughter 1 and her husband being a bit silly.

Son and Daughter 2 being affectionate.

Son wearing Daughter 2's necklace as coronet. Regal.

Son-in-law wearing the necklace that Daughter 1 had just given me. Fetching.

Daughter 1 reading paper after the guests had gone. Restful.

Recycled birthday badge. Don't know why it decided to post itself sideways. Sometimes my technical incompetence surprises even me.

Communication

Our son, newly back from New Zealand, kindly offered to go to the supermarket for me.

He did four years of German at school (up to 2000); I did three (up to 1967). As a family, we occasionally converse in what we know is bad German, French, Latin, Spanish or whatever. In German especially, we tend to elide the endings and other hard bits.

Needing money to do the shopping, he said to me, “Habst du Monat?”

“Monat?” I translated mockingly. “Have I month?”

“Ach,” he said. “Geld, then, habst du Geld?”

“Ja,” I said. “In mein Handtusch.”

“Ah, gut,” he said, picking up my handbag (or purse, in American English). Even though, as I realised after a moment, I’d just told him that I had money in my handtowel. I think what I meant to say was "Handtasche".

You might have to know a little German to understand the above, though I think a genuine German person would have some difficulty. Still, my boy and I knew what we meant.

Work and non-work

It’s been a bit of a crazy week. This is partly because tomorrow is our big national exam day and therefore our exam students, who have spent much of the year not doing a lot of the homework that we set them, have leapt into action, burnt lots of midnight oil and given us big piles of things to mark. And of course it all has to be handed back more or less immediately to give them a chance to benefit from our sage advice.

It’s amazing how many students wait behind at the end of class at this time of year and say things such as, “I’m having trouble writing literature essays. Can you give me a few pointers?”

Exactly what do they think I’ve been doing all year? Telling them a whole lot of nonsense so that I could keep the good stuff, the answer to all their problems, till the very last lesson – when all would be revealed?

But I don’t say this. I sigh and repeat all the usual advice. The real answer, I feel like telling them, is to read a lot and practise writing a lot, well in advance of the exam. Starting when they were about eight. It’s a bit late now.

Anyway. The other thing keeping me busy has been that this is the start of the birthday season chez Life. My mother was 86 last Friday, our son-in-law 28 yesterday and Mr Life attained his 60th birthday today. How can I be married to a 60-year-old? – at my age? Astonishing. There have been various celebrations of these splendid events. We had my mum to dinner on her birthday and then on Saturday we took her to lunch at Crieff Hydro. At the top, there she is in the gardens, with the hotel in the background. Then above, another view of the grounds - it was a lovely sunny day.

Later we went for a walk up the hill behind the Hydro where we scattered my dad's ashes last year. We said hello to him.

Here's Mr Life pointing out something or other to my mum.

Maybe it was this view. The weather had got a bit hazy by then, but it was still lovely.

Then today we had a birthday dinner for Mr Life (and son-in-law) and on Sunday, once our boy has returned from New Zealand, we’ll have the extended family to lunch for further celebrations. Mr Life got a single lens reflex digital camera for his birthday and has been playing happily with it ever since. He’s a man easily pleased with cake and expensive technology. No doubt he will share today’s photos with me in due course. Watch this space. You can’t wait, can you?

Sigh

The weather is balmy, the sun comforting after a cold spring. The sky is brochure-blue. In my garden, last week’s rain and this week’s sunshine combine to send sap shooting through the plants. There’s a visible difference from one day to the next: clumps are sprouting like teenage lads, all legs and elbows. The earth smells damp and warm. The birds are taking their young ones for test flights and teaching them to twitter. The cats watch with interest, basking in the sun.

Standing on the grass – which is lush again even though it was cut only last weekend – I can almost feel the roots creeping through the ground beneath my feet, almost see the stealthy burgeoning all around. I sense that if I turned round quickly I’d catch plants growing: stems stretching, buds plumping busily up, leaves uncurling their fingers, flowers colouring and opening. And weeds boldly rampaging too: their seeds splitting and their little roots and shoots wiggling their weasly ways through the flowerbeds, tangling with the roots of the legitimate occupants of the garden.

Or at any rate I would feel all this, see all this, smell and hear all this if I weren’t composing these words in a stuffy classroom while my unfortunate students practise essay-writing for their exam next week.

Lovely day

Today felt like the first day of summer. It was a holiday (though not for everyone, eg poor Mr Life). In the morning, Daughter 1, Daughter 1's parents-in-law, Daughter 2, Daughter 2's actor boyfriend and I sat under the cherry tree in the garden drinking coffee and talking.

In the afternoon I gardened. Here's a pieris and magnolia stellata.

Rhododendron.

Polyanthus.

The front garden - little crab apple tree not quite at its best yet.

Tulips.

Even nicer tulips.

Here they are again.

And here's the pieris from the other side.

No profound thoughts today. Just flowers.

Always look on the bright side of life (te tum, te tum te tum te tum te tum)

I’ve read some blogs in which people try to – for example - post about three good things each day. This seems an excellent plan to me – not that I have time to post daily but I like the philosophy. I like it because sometimes life is a bit rubbish but there’s not a great deal of point in dwelling on the rubbishy aspects. We’re going to grow old and die but we might as well try to enjoy life while we can. (Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.)

This rings a bit hollow from me, one of the world’s worriers, but hey, I would be considerably more of a worrier if I couldn’t be distracted from my sorrows by enjoying things I see along the way.

I very much believe that the secret of happiness is the ability to take delight in small pleasures.

These last few years have certainly not been the easiest part of my life so far, for reasons which I won’t detail. (At least, not today.) But I give you three of the (many) things that give me pleasure.

My garden. The grass needs to be cut just now (all this Scottish rain) but there’s lots of colour and it’s spring. A garden is undoubtedly a lovesome thing, God wot. Including these tulips.

This glass vase. Mr Life gave it to me many years ago and I’ve always liked it. (Mr Life is also a lovesome thing, as are all the little Lives.) The vase has “J.Ditchfield” on the bottom. I looked this up on Google a little while ago and J.Ditchfield is still glassmaking, though there’s nothing on his website like my little crooked pot.

This poem (one of many) by Norman MacCaig. I love his poetry. It makes me wriggle with enthusiasm. There’s nothing like a good wriggle when life seems almost too tough to be worth struggling through. And look! Norman MacCaig knew the difference between "it's" = it is or it has and "its" = belonging to it! (Unlike some people out there... mutter, mumble...)

Caterpillar going somewhere

Its green face looks as if
it were about to spit – pft.

It moves along a twig
by doing exercises, bend, stretch –

hard to imagine
a potbellied caterpillar.

It looks so active (hard to imagine it
in the lotus position)

and yet, and yet
it looks so melancholy.

Is it because it knows that
when it reaches a green leaf

its jaws will open sideways
instead of up and down?...

It’s standing erect now – it turns
from side to side

like a retired sea-captain
scanning horizons.

Home

Lots of my favourite blog-people live a long way from where they grew up. A different state, a different country – even a different continent.

I live about six miles from where I grew up, in the same city. I’m very attached to my home territory. It's not that I'm particularly a city lover, but if I go away on holiday for two weeks, I’m thinking longingly of home about half-way through the second week. I love it when we’re driving up from England and we see the familiar shape of Arthur’s Seat, the biggest hill in our city, on the skyline. I love getting back to my garden and seeing what’s grown, and being back in my house, which looks to me, like the rest of Edinburgh, familiarly strange, strangely familiar.

I occasionally wonder if I’d feel the same about home if I’d grown up somewhere less pleasant. Edinburgh, as cities go, is a good place to live. It’s not very big – you could walk from the centre to any place on the outskirts in an hour or so – and yet it has most of the things you need in a city: shops, theatres, cinemas, parks, hills (I think you need hills in a city), art galleries, museums. It has its ugly bits like anywhere but also some lovely bits; it’s historic; it has quiet areas; and it’s got the sea on one side. The weather – well, it depends what you like, but I don’t like hot weather and it’s seldom either very hot or very cold. It has short days in winter but this is easily offset, in my opinion, by long days in summer.

Would I feel less attached to home if I lived in an industrial area full of tower blocks? A huge city like London? Or somewhere with an extreme climate? I don’t know.

I’m always amazed when people emigrate. Apart from leaving the place, I wouldn’t want to leave friends and family. I just can’t imagine why anyone would – of course I exclude victims of war and famine for whom home has become intolerable. And I realise that sometimes you have to move for work. But people who just tootle off from somewhere nice to somewhere else nice – clearly they have much more of a sense of adventure than I do. (Not that this would be hard.)

The only reason that we might move far away would be if our children did. They’re more important than anything.

Ah well. We’re all different; and other such original conclusions.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats

Thank you for your kind comments about my friend M. I still feel so grieved for her. Meanwhile I'm trying to seize the day, gathering rosebuds as I do so. And also blog a bit.

If you haven't seen An Engineer's Guide to Cats, you should watch it. Mr Life and I thought we'd got the wee screen on to this post like other, clever people do, but then it vanished. Still, the link should work. It's rather funny.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

M

When I was at school I had two separate groups of schoolfriends, both comprising three girls plus me. One set comprised my official “best” friends – my very best, my second best and my third best. Sounds ridiculous but that’s kind of the way it was. We went around together most of the time, sat together in class and knew one another’s secrets. But these girls all took packed lunches while I ate in the canteen. So my lunchtime friends were three other girls: M, G and S, with whom I also shared a lot of girlish chat.

I’m still in touch with all of these girls, though with some more than others. I’ve always seen M intermittently – she would come down for a meal with the family maybe once a year. She was unmarried, and when you have small children you sometimes hesitate to inflict yourself on childless friends whose life is more focused on a successful career than on picking up bits of Lego from the floor. But we got on well and she was very empathetic and – a lovely person. I’ve always been rather enchanted by her. In fact, when I was a girl, I really wanted to BE her. She was from an interesting and talented family and always seemed to be confident – not in an arrogant way, but calmly, as if life were simple. In fact, like the rest of us she had her neuroses, as I found out later in life. But she was sweet.

One of the surprising things about her was that she always seemed to fall for unsuitable boys/men. They were older than her, or they were planning on a career that wouldn’t have fitted in with her plans (for example, one was very religious and planned to be a minister, while she wasn’t at all religious) or they had emotional problems … anyway, though she was very attractive, she never seemed to find her life partner. And then, in her late thirties she did, though he came with baggage: he was quite a lot older, had been through a messy divorce and was wary of commitment. Eventually he recovered from this and they got married, but she was in her late forties by then.

At first when they got together, we asked them both to the house but he didn’t want to be regarded as part of a couple so she came by herself. Later, they did both come to dinner but we didn’t feel it was a great success. He was nice enough but I don’t think we had much in common and they never asked us back. He was retired but had been a top civil servant and clearly had lots of money and she was also quite a high earner and I suppose I vaguely thought that we didn’t seem important enough to him. I was sad about it but on the other hand, she seemed to have found happiness, which was good.

M and I continued to stay in touch via Christmas cards and notes and several years passed without much more contact, though we did occasionally mention meeting up and I certainly assumed that we would at some point. But you know what it’s like when you’re busy. Years go by. I was deep in family and teaching and she had a high-profile, engrossing job. I missed her but thought that when we retired and had more time, we would resume our easy relationship. We’d known each other since we were five and always just picked up where we’d left off.

But then we didn’t get a Christmas card for the past two years, which I was slightly hurt about.

Recently another of this group, G, moved back to Edinburgh and I met her yesterday. And she told me that M, beautiful, charming, funny, kind M was diagnosed two years ago with a rare form of dementia. She’s 57. She’s in a wheelchair, requires 24 hour care and is like a completely different person. This form of dementia decreases social inhibition and people become aggressive or say embarrassing things. There’s no treatment and she will just get worse and worse until she becomes vegetative and dies in a few years’ time.

I just can’t stop thinking about her. I’m so sad. How I regret not making more of an effort to spend time with her in recent years. How I ache to think of all the things she wanted to do when she retired and had more time. When I think of adjectives to describe her, they’re all to do with light and warmth: golden, glowing, radiant.

I also think of all my plans for retirement; for the rest of my life, as I fondly hope. Better get on with some of them now.

Yes, I know this is undignified. It was Daughter 2's fault.

Sirius is such a patient boy.

Resigned, I suppose you might call him.

He just sits there.

Cassie, on the other hand...

... is slightly less co-operative.

Still, she's prepared to look at her cake... (See the levitating hat!)

... for a short while. (The hat's still there.)

We sang "Happy Birthday" to them. I'm not sure they appreciated it. Then we were forced to eat their cake for them, because they'd lost interest.

Six word memoirs

There’s a “write a memoir in six words” meme going around and I decided to have a go. You may not be surprised to hear that I found six words a rather inadequate allowance.

(First attempts turned out rather gloomy) -

School, university, work, children, work, why?

Too busy to live life fully.

Tried best but have some regrets

Thinking breeds gloom; just kept going.

Worked; tidied; cuddled; worried, kept breathing.

Mother hen; chickens now spreading wings.


(Then I became a bit cheerier) -

Much love; many small pleasures; overwork.

Kept busy; less time to fret.

Married for love; who needs money?

(Make it more difficult; try alliteration) -

Lucky life; lots love; little leisure.

Fantastic family; fairly frenetic; feeling frazzled.

(A variation: alliteration in a pattern) -

Wonderful offspring; weary often; work overloaded.


(Is there a lesson in this?) –

Don’t teach: no life at all.

(But to sum up my memoir) –

All very interesting but too busy.

Six words? I need six million!

(Anyone else like to try this?)

Some pictures

Some commenters have kindly enquired how our boy is getting on in New Zealand. He’s having a fine time, thanks. He and his young lady arrived the weekend before Easter, so very soon got a long weekend (no one in New Zealand is ill from Good Friday till Easter Tuesday, evidently; or if they are, they don’t want to be treated by students). So the pair of them went off to see glaciers. Then they worked for two weeks and were told to take a week’s holiday. What a splendid country! So they went down to the south and saw lots more beautiful scenery, such as this: Queenstown Hill with Lake Wakatipu in the background. It looks a lot like the Scottish Highlands except that in Scotland the grass would be a lot greener (rain) and you probably wouldn’t be wearing shorts up a mountain because it would be too windy and cold.

Now they’re back in Nelson for a few more weeks before having a final week off, during which they’re going to North Island.


It came to me a few weeks ago that my second blogiversary had come and gone on March 3. This, combined with the slightly depressing fact that my stats have gone considerably down this week (I was clearly rather uninteresting last week) made me decide that when not many people were watching I would take up the self-portrait challenge that’s been going around. I didn’t actually take a new picture – this was done a few months ago for a blog friend who wanted to know what I looked like, but, you know, I don’t look all that different yet. It’s taken in the bathroom mirror, which has a kindly light from the side window. I actually look 140. I do like seeing bloggy people's faces so decided to step out from the shadows. My students aren’t reading this, I’m sure. And nor are all that many other people, judging by my latest stats. So here I am saying a quick hello to a select band of you.

If you’re reading this and haven’t done the self-portrait thing yet, I dare you.

The first one was me trying not to look boring, which I always think I do. Hence the dopey smile. The second time I decided to revert to type.