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.

Halfy birthday to you

Our boy was born 23 and a half years ago today (29 August 1984) so this is his sixth half-birthday. Does that make him 3? We gave him six candles, anyway. And some Maltesers.

Excuse the messy kitchen. It's been a busy week. (The bit you can't see is immaculate.)

Cat or furry toy?

No, it's all right; the girl in the previous story wasn't in one of our most academic classes. Scotland does have some young people with sense. The story was genuine, but I translated her comment slightly. I wasn't there at the time, but she more likely said something like, "I cannae dae mair than yin essay, so I'm waiting till it's time to dae the yin I can dae." I decided to make it more refined for you people who live south of Edinburgh.

This is Daughter 2 and Sirius. He's such a cuddly boy.

I'm so sorry I haven't been visiting blogs much. I've been so busy doing work stuff. I'll be back. And I might some day get around to doing Molly's "I'm from... " meme, if I ever have half an hour to call my own. Meanwhile, it's midnight 10 and I have things to do. It's all very well for you ladies of leisure.

A new one on me

Our students have been sitting exams. In paper 2, they have one and a half hours to write two essays: thus we point out that they should spend about 45 minutes per essay. There are various questions to choose from.

My colleague noticed one student just sitting there doing nothing while her fellow-classmates scribbled furiously. Worried that the girl might be ill, she approached and asked her if she was all right.

“Yes,” said the girl. “But I can only answer one of the questions, so I’m waiting for the first 45 minutes to be up and then I’ll write the essay.”

(Hello, Meghs - how kind of you to unlurk and what a nice comment! Do pat your cats for me.)

After I'd done the ironing...

... and gone out of the room with the ironed clothes, leaving the water jug (for the iron) on the ironing table...

... our son...

...and the cats...

...had fun with the jug...

...and our daughter took some photos. With my camera.

We drink water out of this jug at mealtimes.

We've given it a good wash.

Edited to add:

Ok, Gina. I take your point. I mean that we pour water out of this jug (or pitcher) into glasses and then drink the water. Mind you, maybe the cats' way is the way to go... But I think my head is too big.

More books and cats

Actually, I got these books for Christmas too, now I come to think about it – except “The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl”, the one on the top, which I bought myself. I’ve mentioned it before – it’s a touching and inspiring account written by a fellow blogger about how she got her life back from depression and overweight to happiness and fitness. What a girl. Her story is riveting and she also writes very well indeed. Including apostrophes. I do recommend it.

It’s sitting crookedly on the pile because it’s on top of Janet Street Porter’s horridly fascinating autobiography (part 2) which I dropped in the bath. This is not good for books but it doesn’t matter in this case. JSP is a journalist with a very good opinion of herself and if I saw her standing on a river bank with her back to me, I might well be tempted to give her a little shove. Only into a shallow river, you understand. Or a bath.

Of this second pile, I’ve so far read the Don Paterson, the Janet Street Porter and the Dietgirl. Now, however, I’ve abandoned the Mitfords temporarily for Sebastian Faulks’s “Engleby” (very good so far), which is our book group choice, and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, which I’m rereading so that I can pretend I know it awfully well for my (very intelligent) Advanced Higher students. A week or two ago, two of their essays on “The Return of the Native” made me doubt whether I could actually do any better myself. I didn’t tell them that, though. One has to maintain the illusion.

Girl in pyjamas with happy cat last night.

Boy in pyjamas with happy cat this morning.

Boy in pyjamas with other happy cat.

Boy in pyjamas with relaxed and happy cat.

Books and names

These are the books I got for Christmas; all delicious; all just what I wanted.

How many of them have I yet read? Can you see the markers in the Mitford letters and in "Poem for the Day Two"? That's how far I've got. I've only dipped into the others.

Why can't I be a lady who gets to sit at home all day, sipping coffee from a porcelain cup and nibbling grapes?

Apart from working all day and also Tuesday evenings, I spend too much time marking and preparing work. I also have to study books to teach them. And then I have to read our book group's chosen books. And of course a bit of evening blogging goes on too, I have to admit. And three evenings a week I go up about 10 to my mother's to spend the night with her. I keep other books there.

Still, the Mitford letters (between six aristocratic sisters) are entertaining. I bet they didn't work so hard as we all do.

They all had fairly unusual lives, but one of the more conventional married the man who became Duke of Devonshire. Very wise; might have thought of this myself. Actually, my plan as a child was to marry Prince Charles.

Anyway, in one letter she tells of a friend of her son's. The friend was called Lord Ancrum and when he arrived at some social event the announcing chap asked him his name. The chap misheard him and announced him as Norman Crumb. From then on, his friends naturally called him this, even sending him letters addressed to Norman Crumb, Esq. Shortly after this, Lyndon B Johnston became President of America so the young man became Norman B Crumb, or indeed Bread Crumb. I presume that this chap is the well-known Conservative politician now known mainly as Michael Ancrum.

I was relating this tale to Daughter 2, who mused that the upper classes, some of whom she has met at university, often have silly nicknames. She recalled that the mother of one posh friend is called Twinks and actually introduces herself as such: "Hellew, I'm Twinks X."

Of course we do call Daughter 2 "Boots" most of the time. But we don't actually tell strangers this. Except all of you, of course.

February 9th

It was sunny and mild today and I took my mother for a walk in the Botanic Gardens. Spring is in the air.

This afternoon our son was vacuuming the dining room and temporarily put the cushions on the table. Cassie liked this.

I have a cold, the kind that makes your nose and eyes stream and your teeth ache.

I had some friends round for the evening. We started teaching together in 1973 and the last one of them has applied to retire in June. This means that I shall be the only one still working. Sulk.

We’ve had social gatherings every couple of months since we met. We used to talk about men. Then children. Then teenagers. Then weddings. Now we discuss our pensions and our ailments. And in Jan’s case, her grandchildren.

I love our catlets dearly but I wish they’d stop scratching the wallpaper. So far they mainly do it in reasonably unseen corners of rooms, but – hmm. Dido, the cat of my youth, never did this.

Cats nowadays… what’s the world coming to?

Tomorrow I hope to do some gardening of the tidying variety: cutting down the dead stalks of perennials and removing last year's leaves, which lie which lie in a soggy brown blanket over snowdrops, crocuses and primroses in the back garden. Why is it that, even though I raked up all my leaves last autumn, I end up with a fresh supply at the end of the winter? It’s one of the mysteries of gardening.

This would have been my dad's 88th birthday, the first since he died.

Snuffle, sneeze, drip, blow nose.

Two grannies

Unremarkably, I had two grannies. One was born in 1885, the other in 1895. I was born in 1950, so as you can probably work out, one was 65 and the other was 55 at that point.

For both of them, my older brother and I were the only grandchildren.

The older one, Granny S, moved down to England when I was 5 and we didn’t see her much from then on – only on occasional visits. She developed dementia in her early 70s and grew gradually more confused until her death when I was 18. I don’t feel I really knew her. I never knew at all Grandpa S, who died the year I was born. I feel sad about this.

The plate above was part of her wedding china. One day she was carrying a lot of it through to the dining room on a tray when she dropped it. This is one of the few pieces that survived.

My other granny, Granny C, lived just along the road from us until we moved house when I was 12 – but we moved only about a mile away. She and my grandpa were very much part of our lives. Granny C was an absolute darling. She lived for her family, had the illusion that my brother and I were perfect and loved all things domestic: sewing and knitting and cooking and gardening.

However, she had a sad family background. Her mother was from the island of Arran but left the island, went to work in Glasgow, got married, developed TB and then died when her children were 7, 5 (my future Granny) and 2 years old. Their father got his sister to come and be his housekeeper, but she wasn’t a very motherly person and didn’t give the children much love. Even more sadly, the 2 year old daughter also got TB, was a sickly child and died at 14. Granny C and her elder brother, Alec, were very close. Then their father remarried when they were 16 and 18 and their step-mother made it clear that they were no longer welcome in the house. Alec joined the army and Granny came to Edinburgh and got a job as a sewing maid in a big house.

Alec was gassed during the war. He was never well again and survived only till late 1921.

My granny and grandpa got married in 1921 and Alec gave them a wedding present of two blue and white vases. These sat on either end of the mantelpiece until my granny was an old lady and had a home help once a week – and this cleaner broke one of the vases. This is the other.

Both my grannies seemed like very old ladies to me, with cottage-loaf figures and white hair pulled back into buns. I'm now 57, two years older than my younger granny was when I was born. Strange thought. I'm not a granny yet, nor does there seem any prospect of becoming one in the near future. Fortunately I already have the cottage-loaf figure and the hair will probably be at least grey by the time it happens so at least no one can say I'm not prepared.

Why do I blog?

Daughter 2 was having a nice early night with a book. Then she got up to fetch something. Guess what had happened by the time she got back?

I’ve been out of the blogloop all week and indeed hardly in it at all for several – all due to ridiculous busyness.

Thank you for your answers to a couple of posts ago: why you blog. These had some points in common but were interestingly different in other ways.

Like Tanya and others, I do it partly because I’m a compulsive writer. I enjoy putting words together; trying to make them say exactly what’s in my head; getting the rhythm right.

I think I also do it because I’m quite a shy person. My son doesn’t believe this, because these days I hide it fairly well most of the time and I no longer worry all that much what people in general think of me. And of course my job involves talking to large groups of students, which is different. But I do sometimes lack confidence in my complete fascinatingness – who doesn’t? – and in social groups will sometimes notice myself speaking quite fast so that others don’t have to listen to me for too long. Blogging is such a good medium for shyish people. No one has to read you and you never know if someone has got bored and stopped reading half way through a post.

I suppose there’s a self-selection process: almost by definition, people who read your blog are likely to be interested in what you have to say and to share your sense of humour and outlook on the world. Unless they’re only looking for pictures of cats.

And comments, however brief, are indeed a bonus. Every time you post, you step out of the shadows and shout, “Listen to me!” You feel less silly if someone replies.

I read one or two excellent blogs that get hardly any comments. I imagine that this is because they don’t comment on others’ blogs and so not all that many people know they’re there. I rather admire this. Presumably they don’t need confirmation – that reassurance that yes, other people know what they mean, like how they write and occasionally feel the same way.

And of course blogland is a community. Like the rest of you, I do have actual friends, though none of them knows about my blog. Blog friends are… just very pleasant. They tell you things that sometimes your real friends don’t. You get an insight into their daily lives, sometimes many thousands of miles away. You may even get to meet some of them – a sort of internet dating without the anxiety that they may not find you attractive.

Lastly, of course, it’s so much more fun than cleaning the oven. Or, in some of your cases, than doing your paid employment. Hello Salford!