More holiday pictures

Here's another view of our North Wales house. Actually, it's been divided into two: the owners, reasonably enough, live in the left hand bit, which has a lovely view over the bay, and the right hand bit is let out to holidayers. No view, alas.

Interestingly - or at least I found it interesting - the house once belonged to the uncle of Mrs Gaskell (who wrote "Cranford" and so on) and she visited it a lot, even honeymooning there. So that was a bit of a thrill for a nineteenth-century-novel fan like me. I suspect she may have spent more time in the more scenic side, but anyway, here's Mrs Gaskell's uncle's extremely small living room (claimed to be suitable for 9 people - just as well that there weren't as many of us as that and that one of us was an elf).

Here's his kitchen - do you think Mrs G might have popped in here to make a cup of tea? I don't think it's been updated much since her day. (Note the notice on the dresser.)

And here's the stair. Can you imagine her swishing up here in her crinoline, or whatever she wore? A bit narrow, maybe.

North Wales is beautiful; a bit like the Scottish Highlands.

We went to Bodnant Gardens, which are wonderful even in autumn. Here's Daughter 2 amid vegetation.

Spectacular views over the garden.

Mr and Miss Life rest under a tree.

We also visited Llandudno, which was very elegant. A touch on the bracing side, but beautiful.

Looking in the other direction.

We have five legs and only one arm, it would seem.

A different narrow gauge railway train. It was very wet that day, but Mr Life is a happy man on a train.

Portmeirion - a spoof Italianate village built by a very rich and somewhat eccentric architect last century.

It has a wonderful setting.

Pretty, isn't it?

We had a lovely time. But it's quite nice to be home, really.

Chuff chuff

We’ve been away for a week with the family in Wales , so that Mr Life could drive a narrow gauge railway train for a day. Here he is in his boiler suit.

That was his exciting present from the offspring, for his 60th birthday (which was in May). He was a very happy chap. They made him a cake with a train on it too.

We were staying in a holiday cottage.

Apart from Mr Life's train-driving, we also did other things, some in the sun... (I'd rather have stayed in the house above than our cottage, frankly)...

and some in the rain.

Our cottage featured quite a lot of stern notices.

(The elf we bought in a Christmas shop was a bit naughty.)

Some of the notices had PSs added to them – even though they were printed on a computer and the PSs could easily have been incorporated. For example, one notice gave a big list of what not to put down the toilet (we didn’t) and then added, as an extra little dire warning:

PS – using too much paper may block the pipes. (We didn’t do that either.)

Our catlets were looked after by some very very nice visitors. I’ll tell you about these some other time.

I’m looking forward to catching up on all your doings. Meanwhile I must go and fill the washing machine.

Back to porridge and auld claes (old clothes), as my Granny used to say.

Tell Laura I love her

Do you know the song "Tell Laura I love her"?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=p93XxQPsLsA

Daughter 2's name is Laura and she works as an architect with a medium sized firm and therefore sometimes spends time on building sites with lots of joiners and plumbers. Her current project is the conversion of an old building into a hotel. She's a sweetheart. Yes, I know I'm her mother; but she is.

The other week she was on site, and saw that someone had chalked up on a wall, "Tell Laura I love her".

Yesterday she went past the wall again, and there, in two different handwritings, was: "Me too" "Me too".

Your father and me too. We love you, Laura. (More!)

Guest post from Fifi: "Rockcliffe" - Episode 2

I thought Fifi's comment on my previous post deserved more prominence (hope this is all right, Fifi):

fifi said... On "Rockcliffe" this week, young Dr D finds that making soup is almost as hard as convincing wee auld Mrs McLatchey to take her heart medication. In his usual endearing manner he ineptly stirs pieces of vegetable forlornly around in his broth.Luckily for him, it's Isabelle to the rescue: turning up just in the nick of time with a big bunch of dahlias, a cauldron of hot soup and a package of....Gorgonzola!As usual the beautiful landscape is the real star of the show, though,luckily for Mrs Mclatchey, Dr D is a far better physician than chef.

Above, a pot at our front door, still blooming away in October - though the first frost will cut down the flowers.

Below, having enjoyed a nice combing session, Sirius relaxes on Mr Life's legs.

In our college we teach towards exams in English language and literature but we also teach vocationally-appropriate, practical English, to people doing all sorts of courses such as beauty therapy, preparation for nursing, business studies, computing and so on. My preparation for nursing students - all young and jolly but not necessarily academic giants - were doing an assessment. ("Hollyoaks", by the way, mentioned below, is a soap opera, which I myself don't watch.)

Student 1 [looking up from the article she was reading]: What's schizophrenia?

Me: Well, it's a psychiatric mental condition -

Student 2: It's what Newt's got in "Hollyoaks".

Student 1 [completely satisfied]: Oh, right.

Student 2 [nodding conspiratorially to me]: Talk to them at their own level.

Mother and son emails

Hello my boy,

I wrote a blog post about our visit to Rockcliffe and this was Fifi's comment:

Rockcliffe.
It's almost like a TV series, you know, handsome young doctor arrives in wee village, gets up to all manner of capers. His mother moves there to become a writer and keep a vast garden of flowers, writes a vast novel. It'll be epic!


Well, it's an idea...

Lots of love,

Mum

PS Less of the capers.




Dear Mum,

Hmmm, certainly an idea.

Unfortunately I don't really get up to much in the way of capers (except for crashing my car, but I'm not sure that this counts).

It's kind of hard to imagine Rockcliffe as 'epic'.

I'm not up to a huge amount today. [Girlfriend] is at work, and I'm sitting in the kitchen. Yesterday was just the most horrible weather - driving rain non-stop all day. However, today is beautiful sunshine and very still, so I'll probably go outside in a bit.

I made some soup yesterday, it being soupy kind of weather. The day before, I looked at a food processor in Tesco and wondered about buying it (that's the exciting sort of caper I get up to), but decided I probably wouldn't use it all that much (it was the blending kind, rather than a proper Kenwood-style thing).

My soup was nice, but really more like soggy vegetables in water than Mum-soup, despite my best attempts at mashing. Ah well, it still has much-needed vitamin C.

Hope all is well at home. I'll probably phone in a bit, so this email may be a bit superfluous, but there we go.

Missing you all and the lovely cats.

[Son]

Some barely connected musings

When I was 17, our A level French teacher, Mrs Walsh, was speaking to us about current affairs. She mentioned Twiggy, the famous model of about our age who was being mobbed by adoring fans, much like the Beatles were at that time. "Girls," said Mrs Walsh, "in a few years, Twiggy will be forgotten, but YOU, girls, YOU will have careers!"

Well, yes, we do have careers.

Twiggy, on the other hand is still beautiful, rich and famous (at least in Britain); one of those "national treasure" people. I wonder if she sits up late at night marking papers and preparing classes.

Never believe what a teacher says.



I know it's a ridiculous cliché and I despise myself for my lack of originality, but at this time of year I can't help thinking of the garden as being like a lovely woman whose beauty is fading. It’s still got some colour but you can see it used to be much prettier.


I must try to think up a better simile before next year.


How about this for an action photo? Unimpressed by the flowers, Cassie was trying to catch an insect.

This is Dr Son in the garden at Rockcliffe. Not really like home, is it? (He's looking a bit brooding and Heathcliffish, but I think he was just about to smile. He had also taken the opportunity of a non-working day not to shave. )

Back in our garden, I picked some sweet peas for a reminder of what the summer is like.

Today is damp and chilly. Autumn is on the way.

Rockcliffe

We got the bus down to Dumfries on Saturday to collect our other car from our son – he needed it till he bought a new one to replace the one in which he skidded into the wall.

There were two women of a certain age sitting beside us in the waiting area at the bus station in Edinburgh, chatting as they read a less upmarket type of woman’s magazine, complete with lots of photos of lissom or hunky celebs.

I started listening to them without actually looking. (I’m subtle like that.) One of them said to the other, “I like them bearded.”

Her friend replied, “Oh yes, and especially if they’re blue.”

I thought, “?” and glanced covertly at the magazine. It was open at an article about irises.

My mind wandered. Later, I started listening again. They were looking at a feature on kitchen gadgets.

One said, “Do you have difficulty opening jar lids now?”

“Yes,” said the other. “My hands are getting quite stiff.”

“Well,” the first one said, “my mother gave me a good tip. She said it really works. It’s made all the difference.”

“What does she do, then?”

“I can’t remember, but she said it helps a lot.”

Unfortunately they didn’t sit near us on the bus.

We went for a walk with our son and his girlfriend in beautiful sunshine at Rockcliffe, where they’re living.

We saw pretty houses, sparkly water, bobbing boats.

It was lovely to see our boy.

Children are so precious and when they’re little, we long for someone to take them away for a few hours. And then life comes along and takes them away for what feels like forever.

Another car disaster

On Tuesdays, I'm at college till 9 at night because I teach an evening class. So I emerged after the class into the darkness of our poorly-lit car park, approached the car from behind, got in, drove home, parked in the driveway and went into the house. The next morning I took the bus to work and walked home. It was only then, on arriving at the front door, that I noticed that someone had bashed and broken a huge hole in the front bumper - and it had to have happened at work. That grey squarish thing you can see inside the car through the hole is a tank of some sort - petrol? Or water? I know nothing about cars but I don't like being able to see the innards of them without lifting the bonnet.

Did the basher leave a little confessional note? Alas, no.

We were rather fed up, as you can imagine, especially when my husband found out on the internet that the car - which is admittedly nine years old, but it goes all right, dash it - is worth only £5oo. So repairing it didn't seem an option, but then neither did driving a car with bits falling off it. And we haven't really been budgeting for a new car.

At work, I sent round a not very hopeful email asking if anyone had seen anything and then went off to teach, grumbling about the human race.

Meanwhile, unknown to me, our facilities manager, who is a trained motor mechanic, read the email and went and found my car in our (large) car park. He inspected it, phoned a garage in the Border country and established that they could supply a second hand bumper and then came to see me to say that the college would get it for me and the motor vehicle department would spray it black, fit it, and touch up the rest of the scrapes all free of charge.

I was so touched. I like the human race again!

(I phoned my husband to tell him the good news and he pointed out that the back bumper has a minor crack from some earlier occasion when someone - can't imagine who - had backed gently into a bollard. But we felt that asking if they could find us a back bumper too might be pressing our luck a tiny bit...)

The Big Bang

On Sunday morning I was in the garden, hanging out the washing in the sunshine, when I paused to stroke Cassie, our girl cat.

Suddenly there was an ENORMOUS crash which reverberated around the city. I checked for Apocalyptic horsemen galloping through the garden. I didn’t see any.

Cassie was no longer much in evidence either. One second she was basking on the lawn, having her head patted; the next she was a furry black streak, diving into the lilacs.

Then I remembered having heard that this was going to happen some Sunday morning soon, about 3 miles from where we live:

http://www.edinburghnp.org.uk/page/bhb_videogallery.aspx

This, then, was that Sunday.

Cassie tiptoed cautiously out of the lilacs and zoomed into the house. She retreated under the table and stayed there for some time.

A few moments later, Sirius, our boy cat – who had clearly been further away at the time of the Big Bang – dashed into the kitchen, panting and wild-eyed. His panicked gaze fell upon his food bowl and we could see him thinking: This might be my last meal! Better make it a good one! Rushing over, he started cramming cat biscuits into his mouth like a man in a pie-eating competition.

The pair of them still look suspiciously over their shoulders when they go outside.

On Saturday

On Saturday, our son bought a new car – well, newish – in the town where he’s living, to replace the one that slid into a wall the other week.

He was telling his dad about it on the phone: man-talk of heated seats, electric sunroof, alloy wheels and such fascinating details. After a while, I said, “What colour is it?”

“I never asked,” said my husband and then said into the phone, “Your mum wants to know what colour it is.”

Pause. “Black.”

“That’s a bit boring,” I said. Then, rethinking this, I said, “Ask him if it crashes.”

“Your mother wants to know if it can crash.” My husband listened to the answer. “No, it apparently runs on little tracks fastened to the road.”

That’s ok then.

On Saturday also, I went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens, one of my spiritual homes. It's coming on to autumn but there were still many flowers, such as the rose at the top of the page (yes, it was raining slightly) and the asters immediately above here.

There were frilly Japanese anemones...

... and little cyclamen under a tree.

Look, here's a very old fossil tree from Craigleith Quarry, a couple of miles away.

It still looks quite like a tree...

... despite being 340 million years old. I don't think I'm quite so well preserved even now.

Dahlias - a wonderful bright red on a grey day.

Autumn leaves on damp ground.

Quite a lot of the benches have dedications on them, including this one. The dedication always intrigues me: to "Our spirited parents". I feel that spirited parents might be a bit wearing, myself. It sounds like a euphemism, don't you think?

I wouldn't have known that this was a euonymus, but that's what the label says. Singing colour, though.

If there's anything Scotland does well, it's puddles.

And grey squirrels. Some people don't like them - rats with tails, they say - but the tails make them so pretty and graceful, even if grey squirrels aren't indigenous and are crowding out the red ones.

I love the herbaceous border, though am glad we don't have to cut the hedge.

On the way home, I passed Fettes College, alma mater of Tony Blair and, one hears, part of the inspiration for Hogwarts.

For Old Black

I love Old Black's comment (a male reader! - most rare) on my previous post:

The big question is: who are the four people in the photo on the fridge and what are they / have they been doing?...and what is that red thing hovering above the people in the left hand photo?

The four people on the right, Old Black, are our two daughters, our son and our son-in-law, sitting on garden chairs in obedience to their mother/in-law, who wanted a photo of them. We were in the garden of a house-swap holiday house in Malmo (imagine two dots above the "o", please) in Sweden at the time. The picture is now a bit faded, having been exposed to the blazing Scottish sun in our kitchen for a few years.

The people in the left-hand photo are our son and his girlfriend, in beautiful New Zealand - not, I think, despite the suggestion on the fridge magnet below, at Marlborough Sound. I do now wonder what the big black monster is, climbing out of the water on the right of the picture and just about to come and inspect them...

The hovering red thing is another fridge magnet in the shape of a car.

The fridge magnets on the right come from... the tile one might be from Delft, possibly; the ones with quotations from Shakespeare probably belong to Daughter 1; and the one at the bottom is from Rome - a cat sitting on a huge stone foot.

Thanks for asking!

The ups and downs of being a cat

Happy birthday for two days ago, Daughter 1!

The cats are still enjoying the garden even though the people have to be at work. I want to be a cat.

On the other hand, Cassie got locked in the garage for four and a half hours yesterday. We couldn't think where she was. Daughter 2 went searching outside and traced the mewing to source. Cassie likes being locked in the garage even less than she likes being around when the freezer's being defrosted. Like Queen Victoria, she was Not Amused.

She's all right now, though her nine lives seem to be being used up rather rapidly.

I'm awash with marking and schedules and making up lessons, all of which fill my days and evenings and thoughts. So I still want to be a cat, despite occasional garage mishaps.

This weekend

The weekend:

Friday evening: book group.

Saturday morning: went to supermarket at 7.20 am so that husband could have car in time to pick up my mother at 8.40 am to take her to the Church of Scotland Guild annual meeting in distant town - son has our other car in different distant town. By mistake, locked keys with shopping in boot (trunk) so that husband had to catch bus and then run down the road from bus stop with spare keys to rescue me. Husband didn’t reproach me. Ah, a good man is worth more than rubies (though I also like rubies).

Rest of Saturday: did some blog-reading then some housework including defrosting freezer. Cats did NOT like latter, which involved cold air, lumps of ice flying across the kitchen as I chipped it off, ice melting chillily on kitchen floor and me using noisy hairdryer to speed up the process. Daughter 2, who had sore throat, did some reading for her work on the sofa. Or that was the idea.

In evening, went to party given by colleague. Husband, not long home from sitting through day-long meeting with my mother, nobly accompanied me to party though he’s more of a sit-in-front-of-television-with-cat-on-knee person than a party person.

Sunday: went to church. Had Daughter 1, SIL, mother to lunch with Daughter 2, husband and me. Took mother home. Took Daughter 1 and SIL (who don't have a car) to buy sawdust for their guinea pigs, to supermarket and then their home. Came home myself. Went out for walk with husband. Tidied up. Sat down to type out year-long schedule for one of my classes, but first answered some emails. Then put off work slightly further by writing this blog but any minute now will get down to that schedule, which will take me some considerable time. It’s now 10.50 pm.

These are some of the reasons why I don’t make quilts or knit socks or do anything creative.

580 working days to go before I retire.

Work for some

Cassie is fine. So is Sirius.

They've been taking it easy. Convalescence, you know.

I haven't. Work is very time-consuming! I have no evenings again. I snatch quick reads of blogs at lunchtimes but can't comment. But you're writing some very good ones!

The boy returned to his work on Monday night, in his distant town. With our second car, normally used by Daughter 2. But he needs it and she loves him.

He left this note. And some clothes in the washing basket. We miss him.