Some of the many lovely things about Switzerland

1) The flowers! The Swiss are very good at their window boxes and other containers with flowers. If I have a tiny criticism, it's that they seem to think that scarlet and pink go together, which I don't. However, there was such general floriferous whoofing that it hardly mattered. This is Murten. Hint for future wealth: take out shares in Swiss geranium farms.

2) The roofs. I do like red roofs in beautifully random shapes. (Daughter 2 points out my inconsistency in that I'm not very keen on red bricks. Which is true. But I might, if they were in such lovely cluttered patterns. And it's a mellow red.) This is also Murten.

3) The turquoise water. It's really that colour. Something to do with minerals dissolved in them. My brother will no doubt give me the scientific explanation but it's very pretty, whatever the reason. This is Bern. We in Edinburgh tend to pride ourselves on our beautiful town centre but I have to admit that Bern's is - well - pinker and bluer and greener. We tend to go for grey, stern and lowering. (Lowering as in threatening, overcast, rather than bringing down.)

4) Mountains. We too have mountains, but not quite so everywhere and not with pretty pink and white towns so close by. Our mountains are magnificent but you wouldn't go there to increase your social life. We go more for isolated derelict cottages and occasional villages with grey roofs. And sheep.

5) Cute little churches - mainly at the highest points of already quite high villages. As one of our party remarked, you'd need to be really keen to pant up the hill to these churches.

6) Smooth hillsides. These fascinated me. Though the chalets on the hillsides usually didn't have fenced-off gardens, it looked from the trains as if the grass in between them was smoothly mown. Which didn't seem very likely: rather hard work. The landscape looked like a painting, with the flat grass, the shadowed trees and the musical-box houses. As we travelled around, however, we often saw people cutting the grass (which wasn't actually quite as short as it looked from a distance) and then raking it up, presumably to use as animal feed. Is this right? Does anyone know?

7) Red. They are very fond of red, on their flags, tourist souvenirs and yes, more flowers. These are begonias. Our growing season isn't long enough to achieve this effect.

8) More mountains. This is the early morning view from our balcony in Thun. Rather impressive.

9) The lots and lots of views, such as this one from a rack railway up to the...

... Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes fell to his death (or didn't). They were a bit unimpressive, actually. Mr L thinks that they've been somewhat diverted for the sake of hydroelectricity. Niagara they're not.

Look what Daughter 2 did while we were away. It's the first time she's had short hair since - well, since she was 1.

Another pretty picture

This is Basel. We were standing on the bridge over the Rhine, generally admiring the scene and particularly admiring the tiles on the church roof, when we noticed some people swimming. 

Can you see them? Little heads bobbing about in this fast-flowing river which has big ships forging their way up it? This - presumably - very cold river?

We were surprised.

The Swiss are amazing linguists, which is just as well because if you've ever heard Swiss German, you'll know that it doesn't sound anything like the German one learnt at school. And then in some places the language is French (fairly normal-sounding French) or, occasionally, Rumantsch. So I'm in awe of the ability of everyone - from the ticket collectors to the chaps selling you a sandwich - to speak good English.

Well, almost everyone. Maybe not the person who wrote this for one of our hotels:

Welcome at the hotel Holiday. You are our guest! About you is going everything. The whole year. See the region of the Lake Thun in all its beauty, enrich cultural or just enjoy. Because we know, the most beautiful moments results not by random.

It is possible for the washing and ironing of the guest laundry.

Little sew we finish off patching's within 24 hours - price after expense.

I'm not really criticising this person because his/her English is about as good as my German. (I may be flattering myself.) But if I were going to write a notice in German and put it in every hotel room, I think I might just get someone to check it.

Stunning view number one

Well, you know what it's like. You spend a fortnight sitting on trains, looking idly at beautiful bits of Switzerland (well, actually it's almost all beautiful) and then you get home and you have so many million things to do that you don't have time to blog.

But anyway: we were on 49 trains and a bus. Some of our party were really quite train-geeky. "Oh look!" would go the cry. "This is 39.8 coupling! And it's joining a Federal wagon to a Confederate!" (Or words to that effect.)

And people would crowd round, exclaiming, "I've only ever seen that on the Geneva line!" and write things down in their little notebooks.

Meanwhile I'd be examining the window boxes and wondering how they get their geraniums to bloom so prolifically.

Must get on.

(We didn't fall off a cliff, by the way.)

Still not quite gone...

We're nearly organised. The house is clean and tidy, the beds are made up for the visitors, the instructions are completed, there are various informative yellow sticky notes attached to various things and we're more or less packed. You have to take a lot of socks for 18 days away. The fridge is fairly empty; there's room in the freezer for the catsitters' food; the last of the washing is done; and I think all the bins and wastepaper baskets are empty. 

I've thrown away all the flowers even though there were a few days' life in them yet - apart from this orchid sprig, which I broke from a plant by mistake a few weeks ago while trying to attach it to a stake. It's lasted amazingly well and still looks fresh, so I hadn't the heart to bin it. 

Son-in-Law 1 brought the little ones round for a final play and cuddle and meal, which was lovely. Can't believe I'm not going to see them again till the 24th. What was I thinking? 

Luckily the other grandparents are coming to stay with them tomorrow and Nanny is staying for a whole week, which will be lovely for all concerned. Have fun, Nanny and Gramps!

By the time we return, Scotland will have had a referendum for independence from the UK. The idea of living in an independent Scotland has a romantic appeal and it would be nice to feel more at the centre of things than we do - living up here, a long way from the south and its London-centric views. But the horrible news of the suffering caused by nationalism and sectarianism makes separation seem (to me) not a good idea at all. So friends are going to proxy-vote for us, against independence. The polls suggest that it's going to be quite close so presumably there will be a lot of unhappy people, whatever the result. The heart sinks somewhat even for Scotland, let alone the other places in the world which are torn apart by such enmity. 

Well, I'm off to finish packing. Thank you for all your good wishes, bloggy friends. I hope that railway line keeps steady as we cross it. 

Going, going...

This year we've been away an unusual number of times: visiting Daughter 2 in London, meeting up with the extended family in the Lake District, visiting my aunt in Norfolk, house-swapping in York and now we're about to go to, and round, Switzerland on a train.

This is all very nice and fortunate but it's a bit exhausting - having five times to leave the house all pristine for the catsitters, with updated instructions about the idiosyncrasies of the house and the cat, and to pack at the same time. But nowadays I also have to leave my babies behind! The other holidays have all been short ones but this time we'll be away for two and a half weeks. I'm going to see them tomorrow; on Thursday we'll have to clean and pack; on Friday we're off to Daughter 2's for the weekend; and then we're off on our train journey on Monday. We return to London two weeks on Monday and then get back here on the Tuesday so that's nearly three weeks without the little ones. How will I survive?

I have a list of things to do tomorrow and Thursday:

Phone Grace about Zumba.
See grandchildren.
Lay out clean bedding so that the catsitters can change their bedding mid-holiday.
Take stuff to charity shop.
Update instructions.
Organise cards for various family events.
Plant plants I bought at Breezy Knees.
Clean house.
Pack.

Actually, that's not as bad as I thought it would be.

I've already crossed off:

Cut grass (actually Mr L did that).
Buy pants and socks (I didn't have enough to last out).
Buy jacket that actually keeps out the rain (at least, let's hope it does).
Do ironing.
Go to Morag's.

Then of course there's the extra thing that I remembered earlier today while having coffee with friends and told myself to add to the list when I got home.

If only I could remember what it was... .

We will be going along a railway line which did this on August 13. The travel company says it got mended within three days. I'm not convinced that three days was enough to mend it sufficiently. So if this is the last blog post, you'll  know why... .

Water

The other week Daughter 2, Son, Daughter-in-Law, the grandchildren and I went to the Botanics. It was sunny but had been raining earlier. We were on our way to the gate to go home when we came across this soggy piece of grass and Grandson began to run about on it, fascinated by the way that he could make splashes fly up.

He kept on running to and fro,

 and back again

 and back again

and back again, really concentrating on his feet and the way the water, though hardly visible before he got there, splashed up when he ran on the grass.

He was so busy, really interested in this strange phenomenon.

He got remarkably wet, well up his thighs, but didn't notice.

When he started getting wet arms too, we decided that it was time to go.

He did have a lovely time.

Yesterday and today I've had a very similar experience - splashing my feet while stamping - but on a friend's carpet. It was less fun. She's in France and phoned us just as I was about to make the evening meal yesterday to say that the chap that comes in to feed her cats while she's away had discovered water dripping copiously from the flat above hers. We rushed round. We and another friend frantically mopped water while the chap upstairs turned his water off at the mains but it was a losing battle since there was clearly a lot of water in the ceiling space which kept on dripping into the many buckets and other receptacles that we put on the carpet. The carpet was absolutely sodden before we got there, as was the lovely parquet flooring and, worse, it had started to leak through to the room below - our friend's flat is on two floors. We took out all of the furniture and moveables that we could and discussed the possibility of moving the carpet, but it's a big room and a big rug and it was exceedingly heavy - too heavy.

Meanwhile the chap upstairs phoned his insurance company and the other friend phoned the home owner's insurance company and they both got precisely nowhere. If you have an emergency, needing strong men to heave a heavy sodden carpet out into the street and install a dehumidifier on a Friday after 5pm, you can forget it, it seems.

We gave up and, having done all we could, came home again at 9pm laden with dripping towels and bedspreads to wash (poor old Mr L was seriously needing his dinner by then) and then returned this morning. The water had stopped dripping but of course nothing had dried much. Then the chap upstairs got his plumber to come and he discovered a corroded pipe, which he fixed, but this involved more water leaking down for a while.

Our friend's daughter arrived at 1pm - she had been in France too but was coming home today anyway. The insurance company had agreed to send chaps down once she was there and could assure them that this was necessary. She had to be quite forceful but they did send men, who took away the dripping carpet and installed a dehumidifier, but we had to mop up puddles on the soaking parquet and I took away a new load of sodden towels (the same ones that I'd washed and dried the previous evening).

Water. Great in the right place. Horrible in the wrong one.

The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth

Though York is a lovely town to wander around, there are also some wonderful gardens not too far away. A few years ago we went to Breezy Knees, a plant nursery with acres of beautiful - mainly herbaceous - planting round about it. We went back there this time. I did think that most of the best blooms would be over at this time of year but actually there was still lots of colour, such as this wonderful splash of sedum and phlox above.

Herbaceous perennials (which die down every year and then come again the next) are my favourites and though much of my own garden is planted up with these, they're always better in a big space (which I do not have). All gardening books tell you to plant herbaceous plants in drifts - usually of five plants - but alas, this requires huge beds and large vistas.

Look at this: a whole area planted up almost entirely of penstemons of different shades of pink, red and purple with - entirely counter-intuitively (or at least counter my intuition) - some yellow or orange montbretias. I don't like orange and never have orange flowers in my garden - it's the only colour I ban - and wouldn't normally think that yellow would go with pink. But somehow this all looked stunning. It's a bit like patchwork, I'm beginning to see: you don't have to like all the bits of material individually to enjoy the way they combine into a whole.

And I deeply coveted these dahlias. My one dahlia got entirely consumed by slugs or snails this year. I wonder if the gardeners here take stern measures against the slimy pests, or is it just that there are so many flowers that the beasts can't keep up?

Another day we went to Harlow Carr, the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Harrogate. The actual site here is more dramatic than that of Breezy Knees, which is more or less flat. Harlow Carr sweeps down from the road into a valley and then up again into woodland. This time it was more obvious that some of the more spectacular plants had flowered earlier in the season but it was still wonderful.

I loved the colour of these cone flowers, which I've twice tried to grow and never managed to persuade to come back after the winter. I must try again.

Lovely sweeps of planting.

And here's what seems to be this year's very pretty fashion, the wildflower meadow. I hope the wildlife likes it, apart, of course, from the slugs and snails.

Oh, how I love gardens. Soothing, healing, cheering. Lots of hard work, of course but in these cases it was all done by someone else.

Rushing rushing rushing

We came back from York on Thursday but since then things have been crazy busy and still are. The family were here at the weekend, which was nice, celebrating Son's 30th birthday (a week early). How can he be 30 when I'm only 34??

House-swapping is always interesting. You always think things like: how can people live without a colander? No doubt the family in our house wonder how we manage without a lemon zester or a garlic roaster.

It's impossible not to speculate about your swappers - these people had a lot of pictures and objects from foreign countries, such as the ?? Japanese ?? ladies beside the television. Why did they choose these pieces and where did they find them? I was dying to rearrange the blue candlesticks and decanter by spreading them out a bit.

York is very lovely. This is the Shambles, a wee twisty street. It's not really shambolic but as you see below, the name is to do with meat-displaying benches.

Daughter 2 came up from London for the weekend to join us. The grounds of York Museum have these ruins of St Mary's Abbey, completed in 1294.

We liked the way that spare bits of ancient abbey that were lying around have been used to prop up flowerbeds.

Oh, but I missed the little ones. It was so good to see them again.

Grandson: What's the opposite of nothing?
Me: Something.
Grandson: But WHAT?

A good question.

Must get on. More in due course.

Off we go

We're off to York for a week, house-swapping. Whenever we go away, we have to organise people to come and live in our house and look after Cassie the Cat. I hope she appreciates it. Though I wouldn't like you to get the idea that we normally live in chaos and squalor, it's harder work to leave the house in a suitable state for strangers to live in (and potentially look in all your cupboards) than it is just to walk out of the door (though actually I do always bear in mind that we may experience a major event and never get home again).

As far as we can tell, Cassie is always perfectly happy to sprawl on strangers' laps as long as they are a source of heat and can administer the Dreamies.

Right. Better stop doing this and get back to giving the bathroom a final clean.

The Scottish summer

 
On Saturday, Mr L, Daughter 2 and I walked along the beach at Portobello (at the east side of Edinburgh). It was hot. People were doing beachy things: swimming, paddling, making sandcastles ... sheltering from the stiff breezes (well, this is Scotland). Mr L took some photos.

It's been such a lovely summer.

See these Australians who want the summer back? we thought. Well, they can't have it yet. It's ours.

We continued thinking this while eating cake in The Beach House.

Then from Sunday onwards: rain and a chilly wind. I'm wearing a cardigan for the first time in months.

Cassie the Cat is not amused.

(Thanks for the quilty advice, quilting experts. I also enjoyed the non-quilty comments.)

Calling proper quilters

All right, quilty experts: I  have a question. As you see, I have more or less finished hand-quilting my little cot quilt. Boldly - because I am that sort of wild, adventurous person - I didn't quilt it as per the pattern (all straight lines) but instead quilted different sizes of hearts and stars on it - and quite a lot of straight lines. Then maintaining this iconoclastic attitude, I decided to substitute wavy lines (below) for the suggested straight lines on the border.

Now for the question. Would it be completely bonkers to attach the binding before doing the wavy lines? My reason for being tempted to do so is that I do not entirely trust the quarter-inchness of my quarter-inch seams, and if the binding were done first then I'd be more confident that my wavy lines would be in the middle of the border, since the border would then be the finished size.

But then I realise that this isn't what proper quilters do and despite all the evidence, I do aspire to be a sort-of-proper quilter.

I have now bought a quarter-inch foot for my machine but am still not sure that this will rein in my tendency to be slightly inaccurate.

Any advice would be welcome.

Places

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

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

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

What's in the garden?

My computer has been going slow and the brilliant Son-in-Law 1 worked out that it's something to do with the fact that I have 21,000 photos saved on it. Oh no, I said. I can't possibly have that many. But I do. This is a totally impractical number so I must do something about this (what?). Meanwhile he and Mr L have added some memory and the computer is happy again. And I took more photos today; silly me.

Daughter 2 is up from London for over a week, which is lovely except that it'll be all the worse when she goes away again. We all had a happy time in the sandpit this afternoon. (Except Mr L, who took the opportunity for a nap.)

Many of the herbaceous plants are over for the summer but this lily -

- and this phlox - are filling the air with scent.

These Japanese anemones, though they're attempting to take over the whole garden, are so pretty at this time of year (but some of them are DOOMED - I must reassert my authority).

Agapanthus. I know it's a weed in Australia and indeed it's getting quite big and I don't think I could ever dig it out of the garden in my decrepitude, but I love it.

More lilies - what we used to call Turk's heads but I suppose this may be politically incorrect now.

And the agapanthus outside my kitchen window. I'm very proud of its enormous blossoms and fortunately I shall be long gone before it fills the entire flower bed and escapes on to the drive.

I will not burden you or my poor computer with photos of my dahlia and lupin plants, nurtured with love and then stripped bare by slugs/snails. Grrrrr.

Compatibility

I went to South Queensferry yesterday to have coffee and lunch with my friend Joyce. In many ways we're quite unlike each other (though were both English teachers and met at work) but all the same, we get on well and enjoy an affectionate friendship. It made me think about compatibility - Joyce and I probably wouldn't have picked each other out on a find-a-friend website and indeed, I remember that the first time I saw her, I didn't immediately expect her to become a lasting chum. But we've now shared many years as colleagues and understand each other well in a gosh-that's-not-how-I-feel-but-I-see-what-you-mean sort of way.

I've occasionally speculated about whether Mr L and I would ever have got together if we'd resorted to internet dating, which so many young people seem to do nowadays. We share interests in music, history and ... well, reading, but not the same sorts of books on the whole. We like walking, as long as it's not too energetic. We're fairly cautious and not argumentative and we agree on most things. And we're nice people! But he likes steam trains and cars and engines in general whereas I have no interest in these beyond liking to be conveyed where I'm going. I like gardening and antiques and houses.

On the whole I think it's just as well that I fell for his thick shiny black hair, big blue eyes and kind smile. Shallow, yes. But it seems to have worked.

How about you? How important are/were shared interests for you and your significant other?