Weather and stuff

British weather (ah, the final resort of the NaBloPoMo person who's running out of things to say?) is very variable. Above, you see our front garden last Saturday. And below...

... you see our front garden on November 30 last year. Somewhat different, and I'm here to tell you now that I prefer the coloured version.

I couldn't claim that the garden's looking its best despite the lack of snow, but some things are still flowering, such as this tuberous begonia...

... and this fuchsia, with a feebly-flowering lobelia and some polyanthus which thinks it might be spring. (Wrong.)

Today my lovely friend J came to lunch. Because my life has been centred round hospital visiting and sick-bed nursing for some weeks, it was such a boost to see her, with her enthusiasm for life and her tales of college (where she still works, three days a week). And then I took Mum to see her surgeon, who thinks she's doing awfully well considering her "hUUUUge" operation and her age - 89 and a half. I don't think Mum is really convinced of the splendidness of her state of health but the surgeon was so delighted with her that I hope some of the delight rubbed off on her.

And I also trust it doesn't snow any time soon because Mum certainly wouldn't like that. As it is, there have been several times recently when I've said what nice weather it's been and she's responded, "I hope we don't pay for it later."
True British optimism.

Botanics with Mr Life

Another mild, sunny November day. Presumably it was like this when Keats wrote "Ode to Autumn":
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun"
and all that. Another thing that makes me think of Keats is my persistent hacking cough. Anyway, we went to the Botanics, as we often do, and I wondered why I can't grow nerines like the ones above.

This is quite impressive for November, but I don't know what it is. (Anyone?)

This is even more impressive, and a salvia. I sort of knew this but it had a label, which helped. Possibly the other one is a salvia also.

And this one certainly is - again, labelled. Colour does my heart good especially at this time of year.

Mostly, though, the colour was in the trees.

We climbed up the paths on the rockery and looked over at the city skyline.

It was 3.05 pm but see how long our shadows were. Days are short at this time of year, as I said yesterday.

The dishevelled look is so beautiful so long as you're not the person responsible for sweeping up the leaves.

On the road outside, these roses defied gravity and winter to burst over this high wall.

The skyline again, as we looked over Inverleith Park towards the Castle on our way back to the car.

I can't imagine living somewhere where skyscrapery buildings are the norm.

Cramond in November

This afternoon Mr Life and I went for a little walk at Cramond, which is by the sea on the north west side of the city, about ten minutes from where we live. And we wondered, as we always do on such occasions, why we don't go there more often. We actually intended to set out earlier but got sidetracked. It had been a beautiful day and was still sunny and mild, but the sun was quite low - it sets early in Edinburgh in November.

Lots of other people were there too: cyclists, parents with children on little bikes, parents teaching their children to ride these little bikes, parents carrying the little bikes that their children no longer wished to ride, parents with children on scooters, people with dogs of all shapes and sizes. And a few older people like us.

Many of the trees are bare now. Winter can't be far off, which seems strange when it's so balmy.

This is new since the last time we walked along here.

In the distance is Cramond Island, that has a causeway over to it at low tide. People occasionally get stranded when the tide rises.

The clouds were pretty. In fact it was all much prettier to the eye, which could take in the panorama, than my photos suggest.

And then we came home. And I'd better post this quickly or it won't be Saturday any more.

Precious furry friends

Ah, the subjectivity of pet owners. Our cats are obviously lovely: furry, cuddly, highly intelligent and ... loyal. All right, perhaps the "loyal" bit is going too far. But they're happy to live with us, eat the cat biscuits that we buy and sprawl on our furniture. And we love them.

I suspect that our neighbours, keen gardeners and bird feeders, may not view our fluffy friends with quite the enthusiasm that we do. They never say this - they're nice people. But they never admire Cassie and Sirius either.

And I passed this notice in a shop near the hospital. It has a certain tone, don't you think?

Boring

I have just written a post of such all-surpassing boringness (mirroring my life at the moment) that I deleted it. Posting every day for NaBloWhatever is all very well but I decided that I couldn't inflict quite that much tedium on you. So instead I decided to embrace the unexciting, and write about neutral decor, as illustrated above. (That is not my sitting room.)

In my somewhat restricted life at the moment, I quite like those daytime telly programmes in which people buy run-down properties and transform them to sell or rent at humungous profits. I tend to make soup or wash the floor while such a programme is on, to justify my keeping an eye on what they're doing. And they always use neutral colours.

Now, I quite understand this and would probably do it myself in those cirumstances - a blank canvas and all that. And in some people's houses, I do rather like the effect. It's just that I could never manage to restrain myself in such a way in my own home. I like colour. I'm fine with cream or white as a background but I don't really go for decor with fawn as its main theme. Fawn and brown were fashionable in the 70s, when we were setting up home, and I didn't like them then either. Maybe I feel that way because it was also fashionable in the 50s, when the war was just over and it was hard to buy anything. Fawn was king.

It always amuses me when I read articles in such magazines as "Good Housekeeping" in which the writer waxes lyrical about neutrals and lambasts the taste of previous generations. At the time, however, avocado baths or frilly curtains or wallpaper borders were thought just the ticket, and I'm sure that in ten or fifteen years, today's neutral schemes will have scorn poured on them in much the same way.

Could you live with that sitting room above? Or would you be impelled to add some patterned cushions, a stripy rug, a few pictures? Is it tasteful? Or just a bit boring?

Rather like this post. Sorry. (Just imagine how yawn-inducing the deleted one was.)

Gather ye begonias while ye may

The weather is very mild again after a couple of days of very slight overnight frost. See this begonia, still flowering away outside the front door.

And a nice lilac plant whose name escapes me, spreading happily out from this pot. And another begonia beside it.

And look at this lovely rose, encountered the other day on my walk.

But the leaves are falling quite rapidly now from the trees and painting pictures on the pavements. I should really wander round the garden and decide which tender plants I want to rescue before it's too late. Oh, for a heated greenhouse. I'll put some of them in Son's old room, attempting to check them for slugs before I do so. It's not that nice to encounter slug trails on the carpet and have to hunt them down.

As you'll gather, nothing much happened today. Except that I went for a walk, made up three beds, took a downie (duvet, doona) to the cleaners, made eye check appointment for Daughter 1 and me, made a chiropody appointment for me, spoke to a gas man on the phone twice, spoke to Daughter 1 on the phone once, Daughter 2 twice and Son twice, visited my mother in hospital, wrote a 70th birthday card and several emails, herded cats in various directions, reorganised a vase of flowers, washed the kitchen floor, went to choir even though I can't sing ... and stuff like that.

PS Happy 64th, big brother - or as you would consider it, 59eth. By the time I got back from choir, I decided it was a bit late to phone you and anyway, I can't sing at the moment (see above).

Singing, or not

My time at the moment is somewhat taken up with visiting Mum in hospital twice a day, but today I did also manage a visit to Daughter 1 and Grandson. His jumper/sweater was knitted by a Ravelry friend of Daughter 1. I feel myself that the pink in it is a trifle girly, matching (I've only just noticed) the pink trim of his jogging bottoms. But he doesn't seem to mind.

Last night I watched the programme about Gareth Malone and his army wives' choir. This young chap is a choirmaster about whom various programmes have been made, documenting his efforts to get choirs started - in deprived areas, in a boys' school and so on. I love singing, so it's interesting seeing the uplifting effect that singing can have on people who had mostly never thought of joining a choir. He's such a sweet, enthusiastic young man (the sort you would want your daughter to marry) and I find his programmes so uplifting. I was in tears last night, watching the joy on these women's faces as they made a lovely noise and distracted themselves from thoughts of their husbands in Afghanistan. I suppose that he, and the producers of the programme, were probably milking it somewhat by featuring emotional songs of love and loss, and of course this made me more lacrymose, thinking of my departed children.

I've had a cold followed by a separate cough for about three weeks now and currently sound, when I sing, like a frog eating a grasshopper. Which is very frustrating because I normally enjoy bursting into song around the house. (Mr Life is a tolerant husband.) At choir at the moment we're learning Haydn's Mass for St Cecilia and I'm having to just stand there listening.

More Novembery things

My life is so thrilling that I'm a day behind in recounting our amazing doings: these are photos that I took from the car on our way to church yesterday. They're not perhaps of prizewinning quality, but then we were tootling along at 30 miles an hour. This park is known as The Meadows and I really love it, even though this bit is just a flat green space with trees. But even flat green spaces are so welcome in the middle of cities. This is in the student area and in warm weather it's always full of young people having fun, which is so nice. Yesterday, though beautiful, was chillyish - Edinburgh's weather has suddenly changed from unseasonably warm to a more normal November temperature, though with more than usual sun.

The trees are briskly shedding their leaves and the shadows are long, even late in the morning.

I wonder if the architect of that horrible building is still alive and if he or she ever wakes in the night and wonders whether he or she got it right. I expect the university, which owned the building, didn't let him do what he/she really wanted. It somewhat mars the view of Arthur's Seat, our mini-mountain.

And this is a slightly better view of the hill, though the street furniture doesn't improve the scene.

When we arrived at Daughter 2's house on the way to church, Mr Life remembered that the shoe box which I'd carefully covered with Christmas paper and filled with gifts for someone in Eastern Europe was still on the dining room sideboard seven miles away. The church collection for the shoeboxes was happening that day. I must take it to another collection point tomorrow. Silly me.

Mum, though greatly improved, is still in hospital.

I imagine that it's the sort of story that may have gone round the world as an end-of-dire-financial-collapse-television-news humorous filler item, but if you haven't heard about it: in a little Scottish town called Oban, they had a Guy Fawkes fireworks display at the weekend that went a bit wrong. It was a professional show, and the townfolks had paid their money and gathered to watch it. The fireworks were set off electronically, but the timer didn't work properly and all the 30-minutes' worth of fireworks went off in 50 seconds. It was quite spectacular, if a trifle brief:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6QtigLJD_4

Friday morning

So, Isabelle, you ask: what happened on Friday morning before your mother took ill?

Well, since you're so polite as to enquire: the day was going rather well. Mum had a shower and then decided that she felt strong enough to get her hair done, which was a great advance, so I phoned the hairdresser and took Mum along. I then went for a little walk, rejoicing in the fact that Mum was feeling more positive and that I had half an hour to myself when someone else was chatting to her. So I walked along the road above, enjoying the mild air and the autumn colours.

This is a road about a couple of miles from our house, along which I've frequently driven but never walked for any distance.

I came to this sign, which I'd never noticed before. Fantasising briefly about starting up my own little business (type not decided) in Prestigious Accommodation in a Castle, I walked up the drive a little.

It was pleasant.

Though there was this big, forbidding notice.

In a pioneering spirit, I walked a little further, but chickened out when a lady got out of a car up by the castle and looked at me.

Anyway, if I worked at the castle I'd have to get rid of that orange wall.

This is what it looks like on the internet. Not an orange wall in sight.

Returning to the road, I passed this field, which usually has horses in it.

As you can see, houses are gradually encroaching on the fields, which are presumably doomed to be built on eventually. Which seems a pity, but then I like living in a house, myself.

The estate is quite leafy and tasteful.

Then I came upon a second notice. Finding the spelling and punctuation somewhat painful (and what is a "herrus fence"?) I decided to have a look at the "ongoinging works", which seemed to be happening up a path, nearer the hill.

My phone photo doesn't really give the impression of the startling nature of these works, but in the middle of all these nice white houses and flats, huge - HUGE - HUGE excavations are taking place. It's like a scene from Dante's Inferno - those flats at the top look as if they're built on a precipice of mud, and lots of diggers are shovelling vast quantitites of earth hither and thither. It's all relatively near the peaceful road and I'd had no idea it was happening.

I walked up the path a bit and aimed my phone at the fine-mesh green netting which screens the full awfulness from the passer-by.

Well, goodness, I thought to myself. Fancy that. This is the most surprising sight that I've seen for some time. Certainly this is this month's most unnerving event.

But I was wrong.

Remember, remember the 4th of November

Someone asked what NaBloPoMo is (I got it right this time) and since I didn't know the name properly I looked it up and found this page:
http://www.blogher.com/blogher-topics/blogging-social-media/nablopomo
which was a surprise, because I didn't realised that you registered for it and there were prizes and things. I haven't done more than glance at this because I'm exhausted, but I will at some point - it's all to do with blogging every day for November, though. Anyway, I'm not doing it properly because I've already missed some days.

To continue from yesterday - I'll not write about the morning (castle and enormous building site) just now but skip on to the afternoon, when Mum suddenly took very ill at about 3. Her main symptom was almost complete incoherence apart from saying over and over again things like, "I feel terrible." She could manage short repeated sentences - she said, lots of times, "Can anyone help?" - but most of the time she sounded as if she was talking (with remarkable fluency) a different language that sounded a bit like English, but wasn't. I can't remember anything precisely, but she was saying things like, "Cart oval fring sporn fallt premmed." And she would gaze at me expectantly, waiting for the answer, as I played this over in my head, trying and failing to make sense of it.

Anyway, in short, I called an ambulance and she was taken to hospital, where we spent many hours in a receiving ward, she getting more and more ill and agitated and unable to communicate and me talking to various rather baffled nurses who ran tests on her. We all wondered if she'd had a stroke but she also seemed hot and uncomfortable while shivering and shaking, so she seemed to have a temperature though in fact, according to the thermometer, her temperature was only slightly raised. She also had a urinary infection, but she'd had this for a few days with no apparent ill effects.

Eventually, at 10, she was taken on to an assessment ward and given more antibiotics and I came home, very worried. If there one thing that my mum wouldn't like - and neither would any of us, but maybe especially my mum - it's not being able to talk.

This morning Dr Son, who has just finished 8 days of night duty during which, as you will perceive, he didn't shave (hmm) came down from Perth for the day to visit us and his granny. When I phoned the ward, however, I was told that she was much better, which cheered us up. Here he is, unshaven but cheery.

"An old lady [patient] told me that I was a hunk," he informed me. "She didn't seem to notice that I hadn't shaved. She said that if she was 40 years younger, she'd marry me."

Cassie ran up Son's front, an operation not entirely without pain for him, and sat on his shoulders. You can just see Mr Life's toes in the bottom right hand side of this photo. He was lying on the sofa in his pyjamas, with a rug and Sirius over his legs.

So Son and I went to visit Mum and she was pretty well fine. Slightly muddled as to what had happened even today and unable to remember much about yesterday, but basically back to about 90% of her usual ability to speak.

I went back this evening and she was again fine.

I'm not a person who gets very tired on the whole but right now I am, as I said before, exhausted. But very very relieved. Urgh.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, British people.

No picture but a day of contrasts

Well.

It occurred to me this morning that I'd vaguely thought I might do NoPoGoFlow or whatever it's called but had then forgotten about it. I know that starting now is a bit of a cheat. But I thought I would anyway. Only it's been a bit of a mixture of a day and it's too late to go into it in detail. But it started with a castle and a huge building site in the morning and featured a hospital for much of the afternoon and evening.

No one is dead.

So - apologies for a seriously rubbish post but I need a long, bubbly bath.

Back tomorrow.

Some rather random blog thoughts and a bit of Grandson

These are the igloos that the cats sleep in at night, when we meanly shut them in the kitchen. During the day they prefer to lounge on a living room sofa. The other day, I was impressed to note that they'd abandoned the sofa and were presumably outside, getting fresh air and exercise on a lovely autumn day. Then I peered into their igloos and noticed that they'd returned to bed.

One has days like that, when one would prefer to curl into a ball and retreat.

However, it's just as well that it's not an option for most of us. Things to do, places to go, people to see.

Don't you wonder, sometimes, why people whom you've got to "know" quite well, suddenly - or gradually - stop blogging? I can only think of one person who actually announced that she was stopping - and did. Which was fair enough, though slightly frustrating. Otherwise people tend to drift away. Not many, actually, of the bloggers whom I read have done this. But a few. For example, one of the first blogs I read, called "Yo Heave Ho", dribbled away and ceased. Granted, its writer, Zara, had just had a second baby. (I can never understand how people with small children have time to blog.) But I would still like to know that she's ok. And she was a very entertaining writer as well as an engaging person.

Still, it's a funny thing to do, sending thoughts out into the ether; and every now and then I'm seized by the what-am-I-doing-this-for? feeling. When I started, over 5 years ago, I didn't imagine that anyone I knew would read it, but of course all my family do now and some of my friends. Which makes it a slightly different creature. And I suppose that even if we fancy ourselves to be anonymous, we all present only an edited picture of ourselves and our lives. Though some people, such as Fran of "Being Me", don't really even do that. She refers only obliquely to her husband and children and never posts pictures of her pets, cushions, garden or whatever. She's really funny instead.

Such a variety of blogs.

I'm glad to say that in those 5 years, none of my bloggy friends has died. But several have been widowed. And I'm occasionally sidetracked on to blogs of people with terrible illnesses who have since died. And yet their blogs hang on in cyberspace... As presumably will ours...

Anyway, I seem to be in a rambling frame of mind. To return to normal life: Grandson came visting today, fully restored to his sunny self. So delicious! Daughter 1 and I took him out for a walk. I love to see his face turning from side to side, his eyes swivelling as he takes in everything that's visible from his supine position: leaves, sky, gates, people. He has such an interested look on his face. What a pity that we can't ask him what he's thinking about.

Autumm leaves and girning

It's been such a beautiful autumn. In fact, I don't really have any clear idea of what autumn is usually like, since for so many years I've been stuck inside, teaching, with no time to look out of the windows; and at this time of year, there was so much marking to do at home. But this year... well, I've been tied down to the house a lot with my mother, but have at least been able to go out into the garden or for short walks.

Today, however, Daughter 2 was working at home and could keep an eye on Mum (who's gradually getting better, thank you all) so Daughter 1, Grandson and I went to our beloved Botanic Gardens. It was so mild that we didn't need jackets. Because of the time of year, the sun was low so that the light slanted and the shadows were long. But it was bright and the colours seemed particularly intense.

Grandson slept.

We walked. It was lovely but we wished that Daughter 2 was with us too.

No wind; very few ripples on the pond.

Stripy shadows.

Quite a few autumn flowers bloomed on.

Pink!

More pink!

Intense blue.

Grandson wasn't quite himself today - he wasn't as cheerful as usual, though he did smile politely in between the complaints, or girns as we'd call them in Scotland. Maybe he's beginning to teeth?

He gazes, big-eyed. It was one of those days with babies that you just have to live through and hope for a better one tomorrow.

But tomorrow, alas, darling Daughter 2 goes back to London, taking our hearts with her.