Creating an impression

I watched, for want of any better entertainment, the BBC cut-and-paste highlights the Edinburgh Military tattoo and rather enjoyed it. I like military music if not the reason for it. A few thoughts, random and unwonted struck me. In the way that some National Anthems fail miserably to be regal and imposing (often the Eastern European ones in which the words probably count more than the tune) so the style of marching and the choice of instrument can belittle a regiment.

The Austrians - or the Swiss, not sure which, have lot of flutes which make a pretty sound but aren’t martial. The Poles have long "trombity beskidzkie" which look like Alpenhorns, sound pleasingly like mellow bass trumpets but obviously weren’t meant for carrying into battle. The same regiment did some fancy footwork and Russian style on-and-off your knees kicking but it was all a bit Ballet Rambert. The Regiment from Carolina boogied to jazz and blues for heavens’ sake - the chap with a ring of drums round his waist is to be commended for keeping up the swing!! But would you take any of that seriously when on the field of battle? I know there aren’t battlefields any more and the enemy doesn’t have to be cowed by your Haka, but the regiments that looked the most as if they mean business were the Scottish Black Watch, Scots Dragoons and so forth with their big stompy boots, swinging sporrans, Skean Dhu’s and -most of all the lusty bagpipes yowling and thundering fit to blow you off the hillside.

There was a desert regiment. impressive in their thobes, shemagh scarves and headrings, all looking romantically like Lawrence of Arabia but the marching style was a tad mincing and I felt they missed their camels. Wishful thinking of course - they have much harsher steeds these days.

Signs and Portents.

A framed Posy Simmonds cartoon about the various incarnations of a book shop fell 7’ down to a wooden floor yesterday. Miraculously the glass didn’t break. I put it alongside other homeless pictures to await the next move. It had hung in the same spot since the bookshop opened and for no apparent reason - no traffic vibration or mini earthquake (there was one in this area recently but not yesterday) decided the time had come to vacate. if that isn’t a Deeply Significant event I’m a monkey’s uncle.

Cupboard love.

I was vastly overconfident about the clearing out needed. I may not have accumulated much myself but I’d forgotten that I still live with the earlier lives of two of my children. Today I opened the door of a tiny corner cupboard and began to pull stuff out left here by Cossie. This cupboard has all the extraterrestrial physical properties of the Tardis it seems. I pulled stuff out, and pulled stuff out, and pulled stuff out, and still there seemed to be as much as when I started.

I never like to throw away other people’s property even if they haven’t needed or shown any interest in it for eight years, so I had already asked if I could chuck out the pile of magazines which I thought more or less filled the space. The pile extracted will make a difference, but not much. It took me two hours to sort the rest into ‘must keep,’ ‘must throw,’ and ‘must wash’ piles, but that was because I found hundreds (literally) of photos and went for a sentimental walk through his carefree youth. C is a well-organised chap, always has been, so many of the photos were in albums, but as many or more weren’t because, I suspect, of the sheer volume. In the albums were the photos his early childhood that he had been given by us, then there were the ones he started to take himself of family pets, his sisters, sailing in the bay, expeditions with the school, hill-walking and climbing in the Cairngorms, skiing holidays with his dad, those seen above taken on a Tall Ship voyage to the Baltic, the places he lived during his various training's with clusters of tousled-haired youths as tanned and fit as himself (often in various states of inebriation at a guess.) During the summer water-sports season they are either dressed in long baggy shorts held up just above the Mary Whitehouse Line by their skinny hips, or else they're in drag. At the end of each week the residents of the centres had to devise an entertainment for the home-going holidaymakers so there was much panto-style horsing about, silly competitions and fancy dress, for which the lads usually wore grass skirts and bikini tops stuffed with balloons, the girls became Tridents with seaweed beards etc. (the ones who didn’t try for the mermaid look). One anti-people person turned up as a Darlek. In the winter the dress code was ski-suit and goggles and it’s difficult to tell one from the other. In both there are many sun-kissed blonde groupies of the female kind. The fun continued even when he began to earn money from his chosen life and there are the same - or more - number of blondes (are brunettes more academic? Do they eschew the surf-heads?) gazing up with starry eyes at the virile young gods of the slopes.

The magazines were of surfing, snow-boarding, skiing and windsurfing and there wasn’t a soft porn pic amongst them, but as I had suspected the Pirelli girls had been pinned to the walls of the various bachelor pads he lived in between 16 and 26 in Ireland, Greece, Turkey, France (coastal, in land lakes and mountain regions) Lanzerote, Andorra - have I remembered them all? If I were his wife I might feel a tad grumpy about the twining limbs of the bronzed blondes but as she is a ravishing blonde in her own right maybe she is more sensible than me....

I’m so glad he had so much fun. Wild oats sown he was more than ready to settle down when he proposed marriage, and though they are passing through the most exhausting years with two little boys, three properties and money not overabundant, I think he’s steady enough not to be looking back, feeling he’s left youth too far behind or wishing for his freedom again.

Whilst we were in the time-share I kept calling my g’son ‘Costa.’ Yes, it’s a sign of age, but it’s also the sign of the affinity between the two of them that isn’t easy to overlook. Xander is very much the same physical type, tending right now to chubbiness (but with big puppy feet so we suppose he will be tall) and is of much the same mind about preferring the outdoors to the in. There’s nothing more the Xandman likes than to bivvy under the stars in the pouring rain. He can put up with any amount of discomfort in the blister department, get cold and wet without complaining, bitten by insects, feel his muscles screaming from hard mucking out, or paddling his canoe for hours, but put him in an itchy kilt or in front of a maths test and meltdown occurs instantly. His grandfather and I look fruitlessly into our lineage to find the genes that produced these two anomalies.

Mish-mash

Good gracious another week has passed and I've added nothing to my journal here. If I had a computer in the shop that would be a whole different story. The sad fact is that by the time I get upstairs after my stint in the shop all I want to do is nothing, which means I eat too much and watch 'Murder She Wrote.' Shameful. I'm trying to beat myself into some discipline here, gear up to writing first thing in the morning since I wake so early anyway, or at least go for a healthy walk. So far the bad twin is winning.

Little of note has happened this week apart from removals quotes, and the annoying absence of quotes for essential work like putting in wooden floors - so much easier to clean up than the white carpet now lining the living space in the next house. The french windows into the garden make egress and ingress of mud-spattered grandchildren almost inevitable.

Out in the world the plight of the poor Chilean miners gives me the claustrophobic horrors and certainly pales the artificial Big Brother situation into insignificance as an opportunity for observing human beings trapped together under duress. No prizes except their lives for these men. Although I hope they all live to sell their stories for millions..

The world is running out of helium. Now there's a thing. I'd been wondering why it has become so difficult to get helium-filled party balloons, had no idea that it's an unsustainable - un-replaceable - resource which took millions of years to accumulate and which we have squandered over the last 100 years. Divers breath it in their mix of gases to prevent the 'bends.' It's used for cooling superconducting magnets in MRI scanners and the Large Hadron Collider, for neon signs, arc welding, advertising and weather balloons, also for growing silicon wafers (eh?) It's the second most abundant gas in the universe but almost the rarest on earth now because once puffed into a balloon and let loose it eventually evaporates and disappears for ever.

What else caught my eye in the daily trawl through the Independent? The obituary of the piper who wheezed and skurled away on the order of Lord Lovat as their ship ploughed across the Channel to land in Normandy. After the event a German gunner claimed he only refrained from shooting him because he thought the poor fellow had lost his marbles. Once they landed he was asked to keep playing and did so, marching up and down the beach in the customary fashion as well as he could through the shells and over the fallen. Some said he raised their spirits, some were less complimentary in the moment.

They don't make'em like that any more! The aristocracy don't dare to be so outrageous either, or don't have the opportunity to be without incurring almost puritanical judgement and dislike. Life has gone from black and white to colour in film and TV, but in reality I think it has gone a bit grey.

And finally, my own judgemental nature reared and bolted when told about the latest conceit of the founder of the local Art Centre, who I had been disposed to admire for getting such a huge project off the ground and making a success of it thus far. Now, I'm sorry to report, he is talking of changing its name to 'The International Institute for Research into Beauty' or something equally fatuous. When I heard this I remembered selling off the art books from the shop to him, via a mutual friend. As she sorted through what she would and would not take for inclusion in the Art Centre library I noticed she had left a couple of large books, one of them photos of a performance artist Franko B who chained himself naked in a small room in the - Tate? - and had folk visit him one at a time to ask him questions or watch him cut himself and syphon take blood from himself. Not pretty but - he was making a point about AIDS and my daughter, who met him, tells me he is a gentle, warm genuinne sort of chap. She really felt he had something to say. When I asked my friend why these books where being left behind I was told R wouldn't like them because they weren't 'beautiful' and therefore not real art. Oh my! That sort of thinking eliminates Francis Bacon from the galleries immediately. And others. I might gripe about Tracey Emin but I wouldn't deny her her place in the art world, as it goes through turns of the wheel and experimentation, without which it would stagnate and die.

Does this mean that chocolate box scenes are 'real art'? I shall await education.

Moving on.

Gulls are also having trouble getting their offspring to leave home and stand on their own two feet these days. The couple who raised the usual two-egg family on the roof opposite have still to coax one into the big bad world. I thought both had flown until this morning when I heard anxious peeping from the hungry, fully grown, child coming from the chimney pot. Mother is trying hard to ignore it - I think it's a she as the other was larger and started to stretch its wings earlier.

Suddenly I am very appreciative of my roof top views. I had hoped to end my days in a nice little house overlooking the ocean - or at least the Bay, but the next move will be into a decidely unromantic new build in what my daughter calls a 'housing development' and I call an estate. No views there, not even nice old tiled roof-tops. Ah me. Still, I will be getting three proper bedrooms, a place to put my dining table, plus acres of cupboard and wardrobe space which has been sadly lacking here, so it's not all bad. If it isn't eccentric and interesting on the outside I can do my best to make it so on the inside. It'll just take a bit more creative effort. It's certainly quieter there and I think I'll be glad of that now.

I've started clearing out cupboards and am happy to see not much has accumulated. I'm really good at getting rid of stuff. When I moved here I remember my ex saying firmly that I would have to stay eight years to make the improvements worth while. I thought 'Ho! That'll never happen.' The longest I'd lived anywhere in Scotland up till then was four years - in fact I'm not sure that's not the longest I'd ever stayed in a house since childhood. So it's with some surprise that I find I have been here the eight years and even more possibly, I just can't remember which year I moved. It has served me well and been very adaptable, now it will do the same for daughter as she adds more therapists to her stable to supplement income from the shop and her own osteopathy.

I know very little - make that nothing - about house plants but have always accumulated them and they always grow. Mostly more than I want them to. This morning I've had to spend a couple of hours juggling the current cast of characters around into new pots. A lemon-scented geranium, unfondly known as 'droopy drawers' for its tendency to wilt if not watered almost daily, was only a tiny cutting at the beginning of the summer and grown purely for culinery purposes - a couple of leaves at the bottom of a madeira cake make it smell and taste wonderful and cook into a pretty impression of themselves so the bottom can become the top. I really didn't need the burgeoning abundance that is now three feet high and a couple of feet wide. A spider plant, once the tiny off-spring of an older plant, now is much too big for it's situation and has grandchildren. This I don't understand. I gave another baby spider to my daughter at the same time, hers is still a reasonable size and hasn't reproduced. The plants in her house seem to know their place. I evidently lack discipline in this area as in all things.

My mother liked flower arranging, preferably dried flowers which don't wither, fall, die. The joke was always that anything or anyone coming into our house, if it stood still long enough, would soon have a tasteful arrangement coming out of one or two orifices.

The Fall

It's taken me a week to recover from an intense time of togetherness in the family time-share at Ballater. The weather was wet, wet, wet, wet but did we care - no we did not. There is plenty to do for those who need real activity; everyone except the grandparents swam and the ankle-biters came on by leaps and bounds, I'm told. Son and eldest g'son played tennis in the rain, squash in their own sweat, and walking around lochs can be nice in the rain apparently. There was plenty of cooking for me to do (and oh how I miss the good food shops in that little town.) Also I played catch-the-grandson as the youngest climbs onto everything in sight and attempts to throw himself off. He looks like Boris Johnson (of whom I am quite fond for his humour and a certain panache, so no rude comments please.) Theo has the blonde floppy hair, squashy face, the winning smile and is rather the same build, so has been renamed BoJo.

No photos - well a few but so poor as to be useless probably because no-one stood still for long. A blurry one of the squirrel who came into the living room.

I felt sad and bereft when they went back south. The subtle change into autumn happened for me this week. I'm never sure what actually alters, the scents, the light, the colours, but something definately signals a turning of the tide and begins to carry us toward the end of the year. One clue was the appearance of the Academy students back in the High street at lunch time to buy their bridies and bags of chips, so maybe it's a prosaic as that.

I travelled south for the funeral of a very sweet man, my daughter-in-law's father. A sad occasion but the family were brave enough to turn it into a celebration and there are many beautiful moments to remember. This pretty church, St. Mary's, Swaffham Bulbeck, is where Bridget and John have worshipped for nearly all their married life. John was a bell-ringer and, because he was such a positive chap always in his outlook, the ringers didn't muffle the bells for his funeral. They rang a quarterpeel and then, of course, as we left the church, the Nine Tailors and one note for every year of his life. I think that touched me as much as anything else about the service. There aren't many churches with bells this end of the country. The huge church opposite has bells, but they must be attached to some sort of machine because they ring 'Frere Jacques' and other odd tunes on a Sunday sometimes but very, very, softly as if they are rather ashamed of themselves. Odd.

It was an intense couple of days. I'm sure John would be glad to hear that I enjoyed much of it, specifically the warmth and welcome from his family, seeing my grandsons and their cousins and, of course, seeing my own son. Daughter Sophie also joined me in London so we travelled together and shared an unexpectedly luxurious hotel room overnight.

All in all, a reminder of mortality and of the importance of appreciating each other whilst we can!