TIME TO TIDY

Alastair, Dawn and Indy are arriving tomorrow for a 3 week visit.  Iain and I have Big Birthdays coming up in May so this is all to do with us having a bit of a family get-together.  Also it is a lovely time of year so it is time to get out and make the most of it!

Nothing sharpens the mind for tidying better than having folk coming to stay.  Here is Harriet in her favourite place in the kitchen - the bottom drawer.  (The tea towels tied to the oven handle help avoid squashed fingers.) At the moment the drawer has  more toys in it than baking ingredients!

Ishbel and Harriet up to high-jinx.

I might try a Japanese approach: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo.

"Transform your home into a permanently clear and clutter-free space with the incredible KonMari Method. Japan's expert declutterer and professional cleaner Marie Kondo will help you tidy your rooms once and for all with her inspirational step-by-step method."

"Once you have your house in order you will find that your whole life will change."  I look forward to that!

A DELIGHTFUL FIX

BBC Radio Scotland is presenting a series of programmes which are related to the Commonwealth Games to be held in Glasgow this July.  It is called Commonwealth Poetry Postcards where, as the blurb says, there will be "a poem from every competing nation and territory sent to Glasgow for the Games, capturing the essence of who the people of the Commonwealth are today.'

I heard a charming one today [BBC website here] written by Esther Phillips, a retired teacher from Barbados.  The BBC website shows her photo plus her 4.38 minute audio presentation.  Her poem is below.

WORD 

(on teaching an adult male to read) 



He trusted me to break

the word, crack each segment
open until the mystery expired.

Not so this morning;

he stared bewildered

at the board then back at me:

"I never t'ought dat word
 
could be so small... F-i-x,"
 
he mused, "dis word so small."



How could his daily toil
of hammer, saw and nails;
an old lady's reckoning
of last month's window
against the patching
of her roof this week --

how could her life of sacrifice
and his of labour, sweat
and boiling sun
be totalled up
in this small word? 



from The Stone Gatherer, Peepal Tree, 2009

A WALK IN THE PARK

It must be the spring sunshine that brings people out.  Or is it that everything happens in 3s, like the buses (i.e. there are none and then they all come at once)?

Well today was one of those days. I was out in the early morning with Harriet who is recovering from a tummy bug (having been picked up by others in the family). I headed off from Mairi's house pushing the pushchair like a homing pigeon retracing well-worn routes of years ago.  After my first stop in Joe's shop I headed off to the swing park and there I met a lady (my age)  from the neighbourhood I had not seen for quite awhile.  She was doing exactly the same thing as me... out with the one grandchild in a push-chair plus another one of 3 years old.

We got talking. She told me that her husband had died one year ago after a lengthly illness.  However I got an awful shock when she told me that exactly a year after his death her son had unexpectedly died.  He was a fit, healthy person of late 40s - heart attack - and these were his 2 children.

These while bluebells were growing in the area adjacent to the play park where we met ... quick photo taken with my iPhone.

Having delivered Harriet back late morning I headed off to the Canadian Ladies Luncheon in Stirling.  Goodness!  If there wasn't a wonderful lady there that I had not seen in 20 years!  She returned to Ontario, ran her own business and is back and forth to Scotland doing Granny Duty now that she is retired.  We agreed that we are both aging, if not gracefully, at least as well as can be expected!

And finally it was time to catch up with 2 other ladies I had not seen since the last luncheon.  One of them was a great gardener and trilliums were her specialty.  Here are some from the National Trust Garden at Geilston this week.  The maple leaves above are also from Geilston Garden this week.

CAPTAIN'S LAST STAND

There was a news item this week that Mairi picked up on the internet.  It was about an old WW2 mine that has been on the beach on the west side of Eigg.  The story is on the Daily Mail website here.   This photo accompanying the article has been doing the rounds on Facebook etc.  It is by Ben Cormack.

I took it from the Daily Mail website.  The caption says: "Ben's dog Captain Haddock has one last stand on the mine before it is destroyed.   Ben, 32, added: 'The mine was a British one used to protect Allied shipping lanes in World War II from German U-boats and warships. It’s a rare example as they are not usually found with the explosive casing still intact. That’s why they were very worried.'  "

It was the dog that intrigued me.  Anyone who sails knows this beach (Inner Hebrides) well.

 

I took this photo in 1997 and that is our boat, the yellow one, in the distance. I don't know the man in the photo but wonder if it is the same dog! There are, of course, many on the island....!

 

 

Again another time, another photo; this time of cows at the end of the day.  Both of these photos were taken in the days before digital cameras.