Orkney

By now, we should be just off the Scrabster ferry (given today’s weather the Pentland Firth would have been ‘interesting’) and on our way to Peedie Harray. We would have come via Eire, with friends in Counties Wexford, Laois and Cavan, then Ayrshire, the Hebrides, (friend on Mull,) probably through the Glens rift valley, up the East coast thus repeating our superb Celtic journey of 2018.
Or we’d have wound up the West coast and ‘across the top’.

 I have always wanted to see Knoydart, been fascinated by the less accessible Munroes like Sgurr na Ciche, fairly doable but for the long walk in - there are no roads on Knoydart.  Now, I would find them not at all doable even with my trusty walking poles, and might struggle with the long walk up Glen Dessary! So, this afternoon I have been mostly watching other people’s great youtube videos of their long walks. Stunning scenery, but I am glad not to be wild camping however amazing the sunsets and starry nights. But I am in Scotland in spirit if not in reality.

I get a little wobble now and then, wondering when we will feel safe to travel again, stay in great places, find lovely pubs and restaurants, meet interesting people. No, we are not going to the pub today. Not even the local Stour Inn. We will wait and watch what happens.
My mum would have been 100 today. We will drink to her memory with a nice Laithwaite’s Rioja and stay home, stay safe.

Today, I have been mostly - wasting time

All those good intentions I had, all those plans I made, when we realised we would be locked down, all pffttt! in the face of glorious weather.

To edit all those photographs on pc and iPad, make some photobooks, make some hard decisions about what to delete, make a back-up disc or get a spare hard drive for storage then make the scary decision to hit the delete all button. None of this has been done.

Tidy the grandchildren’s bedroom and make it a sewing room for the duration, find some decent patterns online and use up some hoarded materials. I have got no further than tidying up.

Make a ‘When we Were Young’ book for the grandchildren with drawings, paintings and photos, plus words of life in the 1950s and early 60s when it was a different world, ‘the past is another country, they do things differently there..’. I have actually bought a beautiful A4 watercolour paper moleskine and several pages have been done, plus a lockdown diary started at the back, so at least something has been started.

But when you have days like today, -no chance.
I woke early, made tea, the whole day stretched ahead. First, the phone rang. Our insurance company, discussing an issue we have ongoing. Good start. Only took 30+ minutes but that delayed breakfast. Then the post arrived with, oh dear oh dear, a new Hub. We are supposed to plug it in right away, ready for some technical change in July. My heart sinks; anything to do with our home tec causes problems. When it works, everything is fine, but when interventions have to be made, we can’t find passwords, patience or common sense.
Today was not too bad when compared with past exploits, except unplugging one set of stuff and working out where and how to plug in new stuff involved scrabbling around on the floor and banging skulls on furniture. And then vacuuming as the furniture under which things were plugged had been put there temporarily when we moved in four years ago and was still there, unshifted, and no-one had cleaned behind it. But we did succeed in producing the ‘blue for go’ light. The pc works. The device has to be signed in. All goes smoothly, amazeballs. We feel smug.

Then he tries to print something. Printer won’t work. For once we keep calm and work out why, and how to put the network and password information into it. More success and smugness.

Boxing up the old hub to return it reminds me to find a card for a friend’s birthday and then I have to venture into town where no-one seems to care about ‘the rules’ as much, to go to the PO. I notice that the C-19 testing area set up by the army is empty but for 4 gloved masked soldiers.
As I walk back with lovely bread and some bbq treats I realise it is now a) far too hot to go for a proper walk and b) nearly lunchtime anyway.

After lunch I give up. He is fossicking about with the pond in the garden with plans for a new filter box etc and I enjoy sitting in speckled shade admiring the work we have achieved in the lockdown garden and reading. Not even an improving book, but the second book in the Dublin Trilogy. (Funny but I prefer Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy books.

And so it goes, another day of lockdown drifting. I am ashamed. Vik has made a whole patchwork quilt and is taking her daily dips in the North Sea! Nic is learning Italian! Daisy is volunteering at the local Primary! Jan walks every day!
Where do they find the time!?!

Right, I’m Going In..

I arm myself with the necessary equipment.
Puffed down body warmer
Long warm cashmere fingerless gloves
Rubber gloves
Reading glasses
Spare sealable freezer bags
A biggish box to hold temporarily removed items.

Somewhere in this bottomless chest freezer in the outside shed is a joint of beef bought at Christmas for possible family visits. Well that isn’t going to happen, is it, and it needs eating up.
Right, I’m going in...
I may be some time..


I catch myself, too often, paying attention to my own breathing, in, and out.

Proof of age may be asked for...

Contemplating the eagerly awaited easing of Lockdown. (Does it warrant a capital ‘L’?). I call one of the other in-laws, whose birthday it is today. He is finding it more arduous than most of us, but unlike the rest of us retired ones, used to spending days pottering with ‘projects’, he, at 76, still works in his own business. And quite hard physical work too - no way is he ‘vulnerable’.
We agree a big get- together celebrate will be on the cards ‘once this ridiculous L thing is over’.

But will it be over for us? As small shops, then businesses, then Primary schools gradually open, as young families are released from their cramped flats and doll’s house starter homes, will the over 65s be told they should still Stay Home Stay Safe and paint a rainbow on their downstairs window?

Time to look online for hairdye peeps, and a bright lipstick, some new narrow jeans some new sunnies. Cross fingers that the daily exercise has encouraged the dropping of a few pounds and - come on folks, get dolled up and try to pass for 55, so we can strut to the pub. Pray that you don't look like Private Godfrey in that Dad’s Army episode where the platoon had to look younger, I forget why, where they ended up looking like Robert Smith but not in a good way. (The Cure). Choose a pub with a garden, pick a shady corner and send the youngest person in for the drinks. Don’t order sherry, babycham or a pint of mild, go for a bucket sized glass of pinot grigio or a pint of eurofizz. One hopes the bartender won’t squint suspiciously over the bar and ask to see proof of age. Just don’t proffer your bus pass.

Lost in Music

Drifting through another Lockdown day, hunting for a lost cd. Yesterday evening, between ‘Masterchef’ and ‘Taskmaster’ we watched another episode of ‘West Wing’. (On our second ride through its 7 Seasons and wishing the fairytale of intelligent, principled US politics could come true,). The title of the episode was ‘Somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail’. What a track, what an album that is, I thought. Find it and play it tomorrow.

Of course, I find every Don Henley album that I have, sitting correctly between Hendrix and John Lee Hooker, except The End of the Innocence which is the album I need. So what was left of the morning was spent checking through the cds on Billy, re-filing a couple, removing two more for the charity shop, (Razorlight and Wet Wet Wet fyi), wondering who Moriarty are and planning to play it later and putting last night’s Craig Charles’ programme on bbc Sounds to listen to whilst doing some minimal am housework. Then ordering that cd from Amazon.
A pretty typical morning I’m afraid, but hey, it’s Saturday, I am truly retired and apparently vulnerable, so it’s all guilt-free. Although the choc-hazlenut croissant from lidl, saved from yesterday, and about to be eaten with a coffee, won’t be.  

Brrrr

I have just bought another bag of mealworms while I was out. The robins and blackbirds hoover them up, leaving more of the other food for the other birds. By ‘eck, petal, it’s cold. But the, it is winter, isn,t it? And local farmers are hugely relieved that fungus and crop diseases are being killed off. Who are the people shutting schools, cancelling trains, saying “ah well, it’s not worth investing in winter machinery any more.
What machinery did we have in the 50s and 60s when winter was a normal phenomenon? Gritters were two blokes on the back of a council flatbed truck with shovels. More council workers cleared crossroads and zebra crossings while car owners put onwinter tyres and got on with it. Householders did their bit by clearing paths and spreading cinders; everyone had coke stoves and open fires then. (And upstairs, no heating, frost patterns on windows and extra eiderdowns.)
Schools never closed unless the toilets, outside of course, froze up. If the boilers broke down you wore your coat in class. Although most PE Games sessions went ahead, the class in knickers and aertex shirts shivering in ice playgrounds which we had polished with slides during breaktime, sometimes it was just too snowy. Then you did wonderful Music and Movement inside, or country dancing, us Sarf Lunnon kids barefoot on bits of squished cabbage. The big coke stove in the corner of my primary school never broke down. Its heat barely reached us, it warmed our wet gloves draped on its guard, adding the smell of steaming wet wool to that of the gently souring milk. A crate of frozen bottles, with strange white laminated worms with tinfoil hats poking out of them, was placed by the stove to thaw; the unfrozen coke- warmed milk was drunk by all of us, with screwed up faces.
No school buses, everyone walked anyway, I let the red bus go to play snowplough while I save my 4d fare and waded throgh snow which filled my wellies. I do remember my dad being late to and from work sometimes as the trains from Waterloo suffered something called ‘iced up points’.
The winter of 63 turned the whole of Shirley into a playground. Perhaps we did get some time of school then? Parents got to work somehow and Granny turned us out of the house into a white world of wonderful freedom, romping over Shirley Golf Course (usually policed and forbidden to us kids, ) and the gardens of the big houses that backed on to it, their hedgerows, fences, gates totally covered by feet of snow. We did no damage, just explored these usually hidden inaccessible properties, leaving footprints and space snowmen to show we’d trespassed.

Now snow comes down and some people seem to just wait for someone else to deal with it, shovel, lay a cloak, whatever, after all, we all pay our taxes, don’t we? Although the despised public servants who helped everyone smooth their lives have long been made redundant and where does our local council charge, whatever it’s called, go? < shrug > and clean off my shovel.

Gratitude

On the last day of my sixties, I am thinking about how I feel at reaching 70, (assuming I get through the night...) and it is gratitude. Seventy is more than either parent was granted, and I still feel deeply disturbed anger about that. My father, packed off to war aged 19, away from home and girlfriend for six years,(his r’n’r spent in Alexandria; he was unable to eat figs for the rest of his life!), returned to become a lively committed member of his community, a principled and dedicated parent, and did not deserve that bloody cancer and death in his fifties. My mother, also a firm supporter of society, volunteer, community worker, recoiled from a lifetime of small c Conservatism after she saw how the people she worked with were devastated by Thatcherism, also should have had longer to enjoy the travels she looked forward to in her retirement.

What a privileged generation we post war baby boomers still are. Benefitting as we have from the hugely brave political decisions taken in the late 40s, free NHS, education, foreign policies, many of us are appalled by the sacrifice of all the progress we have enjoyed, by a couple of carelessly casual elections and a referendum. But I am grateful to have survived long enough to feel such despair at the state of our country, its betrayal by those who, wrongly, consider themselves fit to govern us.

Perhaps the angst is a symptom of my age, anyway.  Great-Grandchildren who my parents would be thrilled by, (Dad never saw his grandchildren,) are excited and enthused by the world, they will cope with it having known nothing different. Although what are we handing them, a degraded environment? Species collapse? Ecological imbalances that are a threat to every natural living thing, especially the human species? P more than despairs, it is flippant to say he is more like Victor Meldrew every day, unkind to smile at his “Dad Rants” as son calls them surruptitiously filming them on occasions. He thinks, worries, analyses all the degredations of our current political scene, appalled by the sheer inward-looking selfishness of the referendum vote, the incompetence of those determined to go ahead with it rather than bravely challenge the attitudes that caused it, the cruel judgemental opinions of some of the louder mps.

Grateful is what I am, though, I can ignore those ignorant self serving politicians and go for a walk. We live in a beautiful county, the river our town sits by is beautiful at all times of the year, with otters and fish visible in its clear waters from local paths. The sea, coastal nature reserves, rolling cliff-tops, wonderful beach cafés are a short drive away, as are dramatic hillforts with wide inspiring views from their tops.

And breathe.
Next time I talk to you, I will have to acknowledge that I am, officially old.