Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more
4 October 2010 00:22
My brother is 63 and that’s quite a lot older than me, and he and his wife had just about given up hope of being grandparents. But here she is at last, baby Juliette, the latest addition to the extended family.
She weighed in at a healthy 8 lbs 7 oz (3840 grams). Definitely worth waiting for!
11 August 2010 00:24
The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.
Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.
But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.
So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.
The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.
So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!
20 June 2010 22:33
First, many thanks for the birthday felicitations, folks. As it was a lovely bright day we prepared a picnic and went for a drive along the coast.
Just before we left our house I had a delivery of roses from Gordon and Laura, very naughty of them as they were just too extravagant. Must remember to skelp their legs when I see them!
We visited the East Neuk fishing villages of Largo, Pittenweem, Anstruther and Crail and then on to the university town of St Andrews. It’s a lovely wee very historical town and the only place that I would like to live in Fife. Unfortunately that’s impossible now as it is so expensive for property, mainly because of all the golf courses in the area. The University of St Andrews is celebrating its 600 birthday this year. Duncan, our eldest is the website editor there.
So after a nice wander around the town and a visit to Fisher and Donaldson the famous bakery, we headed for the bookshops. Then we travelled back to Anstruther as it was getting on for dinner time. We had the birthday meal on Wednesday in Kirkcaldy so dinner was very low key, fish and chips from the famous award winning chippy.
Apparently it was a popular destination for Prince William when he was a student at St Andrews a few years back, and he recommended it to his father, Prince Charles, who took Camilla there for fish and chips recently.
It was good but I don’t think it was the best that we had eaten, we had never sampled it before because the enormous queue had always put us off, but the queue did move fairly quickly. Next time we will try The Wee Chippy which got a very good write up in The Guardian.
Then we just went back home and ate our purchases from the cake shop. We all had strawberry Danish pastries and I couldn’t resist a coffee tower too. Yummy! Jack watched the FIFA World Cup while I had happy birthday ‘phone calls and watched a birthday DVD – One Foot in the Grave. Really funny, I nearly choked at a few points, so a good day was had by all.
19 June 2010 10:00
It’s my birthday today.
There’s a nasty rumour going about that I am 51, but I for one don’t believe it!
1 June 2010 09:00
Meet my in-laws, George and Nancy.
George had been in the Territorial Army when war broke out in 1939, so he was one of the very first ones to be called up into the army.
As we have had the 70th commemorations of the Dunkirk beach evacuations all over the television at the week-end, I thought it would be appropriate to write a wee bit about George.
In 1940 he was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the Scottish regiments, and as he was the company clerk he was given the task of staying behind to burn all of the paperwork, orders and such to stop any information falling in to the hands of the Germans who at one point were in tanks only one field away from him.
After completing the job he legged it as fast as possible to join the rest of the British army waiting patiently on the beach at Dunkirk, despite the fact that they were being bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe.
Luckily, he was one of the thousands who did manage to get on to a ship and get back to Blighty. Which is just as well really because if he hadn’t, there would most likely have been no husband for me and no Duncan or Gordon either.
The photographs were taken in the family garden after George and Nancy’s wedding which wasn’t until May 1944. Everything was done in a hurry as the whole battalion had been given leave prior to them taking part in the D-Day landings. They thought that it was very likely that he wouldn’t survive it so decided to get married. (As it happened his battalion didn’t land in France until two or three weeks after D-Day.)
The ceremony took place in the bride’s home which happened to be the Episcopalian Rectory as her father was the minister, although it was a colleague of his who officiated.
Nancy always said that she knew as soon as she saw the new choirboy (George) walking down the aisle that she would marry him. They were 9 years old then. They were 24 when they married. I suppose they might have married earlier if he hadn’t been away in the army for nearly five years.
2 November 2009 23:38
Our youngest had his birthday during the week, so we all travelled through to Dundee (of all places), where he now lives.
At Birthday Meal
Family Four
With Girlfriend
Anyway a good time was had by all and what with pizza, pasta, puddings and birthday cake, I don’t think I’ll bother weighing myself this week.
23 October 2009 23:59
People who want to find out more about their family history can sometimes wonder how on earth they can make a start.
So for a kick off I think that it is quite interesting to take a look at the National Trust surname search page.
You can then enter in all the family names which you have dug up and it will come up with a map giving you the highest density of that name at a particular time period.
For instance if you enter in the name Carruthers (that always sounds quite a posh name to me somehow), it comes up with Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland as the main area for that surname.
Dumfries and Galloway is close to England but you could never mistake it for England. It always amazes me that the place is so vast and feels so remote. Just miles and miles of hills and sheep, and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of signs of habitation. Very atmospheric though and I think a bit spooky but maybe that’s just because they aren’t the hills of home.
The internet is a fantastic tool for family research and I think if you google just about any county in Britain they will have a genealogy section on their website. All very exciting.
Don’t blame me though if it turns out that you are descended from a long line of cut-throats or sheep thieves!
One of my collateral ancestors was transported to Australia for sedition, but I’m quite proud of him. It was 1795 and he was trying to get the vote for the common man. Unfortunately he ended up dying of yellow fever. He was a tenant farmer, nothing at all exciting until his mouth got the better of himself and he upset the government of the day.
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