Peregrinations

Since last sitting at my desk, I have been travelling around Britain and generally having a good time. There has been a lot of cake:

 

Lots of memories:

April 1973

Revisiting of special places:

Hawk and Buckle April 2013

Swallow Falls 1973

Caernarvon Castle 1973

The MM and I were celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. Our plan had been to have a quiet weekend away but our son and daughter had other plans and we were swept away in a whirl of gatherings, champagne, dinners and visits. After a weekend of fun here with the family, they packed us off to 

in North Wales to stay in the seventeenth century coaching inn where we spent the first few days of our honeymoon. The mountains, castles and coast looked the same and, as long as we avoided mirrors and shop windows, we imagined we were the same young people who went there in 1973!

A trip into the past

Since retiring, the days and even months seem to slip by without my taking any particular note of them. Random Distractions' fifth birthday passed last month without any fanfare but today I had a reminder of some of those early days of blogging when someone kindly left a comment on this post from 2008. I am afraid I was singing the praises of my son on that occasion, too!

Looking back at the topics I used to write about, the blogs I followed and the friends I made then, has been really interesting. Some of the people I got to know continue to be friends -  D of 60goingon16 has become a close personal friend, while others remain in their 'virtual' state but are treasured nonetheless.

Random Distractions has changed more than I expected, though. I used to write far more about books and current affairs. Life has disrupted my reading time, so I rarely review books now; the birth of three grandchildren has led me into knitting and sewing and granny boasting on a scale I never imagined to be possible; and a few unpleasant disagreements led me to avoid writing on controversial subjects. The newly retired professional woman turned into a domestic grandmother!

Spring is definitely in the air now so perhaps it is time to dust the cobwebs out of the old brain. I'll let you know how that is going after my trip to Oxfordshire later this week to celebrate two grandchildren's birthdays. You see what I mean..........!

Spring in the air

Apple In and Out .... and gone

My mother-in-law, Dorothy, has been living with us for almost two years. She will be 94  at the end of November and is physically quite well, if not very mobile but her memory is poor. At first it was just her short-term memory and we have learned to live with the fact that she does not retain information for more than a minute. Her long-term memory, though, was pretty sharp until a few months ago. She loved to talk about her childhood in Devon, her experiences in the second world war and her years in Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) with her young family.

The memories began to be muddled, so I made albums of her photographs, letters and newspaper clippings with clear labels of the names of people and places but I saw recently that she has crossed out some of my labels and written new, incorrect ones.  I find it rather sad to think that such a long life can be fading into an inaccurate blur but she seems to be quite happy with her misremembered stories.

Dorothy was never a good cook but she had a passion for traditional Devonshire food as made by her grandmother and great aunt. She learned how to make Devonshire clotted cream so that she could have a regular supply in Africa with her other culinary success, Devonshire Apple In and Out.  She would never give anyone the recipe for this and now she has forgotten it but I found it in a book of traditional Devonshire recipes and decided to make some to stir her fading memories.

It is a very simple pudding, originally made with suet and steamed for an hour or more but I adapted it to bake as a sponge pudding and it worked very well.

Devonshire Apple In and Out
6oz flour
4oz fat
4oz sugar
1 egg
1lb apples

Rub the fat into the flour then add the sugar and beat in the egg. Peel  the apples and slice them directly into the mixture in a buttered pudding dish.

Bake at 350F/180C for about 30 minutes.
 (If using suet, steam in a greased basin for 1hr 15mins.)

I used butter and brown sugar in mine and this is how it turned out:

My husband prepared his mother for an exciting surprise and I brought in a portion of the pudding, served with vanilla ice-cream. Dorothy's reaction? "Oh, how lovely. Ice-cream!"

In, out, gone.

An evening with Chris Barber

Still here!

My thanks to those RD friends who have noticed my absence, there is nothing wrong that an extra pair of hands and ten more hours in the day wouldn't cure! Life has been getting in the way of writing the blog. I seem to be busier now than ever I was before my retirement, or perhaps it is that everything takes longer nowadays.

This is the busiest time of the year for me, when I am organising the summer camp for the diocese. It has been a particularly difficult time because the school we have used for the last 9 summers suddenly increased their charges by 62%. It looked like the end of the camps, which have been running for over 50 years, and I had drafted my letter to the priests of the diocese and arranged a meeting with the bishop to break the news, when the Abbot of Buckfast Abbey came to our rescue and offered us the use of their guest house. So, I have been busy visiting Buckfast, attending meetings and getting out posters and application forms. It is all very exciting but really exhausting and I shall be involved in camp-related activities until the middle of August, so blogging is likely to be sporadic.

In between trips to Plymouth, Buckfast and Exeter I have been getting ready for the first visit of baby Amelia. The MM is off to London tomorrow to fetch her (and her mummy, of course). We will have them to ourselves for a week and then our son-in-law will come to claim them back! My daughter asked me to make a play mat as Millie is now six weeks old (today) and getting ready to learn! I have made a reversible mat so that she won't get bored: side one is some Suzy Spafford 'Suzy's Zoo' fabric and the reverse is the monix attempt at appliqué animals. I am expecting baby Amelia to know all the animal names and sounds by the end of the week.



I have managed to read my favourite blogs even though I've had no time to write anything myself. This post by D on 60goingon16 about '60s humour, including a clip of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, had me laughing all the way down the M5!

I'm adding lots of labels to this post to make up for my poor output!

PS Latest on 'The Enchanted April' - Tattytiara hasn't been in touch yet to claim her book prize. I'll wait a few more days and then draw another name out of the hat if I don't hear from her.

Growing old 'grey'cefully?

It has been rather serious around here lately, so I thought I'd do something really trivial and silly today!

There was a feature about grey hair on yesterday's Woman's Hour on Radio 4. Apparently dyeing one's hair is not the secret, shameful thing it used to be. Nowadays, grey hair is not a sign of wisdom and experience but the mark of someone who doesn't care about their appearance or, perhaps, has given up on life. Everyone is afraid of dying so they are staving off the evil hour with hair dye!

In case you're wondering about the odd picture, below, this is the only record of the minutes after baby Amelia's birth. I forgot to explain to the MM how to use the auto function on my camera and the picture is overexposed. However, it does illustrate that Amelia appears to have inherited my hair colour - our hair and the chair being the only parts of the picture to have been recorded for posterity. As yet, I haven't needed to consider hair dyes. You might notice a few silvers among the brown but not enough to concern me.

Ah, now you have it: "concern me". The language we use about our hair colour reveals that underlying feeling that grey is not necessarily a desirable shade. I don't know why that should be. My sister and most of my friends have been grey for years and I think they look great but I wonder if I want to join them.

Another point the programme presenters made was that the colour people choose to dye their hair is not, as it used to be, blonde but dark brown. Ironic, isn't it? I now look like a grey-haired woman who has dyed her hair!

Lost in cyberspace?

How I wish I had a resident IT expert to consult. I have had so many problems in the last two weeks, probably all avoidable if I only knew what I was doing, that I'm on the verge of throwing the PC out of my study window!

First, I opened an infected email. I have what I thought was the highest level of internet security, updated on a daily basis; I have spam control on highest setting; I had my brain switched off! I saw a name I thought I recognised and when asked if I trusted this source I said yes, opened the link and the nightmare began.

My PC was invaded by every worm and bug known and unknown. I had pornographic images popping up, followed by warnings that pornographic images had been detected in my files, the police could take action and my family life ruined unless I clicked on the link to download a clean-up system. At least my brain was alert enough this time to realise that clicking this link would produce further problems.

I spent two days installing new spy and adware programmes and Hijack This, cleaning every infected file, removing every item of malware and resetting my security. I've almost cracked it, I still have a banner that appears on some internet pages inviting me to click on it for an adware and spyware security check but I'm too clever to get caught by that one. Or, wait a minute could it be a genuine Windows alert? I'm so jumpy now I won't click on anything!

My boot up time is now considerably extended because I don't just have my Norton scan, I have Spybot and Spyhunter and RemoveIT. Get through that lot if you can, you sneaky invaders! Well, last night I think they did. I was browsing through the blogs, as I do on my insomniac nights, when an alert message popped up to say that I did not have enough virtual memory space. Then all my Norton Internet Security vanished. Just like that! Not a trace to be found anywhere in the system.

I have now re-installed Norton (2 hours of fiddling), scanned the whole system again (1 hour) and now I'm sitting here, on-line and trembling, waiting for the next attack.

When I ask for helpful advice, people tell me to buy a Mac and use Mozilla. That would only be helpful if I could afford to replace my PC, which is less than 2 years old. If anyone out there can tell me where my lost programme went to and why and what I can do to prevent it happening again, you can have as much chocolate cake as you can eat.

Signed Desperately Distracted of Devon

Exhausted of Devon

I have spent the last few weeks driving up and down the A361 and the M5 motorway. I even covered a significant stretch of the A38 yesterday. I have attended meetings and courses, given lectures and attended yet more meetings until I am so tired that I can't sleep. I have just returned from the course I am running, not the one I'm attending (that was on Saturday)and tomorrow I'm headed for yet another meeting. It is all getting to be such a blur that I have to carry the notes for all of the different concerns with me, just in case!

On Saturday I was in Exeter, yesterday I was at Buckfast, tonight I was in Ilfracombe and tomorrow I go to Plymouth. If this is retirement I think I'll look for a job!

I've joined the Twirlies

When my 60th birthday arrived, at the end of November 2005, nothing seemed to change. I had expected some kind of rite of passage into 'Senior Citizenship' but no new ID or welcome pack arrived. As I stood in line at the theatre, I half expected a public announcement that I had come for a concessionary ticket and I felt a great sense of achievement when the girl sold me a full-priced adult ticket without blinking.

For 14 months now, I have pretended to be part of the mainstream. I've handed over the full fare on trains, bought ordinary meals and not the 'OAP special' in the local pub and my hairdresser hasn't yet offered me an appointment on 'pensioners' day' for a blue rinse. But today it all changed: I acquired my free Devon bus pass and my Senior railcard. I may not have any grey hairs yet, but boy do I feel OLD!

I'm the same age as Helen Mirren for goodnes sake, does she have a bus pass? Does she stand at the bus stop at 08.59 with all the other Senior Citizens calling out 'Am I too early .... tooearly..... twearly .... twirly?'

SNDY (Still Not Dead Yet)

As a newcomer to retirement, I'm just beginning to get used to the freedom it brings. I don't have to get up early every day; the laundry, shopping and cooking can be done in real time, not in moments crammed miraculously into over-filled hours; I have switched off my mobile phone and left my diary in the desk.

Now I'm ready to develop some new interests and perhaps a few quirks and foibles. I am encouraged by a newly-purchased book: 'Growing Old Disgracefully' by Rohan Candappa. The subtitle, 'How to upset and perplex your children with increasingly erratic and unreasonable behaviour', is most encouraging. SNYD is one of several suggested alternatives for OAP, senior citizen or over-60 to describe this phase of life and there are lots of useful and imaginative tips for brightening one's days. I'm quite taken with the idea of 'digging up the hatchet' on page 70: '....now's the time to jettison all that namby-pamby, forgive and forget nonsense ....... just send a letter with the simple, reassuring, unsigned message 'I haven't forgiven you.' Just imagine that former boss wondering who sent it!

I recommend this book to all in their 'later middle years', whether 60 or 90. It tells you how to be outrageous, how to have fun and how to make the most of being a nuisance.

Old and Grumpy
One of the features of ageing is increasing grumpiness. It isn't simply about having more time to notice annoying things but there is an increasing urge to express that annoyance. According to the Telegraph, David Hockney is developing a fine reputation for grumpiness:

David Hockney's return to Britain might have passed quietly had it not
been for his keenness, after 40 years away, to remind us of where we have
gone wrong. The artist has taken to the streets in support of foxhunters,
complained about the persecution of smokers and objected to travel
restrictions on football hooligans. He has sounded wobbly on Iraq, sceptical
on Europe, disapproving of New Labour, and likened having to wear a seat
belt in his car to legally-enforced bondage.

This is pretty impressive but not in the same league as a letter sent to my local paper, the North Devon Journal, by one N.J. Greenslade:

As a lifelong member of the South Molton community, aged 64, can you please
get someone to give me the answers to the following questions.

Firstly, we seem to have several derelict 'bomb sites' - being the disused
land by our car park, the YMCA and the old infant school in New Road. Why is
this? Plus, why are the streets littered with dogs' mess, and why do some
councillors not have the time to speak to you? "Make an appointment" we're
told. There are no cycle paths in South Molton either, and the crossing
near Boots the chemist is in the wrong lace, and why is one of the flashing
beacons covered up? Why do so very few drivers bother to stop?

In my opinion we need a mini roundabout at the top of New Road beyond
Somerfield. Cars and motorbikes are racing around the town at all times - far
too fast. Cars in the Square park in a dangerous position on double yellow
lines. Why?

There's illegal drinking in the park, not enough policemen or a proper zebra
crossing in New Road. Toilets in the pannier market are disgusting and need a
good coat of paint and finally, how long has the Health Centre been closed
between 1pm and 2pm?

Now that really is a grumble!