Mourning

RIC

I sketched this forty years ago. I am still pleased that I captured his firm jaw, the way his glasses hid his eyes, his unruly hair, and the slight irritation because he did not want me to sketch him.
Twenty years ago, on holiday we woke to a beautiful morning like this at La Motte du Caire. Those are the mountains where later that day, he died.
Yesterday, his brother rang me to tell me their mother has died. His brother is the last of that family - lonely.

Mourning this morning.

La Motte du Caire airfield today

Three degrees removed

Last year MiL moved out of her home and passed on an heirloom to us - a square piano.  This piano had been her mother's before her, and it has been in the Green Room at Drury Lane, before being taken up to Sheffield and played in the theatre there during the war.  After her mother died, it stayed with her father and then with her stepmother, who had it for decades.  Her stepmother wasn't a pianist, and didn't really appreciate this piece of furniture, at one time apparently she considered pulling out its insides and turning it into a drinks cabinet! When her stepmother moved out of her home to a care home, MiL had the square piano again.  Being the worse for wear, she had it restored, lovingly and carefully restored by Douglas Hollick.

But transporting it to our house meant it needed retuning.  Our musician neighbours put us in contact with the Royal Academy of Music where we found someone who now enthusiastically tunes our piano.  He's going to contact Douglas Hollick to talk about the piano and whether to tune it up.  At the moment he's tuned it to 392 herz because otherwise it is going out of tune too quickly.  When he came this year to tune it, we discovered that he knows my late husband's best friend from school - my husband's friend's friend makes us three degrees apart I guess.

Xmas eve farce

Christmas starts:

• Mother has forgotten the spare batteries for her hearing aid.
• The flat roof above the visitor's room is leaking, so has dripped onto mother-in-law's bed all night.
• Aunty is cold.
• Husband is stressed.
  

Mother-in-law has spare hearing-aid batteries for mother. We've moved mother-in-law's bed, covered it with a plastic table cloth, put a bucket under the drip, and woken up teenager in the attic to go through her bedroom to shovel the snow off the darned damp roof!

In the sitting room we now have two radiators on and a halogen heater and a oil filled radiator.

We go and watch a pantomime this afternoon.