Preparing for October

This last week I've mostly been preparing for our holiday. I've packed and repacked, listed what to pack, found a suitcase to pack, window shopped for other suitcases. So all rather muddly and messy.
The hens have someone to keep an eye on them and collect their eggs - not many at the moment.
WE're going on our first cruise ever. Normally we go on rambling holidays with the company Ramblers.
But this time we're going on one of their Cruise and Walk to Discover the Baltic. We go through the Kiel Canal, to Copenhagen, then Tallinin in Estonia, and spend a day at St Petersburg. We return via Riga in Latvia and Warnemunde with a trip to Rostock, before coming home. It'll take two weeks.

Big big books

I do wish that publishers would create books that I can carry. Look at the size of this Jodi Picoult book - a hardback that didn't cost much, yet it is enormous. Compare its size to those paperbacks of the fifties and sixties, and of earlier, when books were expensive. Then you could fit a book into a handbag, or even a pocket, to read it as and where and when was convenient. Now you need a desk to hold these big books as you read them because they are so heavy.
One of my favourite old books is Arthur Ransome's Old Peter's  Russian Tales, which is a small now battered red book of six and a half inches by four and a quarter inches by less than an inch.  The edition I have was printed in 1942 and became my mother's in 1943. It is small enough to hide in a deep pocket, or a small handbook, light and easy for travelling. Perhaps I'll take it on holiday in October.
Do we have to be so ostentatious that we show what we're reading instead of just enjoying that private moment in another world?

La Motte du Caire gliding

La Motte du Caire airfield used to have a web cam but it's not been working for six months. Today I cannot look at the airfield, out to the mountains.

Belonging to sports clubs

"Tell us about sports clubs you have belonged to", asked a Toastmaster.
Now I belong to a tae kwon do club, where I kick people, or rather I get kicked, cos the idea is that it's a defensive martial art, and I should be able to block kicks and punches. I like the club, not only because of it being a fun way to get and keep fit, but also cos I learn new things, things I find hard to do and so I achieve when I do them. And on top of that, it's a mixture of people training, old and young. I'm probably the oldest in the club, but I train with 16 year-olds and even with six-year-olds. That can be fun.
Decades ago, I joined a gliding club. As a young single woman, I immediately realised this was a good idea for the amount of talent on the field, literally on the gliding field. Many healthy young men with enough energy, intelligence and money were out on that gliding field. You have to have a job and some money to afford to fly. So there weren't many women competing for attention but plenty of men: tall men and short men, men in the services and men at the local university. Some were highly educated, but one, learning I was teaching English as a Foreign Language to non-native English speakers, said, "Oh great! I'm trying to get my English 'O' level." That was not a good pick-up line for me. One young man was tall and blond and beautiful and intelligent - he hardly noticed me. Another somewhat plump chap with straggly whiskers would come on the field in wearing green operating theatre pyjamas being a trainee doctor. The summer of 1976 was incredibly hot so the pyjamas were understandable because they were so comfortable. I discarded him because of his desert's disease (wandering palms).  My language students and I had to beg lifts out to the airfield, and one day a curly haired young man with thick rimmed 1960 style glasses and a geeky jumper picked us up in a big white Volvo estate. Not trusting his driving I sat in the back but leaned over to remark on all the fancy dials on his car's dashboard. That drew his attention to me. When we'd finished gliding, that evening, several of us went out for a meal together, foreign students, green pyjamas, blond beauty, geeky glasses and I. Then we went back to someone else's for a drink. But finally, geeky glasses and I finished the evening together for coffee.
 
Fellow toastmasters, I married him.

Another funeral

Mum's older cousin died a few weeks after her. He was the last of her cousins, the last of  that generation.
This photo is of him on the canal trip we made in 2013 at Birmingham, a family get-together that one of my cousins organised. Thanks to him I knew my mum's cousin and his family.

"Slightly nutty Nanna"

"Slightly nutty Nanna" is the fond epithet afforded me by one of my relations, a SiL. I quite like SNN. If I weren't slightly nutty, I wouldn't at my age be able to do the physical things I can do, like tae kwon do. It's thanks to another relation that I took that up in my early fifties, keeping a teenager company. Now another teenage relative keeps me company at tae kwon do.
Slightly nutty Nanna last week had the good luck to be invited on holiday in Bavaria with a family of young relations, where we climbed every mountain (well we walked up one),  and drank copious amounts of Bavarian beer, that is, some of us drank beer and none of us drank copious amounts.
One afternoon, leaving Gran'pa behind, we went for a first ride ever for some of the shorter members of the family, in a cable car, and a round trip walk in the lower slopes of the mountains. We saw black butterflies with white tips, a huge ant hill, and several cows or bullocks with bells called scheller.

We crossed a bridge on the way.
"Beware of the trolls!" warned SiL. SNN threatened to puke on them to scare them off.

Our Ferienhaus (holiday cottage) was near the bottom of the mountains, but still an 800m walk up from the town (Oberstdorf). Each day, above the summit of the mountain, we watched yellow, flamingo pink and white sails of hang gliders whose pilots must have taken the cable car on and on further to the very top. Somewhere up there, they jumped off into the air a couple of thousand feet above our Ferienhaus, soared in any thermals they could find, then glided down to the landing field in the valley below us. You could hear a raucous chain saw and the rushing of the river, an occasional bird twitter and an engine from the cable car vibrate far off from the house. Husband alias G'pa stretches out on the path sunbathing his hands sheltering his eyes

Mum

My happy mother, beautiful mind, fun to be with.

May month

May was a busy month for

• work, which I enjoyed because it included a writing week with research colleagues in a Cotswold village. See some photos on Twitter or Facebook
• meeting old friends from decades ago when honorary degrees were awarded at the Royal Festival Hall 
• visiting aged auntie and getting her old carpet changed for new. No flying carpets, or magic lamps or genies sadly. 
• washing a hen. And losing an old one.
• Just a nice month - sunset near us

New hens

I'm back to five hens now. Two new ones joined us a couple of weeks ago. One is a Rhode Island Red, and the other some sort of Ameraucana, with a fluffy tail and a coronet of feathers. We'll call her Crown or Queenie (to go with Lady Grey).
Lady attacks them both to make sure they knows their place in the pecking order. Here's Ebony. Her feathers are black with a glint of petrol green.
And we're getting eggs again. Good.

Three funerals

Going to three funerals in less than a year is a bit unfortunate. This week the third of the funerals was of a colleague, Sheligh, a couple of years younger than me. She used to tease me about being older than her, yet she's died. She got liver cancer. Why? It's supposed to be rare, yet I know three people who've had liver problems, two died, one had a transplant.
Sheligh used to help us with all the practicalities of research, like finding recording devices, and she kept our grumpy director of studies in order, inquiring sweetly when he was effing and blinding, "problem Geoff?" She asked to go part-time, but they said it was a full time job, so she retired early. They first replaced her with a part-time temp - so much for it being a full time job, and then removed the post. In the meantime, Sheligh who'd thought to fulfill her pleasure in gardening, developed arthritis in her fingers and couldn't enjoy that part of her retirement so much. Then the cancer - they discovered it too late to do anything. She leaves a husband and four children. Sad.

Family influence

Today is my son's birthday. He influenced his family, and one really good influence happened on a car journey. Son sat next to me as I worried about my doctoral viva, and he told me about Toastmasters, the club where you practise speaking in front of people. He asked me to speak for two minutes about my doctoral topic, and I did!  Shortly afterwards, I found our local Toastmasters club and joined. It was such a useful experience that I told his sister, and she joined. Then a year or two later, when his step-sister had to make a speech at a wedding, she joined, and she got her partner to join too. The two of them got so involved that they were on the local committee helping out a lot.
All through the influence of one member of the family.

My hen, Gigi

I had a hen and my hen pleased me and I fed my hen under yonder tree. Pretty hen, Gigi, is no more. She'd been sitting around looking sorry for herself for the last five days, walking, no, waddling, less and less. Tuesday she sat under the Hazel tree, which when I noticed because the other three hens came running out to me but Gigi just stayed nestled in the leaves. Each day got worse. Yesterday morning she struggled to leave the coop, so I took her to the vet.
The vet said she was egg bound. Gigi hasn't been laying eggs for weeks and months, but I wasn't surprised because of it being winter, and she is a bit old at three years. But apparently she'd still been ovulating, the yolks had got stuck at some damaged place in the oviduct, and accumulated in the abdomen, gathering germs. The swollen abdomen made it hard for her to breathe, and eating when you can't breathe is difficult. Her crop was empty and she was very thin. Poor thing looked as unhappy as my 93 year old mother.
I left her at the vet's.

Lime blossom tea - not for the wasps

The council, one of them, town or vale or county, has pollarded the limes in our street.
Perhaps this Autumn we'll have fewer wasp nests because there won't be as many insects enjoying the  sweet lime sap for the wasps to eat.
On the other hand, this year I won't be getting my fresh lime blossom tea from these trees.

Tae kwon do progress

My daughter needed to do a sport for her Duke of Edinburgh Award, and found and chose a local tae kwon do club, to which I had to take her. It wasn't a very salubrious walk however, so I would stay and wait for her. Boring!
Then I realised that Bytomic tae kwon do isn't just for kids; they were taking from six to fifty-six. I was then younger than 56 so I joined in. Years later, I'm still going, have attained first Dan black belt and know a lot more about Korea where this martial art started in 1956, than I ever guessed I would! And am I fit! From a health check I had a month or so ago my metabolic age apparently is younger than my chronological age by about 15 years. That means I'm metabolically younger than I was when I started tae kwon do.
I don't rate my skills highly though, so I need extra practice and training, probably more than the younger members do in order for me to keep up with them. Some ways I do that are to

• go to more than one class a week 
• cross-train with a variety of instructors, 
• attend the black belt sessions every six months
• aim to grade
• participate in tournaments

Now I'm so pants, so slow and clumsy that I have only participated in two or three tournaments. So you can imagine how chuffed I am that at yesterday's tournament I gained a medal for my pants patterns!
I must tell my daughter. And by the way, they've taken away the upper age limit, so if you're near or over 56, please come and join so I'm not the only older woman in the club.

Biphosphonate news

Today the BBC tells us that Osteoporosis drugs may make bones weaker drug.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39122541. Their apparent success has been that when bone density is measured, it is denser when on the drugs than off. But that doesn't say what the quality of dense is. The Eiffel Tower would be denser if you put concrete in its spaces, but it wouldn't stay up better. These biphosophonate drugs stop old bone being removed, hence old and new bone cells are present, and more cells equals denser. Now scientists have found a new way to measure bone, and find hairline cracks. Ha! I could have told you biphosophonates can't have been effective because it was such a horrible drug to take  We know biphosophonates are dangerous because they are so acidic that patients must stand or sit up to take it and stay upright for half an hour and take it with water only once a week, or inject it even less often.

In 2010, I broke my hand. Yet, they didn't check me for osteoporosis, despite being over 50.
 I should have got me enough vitamin D, then I wouldn't have broken the bone or got BC. But after the BC and prescribing a BC drug that induces osteoporosis, a DEXA scan showed I had osteoporosis so they gave me biphosphonates. A couple of years later, a DEXA scan showed I had less osteoporosis, and my GP accepted I came off the drug, not realising that I stopped them every few months because of the joint and bone pain that spoilt my tae kwon do activities. But I'd changed my diet and got more vitamin D (sun & supplements).

Imagine taking this drug from 60 till 90... that's when the cracks show - in people who live long enough to show the damage. Several of my aged relatives ought to get vitamin D from sunlight and oils. But how much sunlight does someone in a care home get? Zero. Or if in sheltered accommodation? Then once a week if someone can help to take you out. And what do carers do for elderly vegetarians who don't eat oily fish or liver as a source of vitamin D? Nothing. And the doctors don't advise the carers or warn the elderly people. Sad and wrong.

Coffee with mother

I go up to Yorkshire to see aged Aunty sometimes, passing my mother's care home on the way. If I'm there in the morning I make and share a cup of coffee with her. Mum likes coffee in the morning so I make some fresh for her. She doesn't drink much, and I give her only half a mug but she seems happy to have it. Otherwise she'd wait till the weekend when my brother is back from work and can go in and make her coffee. A mid-week coffee is the nearest I can get to giving her a treat.

24 October 2014 - the day before the wedding

Two years ago, son and daughter-in-law married. Here's the video we put together in a hurry the day before when we realised it was a bit difficult to find the register office https://vimeo.com/109978971. It's a beautiful castle - an amazing place to marry and much more romantic than Aldershot register office where his father and I married nearly four decades earlier. Mind you, the officer at Aldershot was lovely. We were overwhelmed of course and hardly took it in, not helped by my tardy arrival though I kept telling my parents a bride couldn't be late for a wedding at a register office, so I was in tears!

Aldershot 1978

The next weekend, in a more leisurely fashion, new husband and I were strolling round the local supermarket when a woman greeted us, and then as we stared, she said, "what were you doing last Saturday?" and we stared again, realising that she was the officer who had registered our marriage. How nice of her.
Someone took some informal photos that show the officer but I can't find them.  Here's an official photo as we sign, looking more relaxed than we had been feeling half an hour earlier. You can see my mother's cousin and my brother in the background The pendant I'm wearing was a wedding present from my new mother-in-law, who'd been so pleased to find something so pretty and appropriate. I've passed it on to my new DiL.

Visiting the city of Barcelona

Our holiday includes two day trips to Barcelona, the first being last Wednesday and the second tomorrow. On Wednesday, we looked round the old Gothic quarter, going round and round till I was utterly lost. I made an audioboom recording and took a few photos. See Swarm, Instagram and FB. Then husband and I dashed, short of time over to see the Sagrada Familia, Church of the Holy Family,which was fantastic worth a visit.  Gaudi designed it and despite building starting nearly 100 years ago it is not yet complete.

Here's the front door: a dove amongst the flowers

What most impressed me were the towering pillars, splitting at the top into branches, emulating a high forest, and the archways - effigies something between Disney world and Gothic.

East window of Sadrada Familia

The west windows reflected warm colours of sunset (above and here) and the east were cold colours (here).
 But time was short. We learned how the metro works, used it and arrived at the meeting point in time. But the meeting point was place de Catalunya, a huge square , and it took us half an hour to find our group. Too stressful and exciting.

Tomorrow we go back there, after seeing the Hospital  de Pau, to meet my cousin and his partner for lunch. Looking forward to it.

Back to Catalunya

Roman bridge

Years ago I was in Catalunya, La Escala to be precise, on holiday with a French family. Now I'm back again, on holiday with my husband. We're staying in this ancient castle in Cardona and learning about Catalan battles and history, and salt mines. Here's the misty view from our bedroom window one morning.

Salt mine

This enormous salt mine, 1300 metres deep, is here, has been here since the Romans paid salaries in salt.

But in the twentieth century rather than mining for edible salt they mined for potassium chloride for explosives.

And quite an explosive history was round here. In 1711, the Bourbons thought they had the right to the city of Cardona, laid siege, but allies fought against them. The history of the siege and its outcome is here.

Aged aunty's cat

Aged aunty loves animals but where she now lives in sheltered accommodation does not allow pets. Some time ago, passing this carpet shop, I saw this cat in in the window, a sleeping marmalade cat, comfy on the carpet. But it's a model cat, made of cardboard and rabbit fur! I found where to get one and took him up to aunty last time I went. When she was looking the other direction, I placed him on her sofa then stood away.
"How did he get there?" she startled! He is so life like that he gives her a lot of pleasure. She's named him 'Marmalade' and placed in a corner where she won't trip over him, but she can see him sleeping in the sun. Now she tells me on the phone that she has the cat, that he sleeps an awful lot, and that she's introduced him to people who visit, and his name is... "just a moment while I think ... Marmalade!"