Being late. Visiting an old friend

Last November old friend PC and her husband came here and presented me with a blanket that says "it takes a long time to grow an old friend". He died suddenly in January. This week I went to see if I could help PC with some of his technology - and he was very technical. A geek. But on the way a couple of lights on my car computer dashboard lit up and I had to stop at a garage. The first garage had broken equipment so I went to a second garage to check. sorted it. Switched off alarm. Drove on. low on fuel alarm comes on so I stop at a third garage. I' am  now late.

When I arrive my lovely old friend beams at me having being worrying about me and not got my email - which I can't easily send when I'm off wifi. She showed me a lovely colour photo she'd taken of her husband in November 2005. He's holding a dead phasant by its feet. I'd killed it driving over to see them them and the stupid bird flew in front of my car. I slung it in the bag where it revived and started flying around until it collapsed of shock. Dead on arrival. My arrival was late. But P&P are the best of firends to turn up to with a dead pheasant because they enjoy eating game and weren't fazed to pluck and gut it.  So despite me being late and them worrying that I'd slipped on leaves, they were pleased with the unexpected food parcel. So pleased that apparently PC wrote a poem about me. Being late again this year she showed me her poem. She called it NOVEMBER LUNCH. Here are some lines from it:

... she was late as usual....

we worried

As you do about an old friend

Driving alone on wet leaves

Then she arrived with a present

A few feathers on the parcel shelf hinted

It was a plump pheasant

Broken by being in the wrong place

It would still be alive if Liz had been early

Just 2 minutes would have made the difference.....

FAther's day and birthday

 It's a bit crap.

Living with au pairs

R was Finnish. She was sensible and reliable making her a good start to having au pairs. When after a week of briefing her, I hesitated, she told me “Go on Liz - go and work". 

L from Hungary was I think our second au pair, arriving emotionally mature for her age, and in many ways very confident. She'd left a boyfriend in Hungary - she's still with him decades later. L's English was good despite having grown up behind the Iron Curtain when they preferred to teach Russian in school. She was one of the first out after the wall came down. She had and still has a philosophical approach to life. She's highly intelligent yet like most au pairs who arrive at 18, not a university graduate. Years later she's now at university. She got on particularly well with daughter, G, inviting her to come and stay with her when she went back to Hungary. The child broke her arm skating there, but L dealt with it, getting her medical treatment and to ring me without panicking me.

S also from Hungary was next, but only for a few months because au pairs tended to come in September and my work year died down in October, unless I did a bit of exam marking, and didn't start again till February. I still regret not keeping her with us for those winter fallow months. But we had a break. 

When work started again M from Slovakia came. He told us he was a triathlete and so would go out on his bike, then come back and grumble about British kerbs compared to Slovakian more dropped ones that he could quickly mount to get out of the way of traffic. The appetite of an 18-year-old young man was a shock - he could easily eat a whole loaf of bread a day. He amused the children though with his escapades, such as going out to fetch them from school without taking his key. Fortunately, he had left his bedroom window open - and fortunately no burglar arrived before he did. In front of the children, he dragged the wheely bin to the porch, climbed on it and into the house – not a good example. To me, the main point of having an au pair was to mind the children when I was working, so I could work. Minding the children in those years meant fetching them from school and bringing them home safely, but other mothers at the school gate reported that M didn't hold my five-year old's hand to cross the road. He was far more concerned about his bike and that was a worry. He had little idea what a child would do, recklessly providing the younger one with paint while he went back to watching the sports. He played chess with our son. "Of course Miss L" he'd say to me, "I'm going to beat him because I'm better than him." He was a pleasant young man. He'd lost his mother some years earlier and had a good relationship with his father who came to stay with us for a few days. He wrote when R was killed obviously identifying with the childrens' loss.  I'd like still to be in touch with him.

M from France didn't want to be here and thought I should give her more time off and more pocket money so, worrying about her attitude I rang the au pair agency who told me she'd been in touch with the agency complaining. She'd also been complaining to a French neighbour. Neither neighbour nor agency could see her point. I suggested if she wasn't happy then she shouldn't come back after Christmas, but she decided to come back, and shut up. She ate lots of Nutella and cheese and biscuits, then toddled off to the GP to complain that she'd put on weight, then complained to me that the GP couldn't or wouldn't help her. (She hadn't put on a lot of weight at all). By summer, since she seemed happier, she and I agreed that she'd return in the autumn. Then she didn't get in touch. Eventually I rang her father and asked (I spoke pretty good French). He explained that no, hadn't she told me? she wasn't coming back because she was going to university. I never heard from her again, even though R's death in France must have been in the French newspapers. 

When M backed out without warning me, it was a bit late to get an au pair through the agency, but I was in touch with L in Hungary who had a classmate who wanted to be an au pair. Be warned – she was a quite different personality from L.

So, Z from Hungary arrived. She arrived with a different contract from planned, a different situation because husband R and I had worked together, but R had died. He wasn't there to take over the children on Saturday when I was out running tutorials, and the au pair had to be available on Saturdays. Z did the job perfectly. Her sociability also was an antidote to my depression, despair, and sadness at the time. About a month or two after she arrived, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Z came through the back door with three young men following her. I'm going, "Er? Who's coming in my house? What happened?" She had a way with men. The first year, at the local pub she befriended a young man still living at home with his mother. She got him to lend her a bike. I wouldn't have strange men or au pair's boyfriends stay in my house. Not safe when I was a single mother.  So, Z persuaded him to move out of his mother's house so she could stay with him. She enjoyed cooking, like baking a big freshwater fish like the carp you get in Lake Balaton. Carp isn't an English dish, and not usually available so that was an expensive meal.  The second year with us, she met a new boyfriend with a house, so she stayed with him some weeknights, when his wife was in the flat in town. Z wanted to drive and he lent her a car. You could drive for a year without the test, and then you must take it. She took it in his sports car. I think there was a problem passing.

She baked a carp for our neighbours. One evening she was round there when boyfriend arrived with wife! She kept me amused. She didn't realise till the end of the two years she stayed with us just how bad I'd been when she arrived. She asked me why I hadn't said something two years earlier - because I was too upset then. She was too young to realise.

Anita also from Hungary, via the agency came for the last two years of au pairs. She was very shy coming to the Hungarian agency at least for the first visit, with her mother. She was then so nervous that she couldn't or wouldn't dare do anything, believing that her English was too bad. Then in December I took the children and her skiing in France, and she realised her English was better than her non-existent French. She was good with the children, even with P getting more awkward as he grew older. And she talked with our neighbours too, getting advice on how to handle him when he was stroppy or in the way of a particularly aggressive neighbour, like a Saturday when I was working and there was a neighbour’s party. P upset Mr J who picked him up by the shoulders or neck. Then P ran home and A worried because normally I wouldn’t let the children be at home by themselves, but the neighbours advised her that that P would be safer and better and happier in the garden by himself, and they’d explain to me. She stayed two years and watched romance blossom between A and me. Now she's a mother herself. 

Sharing our house

 We've had lodgers in this house for years. In the noughties, local schools had money for developing language skills so would bring in European language assistants who then needed to stay somewhere for a few months. A local teacher told us about them asking if we had a spare room and as our first teenager had left and gone to university totally clearing her room, we had a spare space. We took in language assistants from France, and Spain. They would come in October, disappear for a long Christmas holiday and come back for the Easter and half the summer term, leaving in May. This worked well for us because then our university student daughter could have her room back in her holidays, we had a little extra cash and the young (usually) assistant had a home with access to internet and kitchen. One smoked, which we didn't allow in the house, so set him up in the garden or on the roof. Once, one of our family commented that they'd seen a lodger hanging out of a window smoking, and "it didn't look like tobacco!" Another lodger had meetings and discussions in his room, which was nice - I think they were discussing Islam because someone had brought him a copy of the Koran. I did wonder after because the school the lodger worked at had an Islamic influence on its students and the woman later known as the White Widow had been a student there a few years earlier. 

Usually these language assistants were in their early twenties, though once we had a slightly older assistant from Spain. She complained that she had to take the assistant job because there weren't enough teaching jobs in Spain. She worried that we weren't paying tax on her rent and her father was a tax man in Spain. We explained about the UK's Rent a Room scheme allowing tax free rented rooms in your own house within a limit. Eventually, she found a teaching job in Spain and left us and her local school with little notice, causing the school problems but I could see her point - she wanted and needed a career. Her facebook page indicates that she's still happily working in Spain, 

Mad wife or astute woman?

BBC radio 4's report on Victorian depiction of mad women included a remark that all Shakespeare's plays were about how to kill a king and that Victorian novels were about how to get rid of a wife.

I know of a luckier Victorian wife, born Jane Johnson in Reading, who avoided being locked up, and despite twenty or thirty years of poverty, ended by having an annuity from her bankrupt husband. How the tables turned!

Around 1834, William Sugden, went to Melbourne, leaving his wife Jane with their three small children. As an illiterate washer woman, she must have found life hard, despite living for several years with his parents in Yorkshire. 

William moved to Tasmania where he ran a hostelry and had an affair that produced two sons. The business failed and he moved back to Melbourne where he ran another hostelry and as the first chief of police in the suburb of St Kilda, he became a well known public figure, strutting down the main street like the Queen's guard that he had been. . Then, in April 1843, he married a 19-year old woman, Louisa, daughter of an important business man and within six months she had a son, Arthur. Perhaps William had to marry her.

Somehow Jane knew where he'd gone and that he'd remarried. Jane and William had had a daughter, Caroline. Jane and her children had moved back to Reading where she had been born. Caroline there met and married the younger brother of the Mayor of St Kilda. Perhaps she, and her husband shared information with the mayor and thus discovered William's bigamous marriage, a scandal in Victorian times when divorce was impossible, and bigamy was illegal. 

Jane and her other daughter, Esther, went out to Melbourne in the early 1850s. When they came back to England, the censuses reveal that she was living on an annuity. 

Meanwhile, William was going bankrupt again. In the bankruptcy court, he had to explain the large sum of money paid out to a Mrs Sugden in London, but to admit who he'd paid it to would have revealed him as a bigamist. Thus he fell from grace. He died only a few years later, never regaining his wealth, and consequential right to vote. 

He may have been a bigamist, but he didn't marry the girl in Tasmania, and he didn't put his wife away as mad. In fact, given that he loved at least three women in his life, he was probably quite a nice person, definitely attractive to the women! And his wife wasn't mad. She was astute.

No respite

No respite. January is not a good start to this year. My friends of 50 years flew out to NZ to see a relative, something they've done for years. They both caught Covid on the plane, and a week later seemed to be recovering, when he died, so suddenly that there has to be a post mortem. His poor widow - away in another country. It's so hard. I've done that and know what it is to fly home alone to a house without him.

An annus horribilus

Christmas has just gone and too many people are gone this year.  In 2018, I wrote Christmases past. It was a litany of deaths in the previous few years.

This year, my annus horribilus, is a litany of deaths in this one year: husband, colleague (DG), two cousins(MM), one the son of my cousin (K), the 17 year old neighbour and then our long-term lodger (PdB). 

Losing my husband shouldn't yet happen. He's younger than my father's healthy cousin. But yes, he was older than me and not quite well without being able to put your finger on what the problem was. The medics would put it down to his diabetes without double checking. He told them his diabetes was under control and it was. 

Maybe the next few years won't bring deaths. A respite.

House sharing

Without house mates to share in Leyton, it looked like I was going to have take a room in a local convent. That was not my style! But my thanks anyhow to Mother Cecil, the head teacher at the school in the Parish of St Mary & Michael who found me the room at the convent. At least it was very close to the Toynbee Theatre  where I went every week for amateur dramatics.  That am dram group taught me the value of networking and relationships for amongst my fellow players I found a flatmate Pat Stirland. I also acquired sequentially two nice boyfriends (N, R), a flat mate and Pat's stalker! 

Pat moved in with me in the school summer holidays and I never had to go to the convent. She came with a cat & a pregnant labrador. For some weeks, we had a very mucky kitchen with puppies wriggling everywhere.

Pat was divorcing, and having nowhere to live, reasoned that the best place for her two children was with their father. She took them away on holiday when she went down to Wales that August. She came back from the long drive absolutely shattered. We sat chatting on my bed, when a flash went off. Someone in the street was photographing the car she'd borrowed from a friend. The police came. Pat was so tired she was hardly conherent and the police asked me if she was drunk or on drugs. 

Pat stayed only a few months because she'd met a new man in Wales and moved in with him, but not before she found me a couple of other flat mates from her office: Loretta & Philomena. Philomena was from Dublin I think. And Loretta? South African? Philomena moved on. I can't remember how I knew Vera from Australia. She was a nurse on an intensive care unit. Somehow we also met Graham, and he took a room - I don't remember how we all fitted in! However, the landlord did not want male lodgers, and we didn't tell  - I was the main tenant. 

Diary Mon November 25 1974

Vera & Loretta and I, finding work for idle hands, have turned Graham’s room into a girl’s room and written him a note to tell him to sleep in the bath. We’ve put his books, bible and posters in the bathroom and even got a playgirl mag pin-up to put in “Joanne.” Room – now we’re just waiting for him to come home! We (Loretta & I) are skulking in bed  in anticipation.

Tuesday 2.15 am

He believed…. ‘til he saw the tampons, said it was too much,  then he found Vera’s labelled clothes in “Joanne’s” case”!!!

I gave up the tenancy when Vera and I went to India for a couple of months. When we came back she took a flat somewhere on the other side of London.  Eventually she went back to Australia and we kept in touch until 1978 when I sent her a piece of our wedding cake but the Australian post office had a massive strike, heaps of undelivered post that they couldn't cope with and burnt, so I lost touch with her. 

For the month after I moved out, before the tenancy finished,Graham shared the house with a homeless old school firend of mine, LJ - he called her Jacko - and saw her in London a few times so through her I vaguely knew what he doing. When email became a thing, he kept in touch. Now by email we compare our families and cancer treatments!

Sharing a house with fellow teachers

 IN the 1970s I shared a red-brick Victorian end of terrace two-up two-down house with two or three new teachers. It had no heating, and an outside loo that you reached by walking through the "bathroom" though that was only the corridor with an extra door and a bath under the stairs. Rent for each of us was something like £30 a month. 

Eee! it was cold. We got ourselves a paraffin heater to supplement the two bar electric heaters - both were fire hazards. Once, working in my bedroom, the cardboard behind my heater bent over it and caught fire in front of me. I had to grab the damp towel I'd just had round my head and used it to put out the fire. Another time, our visitor, Angela thought she'd warm the downstairs with the upstairs paraffin heater and despite it being lit she bounced it down each step of the stairs. But paraffin was cheaper than feeding the meter. 

One of the upstairs bedrooms was quite big with two windows, so someone had put up a partition splitting it into a couple of bedrooms. I had one and June the other half. Bernie had the back bedroom. We could hear each other fairly easily, especially June's cockney boyfriend, Tony. When he got cross, his language was interesting, especially when he objected to us neutering a little boy kitten. He was very fond of June. They'd been a couple since early college days. Officially he didn't live with us, the landlord not wanting men tenants, but Tony had teaching practice somewhere near so he moved in with us for several months.  Two people in a single bed room - it was a bit crowded but we all got on. 

One day early spring, June received an unexpected letter. She told Bernie and me that it was from Dave, someone she'd gone out with for a few weeks in sixth form. He had never forgotten her and would like to meet. Within weeks, the two were engaged and Tony had to move out. One sunny Saturday, June disappeared for the day and Bernie and I helped a distraught Tony to pack his stuff. 

Bernie had her own boyfriend troubles. She'd had a rotten boyfriend at college who'd broken up with her in the last term, and she missed him a lot. One evening she called me, (June was out with Dave), "Liz, I can't stop it bleeding." She'd cut her wrist. "Call John" she wanted. No. Instead we went to the local A&E where she told them that she'd fallen through a plate glass window while they put loads of stitches in her left arm. She'd missed doing serious damage by millimetres.  

To distract her, the following weekend in the heat of a summer's evening we went out to the cinema. The adverts were more memorable than the film, showing us a cool ski slope. So we planned ourselves a sking holiday the following Christmas. We went to Mayrhofen in Austria. (I started German evening classes, acquired some skill in the language and a would-be swain). Bernie had the latest sking gear - lovely stuff, but it turned out that she didn't like sking so she gave all the gear to me.  She sat alone in the hotel and I enjoyed the fresh air, having my first Christmas lunch by myself at the top of  a mountain. Wwe enjoyed the apres ski together.

At the end of that school year, June moved back to her mother's so she could save for their wedding, and Bernie, despairing for John, moved back to her native Wales. I had to find new flatmates, or move into a single room offered by a local convent.

Next Stage Choir and Arizona trip

Flags united

Years ago, pre-covid, husband and I signed up to go with the Next Stage Choir to Arizona, to sing with a partnered choir there: Sounds of the South West Singers. Covid stopped the trip happening in 2020 and again in 2021. Husband pulled out. When he was ill this April, I pulled out, but then when he died his children told me to un-cancel and to go. I did. It was awesome. 
My brother! My brother and SiL met me as I got off the coach from the airport (with a nose bleed). They'd driven the four hours down from Vegas and booked in the same hotel for three nights. They tolerated my jet lag and bought me margaritas. We went out to Falcon Field where our father trained to fly during the Second World War. We looked round the museum, its planes and a helicopter and a drone. I had another nose bleed. SiL bought a book and found a list of names of the RAF graduates.

RAF training at Falcon Field 1943

 They left on the Sunday of the baseball match - they weren't interested - been there, done that.

My hotel room was enormous, with a sitting room, big TV, a bedroom with another TV and a king size bed so high you had to jump to get into it - very comfy.

Hotel pool where I swam several mornings before breakfast
(after using the gym)

Jet lag meant I was up too early the first few mornings. Here's sunrise from my hotel room window.

Phoenix sunrise in September

What was most exciting? I don't know. Maybe singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Arizona DiamondBacks baseball match in front of 25,000 people, or maybe just the rehearsal with our partner choir Sounds of the South West singers  in the corridor before we went on!

 Baseball Game  – Arizona Diamondbacks versus Milwaukee Brewers 

Later in the week, our partner choir hosted us at a BBQ and taught us baseball. The Mayor of Phoenix came and gave us gifts - a special T-shirt with an Arizona cactus on it. He also arranged for a singing cowboy to come and entertain us. 

On the Monday, the coach took us to Tombstone  and to the site of the O.K Corral . Then we went to Bisbee to  visit a Copper Mine. but that Monday was a holiday so everywhere else was closed.

OK Corale reenactment

On the Wednesday, the coach took us to Tortilla Flat Saloon Bar (where I didn't eat because I'd eaten enough already, so I drank some lemonade and mooched around the gift shop.  Then we went on a  Dolly Steamboat. Sadly it was too hot to sit outside and inside was too noisy to hear much of the explanation of the rock formations that we could see and how the south west Indians had interpreted them. But the company was fun.

Dolly Steamboat

We had a meal one evening at Kasai in Scottsdale. It was fine though some of the party grumbled about seating because some had to sit outside. 

 Or maybe it was visiting the Grand Canyon – South Rim. Husband and I went there ten years ago, and it was one of those moments when I missed him and couldn't even send him an email with a photo. 

Grand Canyon South side September 2022

Grand Canyon trains September 2022

Instead of walking along the path to see the view, I wandered down to see the trains again. 

 

Or maybe it was the acoustics at the church in the rock at Sedona on the way back from the Grand Canyon.. 

Sedona Chapel of the Holy Cross

Blurb about the dolls

We rehearsed or sang almost every day, which was great. Sadly, looking back at the original plans we were going to sing with Phoenix Boys Choir and we didn't. What else? I enjoyed was the company. Lots of people around to eat with travel on the coach with. At the beginning of the holiday, we rehearsed "God save the Queen". At the joint nine eleven concert, we sang, "God save the King".

Another lovely thing was that I met my old work colleague there - he moved out to Phoenix for the company circa 2002. His wife is a volunteer guide at the Heard Museum, knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and she volunteered to show those of our party who wanted to visit. They were so pleased that they wrote her a thank you card, and all signed it.

Here's some of the artifacts that I particularly noticed there; the Kasai dolls and this model of a maternal journey. 

Kasai dolls

Heard museum: Maternal Journey

Blurb explaining the Maternal Journey

 

I didn't see my friends, M & Em, for very long that first time, and they took time to see me again on the last day, when we were mooching around at the hotel, bas packed, rooms vacated and no coach to the airport till five o'clock. M & Em suggested we visit the Musical Instrument Museum. allow a lot of time for this because it is fascinatingly full - and I've never come across a museum like it - it must be unique. 

We went out for a Japanese meal

One of our outings was to a rather dramatic Japanese meal where they prepared the food in front of us. Every meal, every outing meant I mixed and mingled with choir members, not only my singing part, but all the others: and from the other two towns: sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. I enjoyed the company of all them, the scientist, the Aussie, the noisy one, the beekeeper. Such nice people. 

It was a great trip, distracting from the boredom and duties of home with a lot to do every day and great people to do things with, especially singing.

Leaving Phoenix

Warm and dry in La Motte du Caire

 The weather looks good for gliding at La Motte today. Sometimes you can't tell from a photo if it's good gliding weather. The 23rd August 1996 conditions were difficult with small thermals over the mountains, so the turns had to be tight. Tight turns are steep and the flying speed needs to be faster or your glider stalls (i.e. it stops flying and falls) but since you're turning, your glider then spins, which is interesting. 

La Motte du Caire airfield

Some gliders are better in the mountain conditions of Provence than others. Some gliders are more prone to spinning than others, especially if they're near the upper weight limit.

You can get out of a stall or a spin, and it's part of initial training that you learn to do that. And hope that you never stall or spin near the ground, or near another glider beneath you.

First day of the proms

 July 15th 2020 we went to the proms, leaving children in the charge of older adults. 

Today, Friday, is the first day of the proms. Step daughter #2 has just rung to ask if I want to come and watch it with them, but I've planned my evening already, with the best Booja booja chocolates and prosecco in front of the telly. I celebrated our 22nd anniversary in our usual watering hole with a glass of fizz. Daughter rang me (her breakfast time). I had a massage this morning. All in all, this hasn't been a bad day.

Father's day, again

 Yesterday was first dead husband's birthday, the father of my children.  Tomorrow is Father's day. Now my step-children don't have a father either. It's a bit crap.

The empty chair

 

Where he sat each evening

Positive or negative Easter

Today for the first time since Holy Saturday, I tested negative again for Covid. An hour later, I noticed the gadget showed a pink positive line that hadn't been there earlier but I guess I'm getting over it.

It'll take longer to get over the events of the last two weeks in my family though. If you don't know what's happened, then get in touch.

Teachers I remember

What is it some teachers do that make you remember them? 

That second year infant teacher at St P&Ps, who'd threaten to "tan your bacon". She used words I didn't know, but I watched her put a boy over her lap and smack his bottom. She told me off for not knowing the opposite of sharp was blunt. 

Mrs Pearce, 1st year juniors at P&Ps when I was too young to be in the juniors. I think that was her name. She was kind to me when I was very young and nervous.

Mr Warren, 2nd juniors at St M’s who gave Jacqueline D and me the ruler for talking. We weren't talking; we were facing each other. He told us that when we said "Man does this" it means mankind and includes the women and us girls in the class. 

Miss Thompson who taught French. I heard she was related to the priest and poet Francis Thompson. In first year, she taught her students about how the French make le poisson d’avril, paper fishes andpin them to the backs of the people they wish to tease. In second year, two of our class applied this knowledge. They were the two brightest (Peeny C? and Penny S?) and it was a bit odd that they were at the front asking her questions, but one was distracting her while the other pinned on the poisson d'avril. The class didn't realise until she was leaving the class room at the end of the lesson, when we all saw, but Anne B gasped out loud and Miss Thompson came back in demanding to know the reason. No way would I have said anything because it was too good a joke. She threatened the whole class, and I would have taken the punishment because it was worthwhile even though I'd not thought of it or done it. However, the culprits admitted it. 
Honestly, Miss T should have been laughing in the staff room with pride that her lessons had elicited such knowledge. 

Mr Ryan, my GCE maths who taught the year's bottom set and didn't expect much of me as he revealed when I got my results, “you did better than I expected." Thank you Mr Ryan. 

Mrs Bleslin helped me pass GCE maths because she taught me maths privately on Saturday mornings for nearly a year  She was Irish, widowed, and had had a stroke which was why she didn't teach in a school. She was lovely to me, encouraged me, gave me chocolate biscuits. 

Mrs Phyllis Dalgleish, collect head of drama who cared how her students did. Years later, I would have liked to contact her to tell her how much I appreciated her lectures and directorship of our productions but she'd died before the web provided a means of contacting her.

 Phyllis Ethel (Phyl), late of Digby Stuart College, Roehampton, passed away peacefully on 27 June, 2004. Cremation at Eastbourne Crematorium Main Chapel on Thursday, 8 July at 12.15p.m. 

And several OU tutors who marked my assignments and gave tutorials.

I remember them because there's an emotion connected with some learning incident - amusement, fear, worry, interest, pride. 

Favourite TV programs as a child

 My parents got a TV circa 1956, after my uncle had got one for all the family to watch the royal wedding. Our TV could get BBC and ITV. Nanna's got only BBC. 

There was Watch with Mother that I watched with my mother and smaller siblings. It varied every day, sometimes being Andy Pandy, sometimes Bill & Ben the flower pot men. I liked the Wooden Tops. Picture book was a bit boring - I think the reader talked down a bit to us.

We were allowed to watch children's television, which was before six o'clock, so I'd be sure not to dawdle back from school (then I was a big girl and didn't need collecting and an escort, and Mum had three smaller siblings to mind so wouldn't have come to fetch me). The offerings I remember were Ivanhoe, or The Lone Ranger, or Robin Hood, or Lassie. And Crackerjack. Crackerjack had a presenter with a name I'd not come across before - Eamonn - and he had a lovely velvety voice. When I was older, Blue Peter was fun.

Getting into teenage years, I heard at school what my friends were watching and came home to ask to watch them. Dr Who was on after six o'clock so that required a bit of discussion to persuade Mum we be allowed to watch it. It had William Hartnell as the Doctor and an unmemorable female minion - the culture of the time. And then the Daleks were so scary! I pretended not to be scared but smallest brother would hide behind the sofa and peek out. 

When we got nearer taking GCEs, Mum cut TV watching down, particularly worriying about its propensity to distract my brother as he also approached his exams. We couldn't watch on weekdays.  I never watched regularly again.

Christmas: Father Xmas and God

 Do you teach your small children that Father Christmas is coming, and he'll bring presents for good children? 

And do you teach your children about God?

When I was six, at a Catholic school, someone in class told us that Father Christmas didn't exist, that it was your parents leaving stockings at the end of your bed. I accepted that because it made sense. But then I wondered, "if  Father Christmas isn't true, when are they going to tell me that God isn't true either?"

They never did. I observed that my family had too much invested in the idea of God for them not to believe it. Grandparents, aunts and uncles went to church on Sunday mornings, parents had photos of a church wedding. I was been trained to make my first communion, with church plans for a big event and fancy white dresses for the girls. They'd look as pretty as princesses.

Still being enamoured of fairy stories, I looked for a prince to marry, telling my mother I'd marry Prince Charles. Reality struck. "You can't, dear, because you're a Catholic, and if you marry him, he couldn't be king."

Ambition dashed at the age of six!

Happy birthday me

Having a special birthday this month, it seemed worth having a bit more of a celebration than just ignoring it. After all, who knows what state I'll be in for my next big 0 birthday?

There's a local tea shop that does yummy cakes, decent tea, and an elegant espresso, with a separate couple of rooms upstairs. I talked to its propiator, Nicki. She was happy to cater for up to 18 people up there, and would bake me chocolate gluten free birthday cake with candles. 

I invited about a score of local women friends. Not all could come; we ended up with around a dozen. But some had never met any other friends of mine before and some were going to know only each other, like the choir sops. How to get them to mingle?

Now the thing about getting older is that you've done lots of interesting things, so I got a quiz together, contacting each friend beforehand to ask for fun and interesting facts about them. Then I put the facts together as a quiz for them to ask each other and find out about each other. 

Here are some of the facts.

• Who appeared on the BBC milking a cow?
• Who fell into the sorting machine at the council rubbish tip! 
• Who has a model village with a hamster buried in a mahogany coffin under the parish church?
• Who was asked out by Vice President Johnson of the United States?
• Who fed hamburgers to lions at Tampa?
• Who went to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party in 2012?  
• Who completed a 2100m x 8 zip wire challenge in Split, Croatia!
• Who lived on a farm in Norway, also in a cabin in the woods?
• Who walked into the Louvre when it was shut because the security guard thought she was staff?
• Who trespassed in the Karnak temple in Luxor, Egypt, after closing time?
• Who is studying an OU law degree?
• Who did a masters at Oxford at 57? 
• Who got married to Davey Jones from The Monkees twice a day for two months?
• Which mad, irresponsible mum (and dad) took toddlers to an uninhabited island off the coast of Malaysia where there were no people or electricity or phones but large monitor lizards!
• Who's done at least 25 amateur musicals including playing Annie in Annie get your gun, and Roxie Hart in Chicago? 
• Whose first serious full-time job was as a milk woman and was taught by a milkman called Ernie?
• Which woman here has pulled a car?
• Who is a Morris musician and dancer?
• Who's got a 16.2hh chestnut sports horse?
• Who's been sky diving?
• Who was a games maker working at Greenwich at the equestrian event for 2012 Olympics?
• Who overcame extreme fear on canopy walkways in Malaysia, Sydney Harbour Bridge, the cathedral in Milan and Sigiriya Rock in Sri Lanka?
• Who caught a 7-foot-long sail fish?
• Who's met the Queen?
• Who collects mechanical clocks?
• Who's bathed on a beach in Goa?
• Who's flown a glider round a preplanned 100km route?
• Who's got a black belt in a martial art?

Aren't my friends interesting?! You recognise the facts about me? After about an hour and a half, we had a plenary, and matched every fact to someone in the room, which elicited more stories, like why she was on a zip wire in the first place, and what answer she gave VP Johnson. It was a fun couple of hours. Thank you my friends.

Happy birthday, Mum

My mother recorded in her family history

On the morning of October 22nd 1923, in Bootle on Merseyside, two little girls were going to school. They were cousins, eight years old and good friends. Their route to school took them down Linacre Lane, across Stanley Road, and on through side streets to St. James' Select Catholic School. It was on one of these side streets, Balfour Road, skipping and playing as they went, that one of them, named Edith, but at this stage of her life known in the family as Girlie, looked behind them and said, 'Look Gracie, isn't that your Dada?'

Grace turned round and saw her father on his bike, head down, pedalling rapidly towards them. Before he reached them however he crossed the road, parked his bicycle and hammered urgently on a house door. Grace and Edith called and waved but he neither saw nor heard them. The door opened and he vanished inside. The two little girls went on their way wondering what it was all about. Grace found out when she went home for dinner. As she went up the entry which  led to the back door of the house she passed her Aunty Sally, Edith's mother, who smiled at her and said, 'Hurry up, there's a real live doll for you at home!' In her mother's bedroom a minute baby sister lay in the cradle, and the midwife, so suddenly and urgently called for had just left. Willie, her younger brother, had been called in from play to see his baby sister but had been more interested in enquiring of Nurse Scott why his mama was in bed in the middle of the day. Five weeks early, a not really wanted fourth child, born nearly five years after the family had, hopefully, been completed, I lay in the cradle and cried lustily. The midwife,calling a few days later when my mother was downstairs again and busy in the kitchen, listened and said with satisfaction and some surprise, 'Well, that's not a premature cry!'

I was small though, and weighed only four pounds when weighed for the first time, fully clothed, at four weeks. My father held me easily in one, admittedly rather large, hand and used to tell me that my head was no bigger than an orange. "No bigger than that!" he would say, picking one out of the fruit bowl to show me. But I thrived, and was showered with love and attention by parents and siblings. My mother had born the other three closely, one after the other, during and just after the first world war. With her husband away at sea and in danger, she, alone and pregnant, must often have been too weary and too worried to enjoy her family. And our father, having missed much of his children's babyhood became a rather strict Victorian style parent on his return. For both of my parents this new 'unwanted' baby was a new shared experience.

Mum thrived indeed, living into her nineties. Happy birthday, Mum. Remembering you.