Friday, June 29, 2012

Am Feeling This Right Now...

A gorgeously warm blanket of a song, a heart breaking video (or at least I think it is, plaintive things always get me).


Tomorrow is the last day of school term, the Hobbits will no longer be in P6.  When summer (which doesn't depict anything but constant rain at the moment) ends they'll be in their last year of primary school and that makes me sad.

I said goodbye to the P1 class I helped out in today.  Lots of little people hugs and some tears but, said I, we'll see each other in the corridor next year and we'll say hello!  But it won't be the same, they said.

Oh bless.  The teacher wants me back next year, oh but to make that a permanent position.  I would be so very happy.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Resolution


Do you like my skilful hiding of my government name?  Oh how arty am I.


So, Resolution.  Another title cannibalised from the P52 thing.  I'm on that again, oh yes I am.


This took me four years to achieve.  Now the snobbish amongst anyone who comes across this may look at my meagre upper second class honours and sneer.


However this is also what else happened in those four years:

  • Very messy, humiliating marriage breakdown.
  • Divorce.
  • Illness and loss of a beloved parent.
  • Dependency and then care of the other.
  • Clearing out, decorating and then selling my family home.
  • Buying another.
  • Moving mother from her home to ours.
  • Then moving all of us to new home.
  • Working (boo) and volunteering (yeay!)
  • Raising the Hobbits.

Meanwhile, I studied my level 1 introduction course.  Tutor nearly put me off the whole thing.  Two level 2 courses (including the brilliant creative writing course that I would gladly do every single year if just to keep me in).  Three level 3 courses (two of which were history as I do like my punishment to be severe).


When I finished, and I was well and truly finished, I was very pleased to have gotten my little degree - and with the mark it settled on.  Chuffed to bits and a big two fingers up to everyone who had talked me down in the past.


Resolution - see the date?  December 2010.  Time to use it and no more excuses (okay the illness wasn't an excuse as such but it may slow me down, it shouldn't stop me.)

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

A Matter Of Timely Tasting

For some reason this little gem was dredged from the furthest, darkest recesses of my warped memory as I walked the dog today and, in the way these things sometimes do, it got me thinking.

My parents had taken my younger cousin and I to visit my dad's sister in Helensburgh (what used to be a fairly nice town, birthplace of John Logie Baird and retirement heaven on the river Clyde coastline*).  Now we (me and female cousin) had a particularly awkward relationship - being on my mother's side of the family, the side that encouraged competition and favouritism.  She was younger, prettier and blonde and I could be catty enough to say she is none of those now.  She was everything that side of the family wanted, including remarkable unambitious.  Me, too much of a daydreamer for them, a common comment was "what do you want to do *art* for?"  Said in the tone used if someone announced a desire to become a tax collector.

Anyway this has nothing to do with what I was starting to say.

We went to this "Italian" restaurant where both of us picked spaghetti bolognese and yes I know it won't have been genuine, this is Scotland in the mid-80s not Masterchef.  It arrived, yummy yummy and we were asked did we want parmesan cheese?  Thinking of home cooked spag bol with a bit of cheddar grated on top we said yes please.  (Here we'll end that rumour of Scottish people eating deep fried everything.)  The cheese that ended up sprinkled on top of our pasta not only smelled of sick, it didn't look that appetising either.

We quietly scraped it to the side and ate the rest.

Now, fast forward 25 years.  I adore what the Hobbits call "sprinkle cheese" and yes, we do put it on our  pasta.  Proper Italian version, not the kind called "hard cheese" either.  Yummy yum.  So what happened?

I'm walking along the path beside the burn (small stream, I'll teach you Scots one word at a time).  I'm thinking of this for no reason whatsoever and wonder - was it poor quality substitute we got or just how things were back then?  I know tastes change but surely not that much that I would now love something I once associated with sick?

Plus my Hobbits, much as I love them, can be occasionally and frustratingly picky on certain things, cheese is one.  They love it and I would have been told if there was anything untoward about it.

Now I've unburdened this erratic mind fudge I'll leave you with a panda.






*It was too near Faslane for my anti-nuclear war view liking, at times the submarines would surface as they returned and the noise they made was so horribly metallic that it served the idea of them as machines of apocalyptic war very well.  It is very hard to describe the noise perfectly but even thinking about it sends fingers of ice down my spine.