A Busier Week

I read a book this week!  Actually, I read it in two days I enjoyed it so much.  I had seen it as a recommended book in a magazine and thought I might buy it based on the recommendation so when I saw it in my local supermarket, on special offer of £3 instead of £5 if I also purchased the DM newspaper (which I can use to clean the windows!) I bought it.  For any visitors abroad DM is a newspaper I have no time for normally but I do like newsprint to polish my windows with so it will be used, if not how the editor imagines I suppose!  Anyway, I got the book and it gripped me from page 1, always a good thing!  It's called The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan and what gripped me was the 'message behind the story' so to speak.  There were two threads, one of an elderly lady who used to travel extensively but since her husband died she'd been nowhere.  Meanwhile her daughter was one of those busy people who tried to do everything for everyone plus work full time and she was wanting her mother in a residential home so that she didn't need to worry about her.  (I'm a bit worried my daughter could go that way (hopefully not putting us in residential care though!)  It was actually the elderly woman I connected with.  She realised she'd allowed fear to let her world get smaller and smaller and decided to go a road trip across USA on Route 66 and I'll not spoil any more of the story in case you decide to read it.  The point that hit me though was allowing her fear to make her world smaller.   Suddenly I saw myself and realised I was in danger of becoming that person.  I was making excuses that I wasn't three weeks on from my second vaccine  etc but I knew that was just an excuse to go nowhere.  I have been worried about going out and about and meeting people again since the pandemic.  Anyway, on reading the book I felt encouraged to park my fears and start to live a bit more normally again and to encourage that I asked hubby if we could go out to a 'proper' restaurant for lunch.  And we did.  We went to a lovely farm cafe up in the Campsie Hills called the Courtyard Cafe and we sat in their conservatory and had a delicious lunch.  It takes us about an hour to get there from our house but its a lovely scenic drive over the hills.  We had also planned to visit the grave of my good friend Sandra who died last year and of course we couldn't go to her funeral because of lockdown and restricted numbers.  It so happened her grave is sited about a ten minute drive from the cafe.  She is buried in a woodland cemetary which is very much au natural.  There are no headstones, just an indigenous tree planted at each grave and the land around it is left to grow wild.  If I'm honest, I love the concept but I didn't like it.  I'm not sure how it will look as years go by but for now it felt weedy and unloved which I suppose is the point.  Anyway, she loved it when she saw it and picked her place herself so that's all that matters.  I left some tulips, I know I won't be back but it was nice to see where she is.

Note:  I forgot to take any photos of our trip to the Campsies but I did take one of the hen house they have erected at the farm cafe!  Hubby said 'no, you can't have chickens' when I showed it to him!!

It was my grand daughters 12th birthday this weekend so we went to her house for a party lunch.  It was lovely.  We sat outside most of the time, it was one of those days that when the sun was out it was glorious but when it went behind the clouds it was freezing!  It was very windy too so we had to hang onto our paper plates and napkins!  She's a big Lego fan and asked for either Lego shop vouchers or money to buy Lego with so she'll be going on a shopping spree soon!  I can't believe she's 12.  It seems like yesterday she was born 5 weeks early and worried us to bits!  She's a strapping big girl now and our only worry about her for now is whether she'll get on ok at High School in August.  We'll see lots of her then as I have no doubt she'll do what her brother did - come to us for lunch!  We live across the road from the High School so after the first 6 months when they have to stay in school at lunchtime, she will no doubt come to our house to sit out lunch break - especially if it's raining!  I don't mind a bit, in fact I quite enjoyed having our grandson and occasionally his friends in at lunchtime.  I don't see nearly as much of him now that he's left school and I miss him.  He was warned and our grand daughter will be too, that we won't be in every day, I don't want us being tied down to school hours again.  Once he was in Third year and we knew we could trust him not to bring hundeds of friends in, we let our grandson have a key so that he could come in when we were out.  He appreciated it very much in winter!  At the end of next week our schools in Scotland finish for the summer break - as a parent I remember it being a long 6 weeks!  As a child I remember it going by too fast!