Marks Grans Blog

Suddenly yesterday afternoon I felt quite down.  Most of the time I've felt fine throughout this weird and not so wonderful lockdown but yesterday it got a bit on top of me.   It might just be because I had to go and shop.  I'm now managing to eek out the shopping to once a fortnight with my daughter bringing us a loaf at the halfway mark.  I also make my own bread but given the shortage of flour just now, I'd soon run out of flour if I baked my own bread for the fortnight.  I usually bake one towards the end of the first week until my daughter is back in work during the week and she brings me a loaf which does us till the next shop usually.  If we run out at that stage I just use crackers instead!  Shopping at our local shop is actually not that bad.  I've managed to find a nice time to go when its pretty quiet and people are generally pretty good with social distancing  However, I still find it a strain to keep on top of avoiding peopl...

My garden is looking great just now, if I say so myself.  I have a Clematis Montana that travels from our back door, right down the trellis between us and the neighbours to the flowering cherry at the bottom of the garden and during May it looks amazing.  It takes over and flowers just as the blossom on the cherry gets blown off as it inevitably does every year! This is the view of the clematis from our upstairs room window. I also have some Honeysuckle about to flower and the smell of that on warm evenings is delicious.  The veg is all coming along nicely, we've eaten loads of rhubarb so far, I have spring onions just about ready to eat in the greenhouse and lots of cut and come again lettuce to eat now.  There are millions of Forget Me Nots everywhere.  I love them growing in all the little crevices of the paths and I have Foxgloves coming up all over the place too.  Mine is not a formal type of garden.  It's what I call a bit wild and wooly but...

During the lockdown I've been lucky to have a garden I can potter in.  I love my garden.  It's very private and I have it just the way I like it.  I have a greenhouse where I start all my vegetables and grow on tomatoes and cucumbers and I have a hut to keep all my tools in.  I realize I'm very fortunate especially at the moment when so many people are stuck at home with less space than I have.  I enjoy being in the garden.  I've always craved light.  I think I would curl up and die if I had to live in a basement with little light.  I remember one time at work we were moving to a new office.  I wasn't keen on the move as it was from a bright industrial estate near my home into the city centre on the 4th floor of a horrible building.  I used to take my car and park at the top of the town and walk down into town and the nearer the office I got the darker it became as the tall buildings began to cast their shadows.  In the building ...

They tell us we should get creative during this lockdown.  I am normally a very creative person.  I do all sorts of crafts and art.  I make cards, I do scrapbooking, I knit, I sew, I paint furniture, I paint pictures - in fact I actually sold a painting recently! I did this painting at my art class and put it up for sale at our exhibition and someone bought it! I am in a whatsapp group with a few ladies I met at an art class I did in a learning in later life class at Strathclyde University.  I met these ladies at the first class I ever did there, how to draw and paint using watercolour, which was about 6 years ago now.  It was a lovely class and we all got on so well we exchanged email addresses and kept in touch by meeting up every 6 weeks or so for a trip to a local art exhibition, a coffee and a catch up and we've kept it up.  There were originally 7 of us however one dropped away a while ago and another has recently moved to Dundee, so although sh...