Thursday 31 March 2016

Travels With My Dog

I am just back from The North, where I saw sixteen members of my family and stayed in three lovely cosy homes, and was fed delicious food and wonderfully looked after.   B.Wiggins enjoyed it all too, with interesting walks in the Derwent Valley, Allendale and Heaton Park in Newcastle. He was photographed on phones countless times on the trains there and back and helped people eat their packed lunches and had a good time, though he was very pleased to get home too.
I loved being with the four great grand boys and the two great grand nieces and they all seem to me to be inordinately clever and advances, but surely this is a great grand mother`s prerogative.
I saw a French film,Marguerite, about a rich tone deaf opera singer, which was excellent, read Rebecca Front`s book `Curious` after hearing it discussed on Radio 4, which is funny and wise, and watched the end of The Night Manager which was satisfyingly gruesome.   Now I am comfortably back in bungalow land which seems very quiet after all my gallivanting about. 
Daughter J e mails from Ghana to say they are hot, itchy from insect bites, and a bit queasy after unfamiliar food but otherwise OK  I am feeling  anxious about them, and will be glad when they are safely home.

Monday 14 March 2016

All better now...

It is quite miraculous how well my bruised and battered face has healed up and even the gap at the end of my nose has almost disappeared.     I wish now that I had taken a photo of it and put it on facebook as an example to everyone not to put their faith in rickety fences.
I am feeling fully quakered up having spent the weekend at Woodbrooke College in Birmingham in the company of more than fifty weighty Quakes.   It is the most lovely place to stay with solid comfort and reassuringly kind good people. And I was driven there and back so did not have to struggle with capricious weekend trains.  My Julia always used to say that the Quakers were like the Mafia, beavering away all over the place and the older I get I find I know more and more of them in remote parts of the country, though the numbers both in UK and world wide are sadly diminishing.
.I have just had a lovely walk up Lodge Hill with B.Wiggins in Spring sunshine and for once we are not plastered in mud.  Just as well as BW went to Plumpton College dog grooming department to have a complete makeover the other day and is looking particularly fine. He was used as a model for an exam so it was free!  Apparently he is extremely well behaved which is a surprise.  
We are shortly going up North for Easter and will stay with sister J and then with granddaughter F and the three little  great- greats.  The youngest, aged about one, said Hiya to me on the phone the other day. He`ll be texting soon I expect.