Category: Ageing
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A place in the sun
We are all getting older, Kali cat and us, losing a few of our wits along the way, but still enjoying the sunshine. Kali is especially good at seeking out, and finding, the warmest place to recline, stretch out, relax. Yesterday morning, before she found this sunshine-warmed hammock, I spent hours clearing Harry Hymer, our…
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The value of symbols
I can’t think of anything conveying much more symbolism than a suspension bridge over the Ken Water to the graveyard on the bank beyond. We are, each of us, suspended on a kind of bridge between the life that went on before us, and the life that will go on after we are gone. Of…
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Wisps of sphagnum moss . . .
As age creeps up on us, it can get harder to deal with rejections, failures, lack of success, whatever you might feel despondent over, but on the other hand perhaps one’s skin gets tougher too. Strategies for coping might have been developed, and these in turn can contribute to continued productivity. When we took our…
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When snow is light, fluffy, pretty . . .
The snowfall was off and on last night, and the flakes began to fall again late this morning. It’ll put folks off the resumed LING Lunch, perhaps, but for those of us who know a bit more about the trials and tribulations of snow, this soft and gentle fall could only be pretty and pleasing.…
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Handwork love . . .
We spent a lovely hour yesterday ambling through the knitwear exhibition at the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, from Chanel to Westwood. It was a delight to see that the curators appreciated both hand and machine knitting approaches, but for me the single salient exhibition was this pattern cover that was described as very popular in both…
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A new, tangible project
Although we’d carried my beloved’s Harris loom from one home to another, over the past four decades (London’s Shepherd’s Bush; Edmonton, Alberta; Burnham, Berkshire; Geneva; Sparty Lea, Northumberland), we finally realised that it was time to divest. It was a big floor-standing loom all right, but the real issue was the crawling around underneath to…
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Memory lanes . . .
Our new task, in one of the writing groups I’m part of, is to write a memoir segment. The challenge, I’m led to believe, is to write something that anyone else beside ourselves might be intrigued to read. As we left it at the end of our session, everybody and their uncle are writing memoirs…
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A trip down memory lane . . .
I had cause yesterday to renew my mental acquaintance with the research fields of my youth, adult and middle-age experience. Now that I am old(er!) I have to traverse back some two decades to remember some of the epiphanies of my research endeavours. After finally being redundified from my postdoc passions at the hoary age…
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Running hot water
Having lived not far from Hadrian’s Wall, where there’s a lot of archaeological evidence of the Roman occupation, I’m aware that the concept of hot water on demand is not exclusively a modern lifestyle. But perhaps the universality of running hot water, if one can afford it in these times of cost-of-living crisis, is more…
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Roads from confusion?
The last ‘joy’ I could develop was in the middle of fraught tensions before Christmas, and life has been a frenzy of strenuous physical effort since to pack up all our stuff and vacate our home. Now that we can sit still, in our tiny bolthole within a pleasant village, and sigh in some relief,…
Roads to Joy 