1978: A new pair of kitchen scales

I recently lent a book to a friend. She returned it today, to my market stall, and said she'd found a letter inside it, which she could not resist reading.

The letter (or first page of of it) is from my mother, to the 14-year old me, then in my fifth year at boarding school. I can date it to September or October 1978, as the kittens she refers to were from the second litter of Gobbolino, our accidentally-acquired cat, and they were born in August of that year. Another letter survives from my little sister, then aged six, which reads:

"yesterday Gobleeno borned five kittens out of her leg (sic)" with a picture to match.

This letter above reads,

" My darling Helena,

How is life? I don't seem to have heard much news from you lately.

You will be delighted to hear that we have a new pair of kitchen scales - a gift from Bimby who kindly got them for them for me in Edinburgh.

I've just been trying to teach the kittens to drink milk out of a saucer, but Pippi Longstocking is the only intelligent one of them - she got the message at once, but the other two still just paddle in it and dip their chins in and just generally mess about it (sic)".

Friend and I were creased up with laughter at the major news item, the new kitchen scales.

Why would I have been so happy about them? (I did bake a lot then).

Did Bimby/Bimbi, my grandmother, really have to go all the way to Edinburgh to get them? It's three hours' travel, at least! Did she get a lift or take two trains? I prefer to think the former. She would have been 71 then, and Edinburgh was a lot busier than Oban, where she usually shopped.

If Pippi Longstocking was " the only intelligent kitten" out of the three left (we must have given away two already), why did we later give her away and keep the other two milk-paddlers? I guess their mother, Gobbolino, had already abandoned them, which was why my mother was playing cat-mother to them.

An early blip of mine recounts the story of Gobbolino and her kittens: it's a new year's tale, so I will try to add it in (it's dated 4th August 2012. See it in the comment from Lozarithm, below. Thanks, Lozarithm!)

My mother rang this evening, and I read her the letter, and we laughed some more about the scales. She told me that (shock horror!) there are now branches of Marks and Spencer Simply Food in both Oban and Fort William. My oh my!

Not a great day in the market, but it's good to be out in public, and the sun shone at last. First day of more than about fifteen minutes of sunshine since Christmas day.