Pea souper...

The plan today had been to go out for lunch and afterwards go for a run in the car to (hopefully) enjoy some landscape photography (my poor camera is gathering dust!) before coming home and hunkering down before Storm Ciara hits tomorrow.  Oh well, the best laid plans and all that.

I ended up sleeping really late as it was after 3am before I finally fell asleep, then I was awake at 7am again.  I read my book for a little while and my eyes closed and that was me till almost 11am!  

David decided it was best to let me catch up with my sleep, which was lovely, and although I felt much better when I did wake up, I have been left with that frustrating feeling of having missed half the day.

In the end we had lunch at home and a short trip out late afternoon.  The fog was so thick I didn't even bother taking my camera.  A decision I regretted as there was a brief moment when the low, winter sun did manage to pierce the gloom.  There was a definitely feeling of Brigadoon about the place.

Back home to coffee and nose back into my book.

I am still reading Deborah Orr's childhood memoir Motherwell.  To say I am enjoying it feels wrong, as it's mainly about her dysfunctional relationship with her mum.  It's sad and harrowing but funny in places too.  I have laughed out loud and cried real tears reading her words, made all the more poignant by the fact she died before the book was published.

The most enjoyable thing about the book for me, is she was raised in a town not a million miles from the the ex-mining village I was raised in, at roughly the same time (she was just over four years older than me.)  We are both central Scotland, Lanarkshire lassies brought up in working class families, so I recognise the era and day to day routines and family rituals she writes about (thankfully not the relationship with her mother!)

I was moved to tears when she wrote about her paternal grandmother, who she bought Ponds Cream for at Christmas and for her birthday.  I had forgotten all about Ponds Cream till I read that and I was immediately transported back to buying it for my own gran's Christmas, carefully wrapping it and watching her open it on Christmas morning.  

Even more precious, is the memory it evoked of my gran dipping her finger in the pot and soothing the white cream on her face.  How it left a slight sheen on her laughter lines, and her offering her Ponds smooth cheek to me to kiss, to feel just how wonderfully soft it made her skin feel.  The memory of the fragrance of that cream and my gran's sweet, cool cheek against my lips came flooding back.  Quite overwhelming but lovely.  

I am reading this book slowly as I want to take it all in, the strange thing being I've never read a book before that I will be as relieved to finish, as I will be sorry.