Looking back

Forty-seven years ago today I was in an extraordinary women's hospital having just delivered my firstborn (no - not a hospital for extraordinary women - it was merely a strange relic). Redlands was a nursing home when I was born there just at the end of the war; by the time I was producing my own family it had not long to go, as it closed in 1978. It was founded in 1903, and by the time I was around it took up two large terraced houses in a leafy part of Great Western Road in Glasgow. I remember distinctly that when you walked along the corridor from the nursery to the ward the corridor dipped where it crossed from one house to the next ...Anyway, the baby that was born there was on the phone a couple of times today, and that was lovely. I really feel the need to share a bottle of something celebratory with him, though. 

Another good bit of today for me was the penultimate poetry workshop of this season. I'd chosen two poems by Norman MacCaig, Assisi and Visiting Hour, which I'd always enjoyed teaching in school, and was as usual struck by the liveliness of the responses of the group - it gives me such a lift when we all get going. It's strange - a day in a classroom, let alone a week, would probably kill me now, but it was always the only job for me.

Later, as the rain stopped and the sky looked less likely to drip on us, we walked up to the church to make this week's recordings. The inside of the church was positively balmy at 4.8ºC, and the plastered walls were running with water. Actually I think the stone walls, where we'd removed the plaster altogether, were just as damp; it simply shows less. After we'd finished, I wandered around the graveyard while Himself recorded an organ piece. That's when I took this photo, past the trunk of the tree that was struck by lightning some years back and had to be removed, over the houses of Dunoon towards the still-snowy northern hills. The air was filled with birdsong above the roar of the burn cascading down from the Bishop's Glen, and there was just the slightest suggestion of what spring will feel like ...

And finally, two observations. One: it is inadvisable to make pancakes after a couple of glasses of wine. Two: if you persist in this folly, you will discover the difference when you use oat milk and forget to add the water to the mix. Delicious, yes - but not quite what one had in mind for Shrove Tuesday.