Contrasting lives

Yesterday: the city. Today: the shore and the sea. When I was a child, my seaside experiences were more or less confined to these blissful, eight-week holidays in Arran and then it was back to Glasgow tenements for the other ten months of the year - except, I suppose, for the odd day-trip to Helensburgh on a train. And Helensburgh never quite matched my expectations, somehow... And now we can swap from one to the other, just like that, casually in a car. We never had a car.

Sunday, of course, is predictable - right up to the scamper to be at church in time for the organist to put his special organ-playing shoes on (once upon a time his best go-to-party shoes, the slightly pointy-toed slip-ons of the late 60s/early 70s) and confer with The Boss (aka the Rector) before the service. By the end of the service and subsequent socialising we were both frozen and feeling dreadful - combination of flu jag and lack of strong coffee - and took ourselves home to the ghastly swivelling radiant fire which is currently standing in for our gas fire, kaput since we came home. The central heating had turned itself off on its thermostat, but we needed heat, coffee and a comfy seat.

Himself went off to practise the organ later, and I took my still-aching body for a brisk walk round the West Bay area. That's where I took the above photo - the burn that comes down the Bishop's Glen, past the church, reaches the sea here. I just loved the colours, the brown seaweed from recent winds and the varied blues of sea and sky. I enjoyed a chat on the phone as I walked, with #1 son and younger grandson, who were driving home from Glasgow at the time. More miracles ...And then I FaceTimed the princess in the tower, aka Anna, who is being remarkably stoical about her Covid incarceration. I think her parents are playing a storm.

Lastly, the extra photo. Not my own - I pinched it from my cousin - but showing another contrast. The ground-floor flat on the far side of the road, on the right of the lane, with the three shrubs in the tiny garden, is where we started our married life, in Queensborough Gardens in the West End of Glasgow. It was probably the smallest flat in the whole street, as the close took up the space where the main bedroom should have been and our bedroom was at the back. We had a lovely big front room, that for the first six months of our life together contained only a piano and a large bookcase; the carpet - a wonderful black and gold Persian carpet that we still have in our sitting room, hardly marked after 50 years - came in time for Christmas and we added the chairs the following summer and a sofa another two years down the line. My cousin, who sent me the photo, lived with his wife in a flat roughly where he stood today, a close friend lived in the next street and colleagues just up the road. Even my parents lived only 15 minutes' walk away. I loved living there - but we'd have had to move when we had a family, and where we are now was the result of that sudden rush of blood to the head that assailed me when I was pregnant.

Contrasting lives - but only one major move in all these years.