An inherited passion

Another sort of pointless day as far as I was concerned, although the necessity of getting some shopping drove me to Morrison's, not before breakfast as usual but after coffee, with some assistance/moral support from Himself - the shelves were even emptier than usual and I had to queue for a checkout. This strange virus rumbles on - lots of nose-trumpeting but not much coughing any more; a disinclination to do much or even to think too much. 

However, I did put some thought into the subject of this blip, which is a small volume of poetry that I bought for my mother when she was in her eighties.  The poetry is by one of my favourite poets, Norman MacCaig - but it's been translated into Italian, and a selection sits on facing pages for comparison and assistance, for my mother loved speaking Italian and used to practise on my sister and me when we were in our teens and she was going to an extra-mural class at Glasgow University. Just as I find myself using random Italian words (andiamo! springs to mind) she would say that ("come on!") to us when she wanted to gee us up a bit. 

I can't recall quite how I found this book, though I think the Scottish Poetry Library may have been the helpful agents, and I know she was delighted with it just as I was delighted to find such an unusual present. When she died, I made sure it didn't vanish anywhere but into my library, and recently I've been reading it and finding that I can understand a great deal of it even of poems I don't know. The one I've used in the illustration, however, I know very well - it was one of the set works I had to teach for Higher English in the 1990s.

Other than the literary wallowing, I was fascinated by today's Scotsman, with its reproduction of its coverage of the Normandy Landings when they happened as well as its account of the ceremonies happening now. And it was after reading some of this - online, I'm afraid, as you can't buy The Scotsman in Dunoon - I did something fatal to the drawers below my Ikea desk so that they are now all stuck firmly closed. Disaster. They've not worked properly for years, so I've left the top drawer sort of hanging out which means I could still persuade the others to open; I don't know what demon possessed me to give it an irritated shove and now ...

And now it's too late even to think about it. I shall leave the problem, as did Aunt Julia, senza riposta. *   


*If anyone on here has solved the Ikea stuck drawer problem, on the other hand ...