Weekend

Saturday – I enjoyed the lie in that my newly unemployed on a Saturday morning brought… 😉 Then I walked down to the hostel to meet Ady. Bad Neil saw the car outside and came in for a chat with us before it was boat time. We whizzed along to collect Dave & Faye off the boat then back to the hostel to collect laundry and food from the freezer before heading to the crofts. We parted ways at the croft gate – us to come home for lunch, them to check in at the cabin and drop stuff off. Then Ady walked back to meet them at the Jeep as they were changing the oil in it. I took advantage of the dry weather and sunny conditions to do some more shed painting. I stopped when my fingers got too cold to comfortably hold the paintbrush – it’s mild for November but it’s still November!

Ady had arranged to meet them for a beer at the shop so he and I walked down leaving the kids to keep the fire going. We’d bumped pizzas from Friday to Saturday as we’d eaten at the Bonfire on Friday night. It was dead at the shop – just Jinty there when we arrived. We had a good chat though and if she did let me go for any reason other than it being deathly quiet and her not being able to justify paying me £20 each Saturday morning to stand and drink tea with Neil it appears to have blown over. Phew. Dave and Faye arrived, followed by Chain and then Stevie so there was a handful of us drinking beer in the dark. We stopped for two drinks and were home again by 730pm.

I started making pizzas and then Ady got a call on his phone from my mum who had tried mine and got no signal. It was the anticipated news that Granny had passed away that morning. I sat in the dark in our bedroom as she told me. She is very upbeat about the whole thing although I suspect it will hit her at some point in the next couple of weeks but her and Granny had a big falling out earlier this year so have been mostly estranged. Not unusual for them. I am sad. Sad that she died, sad that I never got to say a proper goodbye, sad not to be around Mum, Dad and Frazer. Sad about what it represents and that this is likely the first of various such phonecalls we will get living up here so far from everyone. I’m also sad that my Granny is dead. I certainly didn’t always see eye to eye with her but she was a good grandparent when Frazer and I were small, probably took the most delight and joy in Davies and Scarlett of any of our relatives and despite being a shockingly bad mother was a strong, independent, successful woman with fantastic business skills, a talented florist, a world traveller and adventurer, a bold and brave woman who lived through amazing points in history, had many stories to tell and in her last communication  with me wrote a shaky handed letter to say she had seen us on TV with ‘that super Ben Fogle’ and it had made her all the more determined to come and visit us, even if she did have to sleep in a tent!

Ady had failed to watch the pizza I’d stuck in the oven despite me asking him to, the smoke alarm had gone off and it was very well cooked. A petty argument about that meant I didn’t tell them straight away and went and sobbed in the loo for a while before coming out and blurting it out. Everyone was very lovely to me after that. The children were sad but probably more sad that I was sad to be honest, I guess to them she was always a little old woman who made pointed digs at their granny and part of the complicated mother daughter dynamic that seems to have run in my family. Scarlett and I are adamant it ended with us. I hope we’re right. I was really touched by some of the comments on facebook, particularly from my first boyfriend Will, who had messaged me earlier in the week to say he’d seen the Fogle show and we all looked really well and how much Scarlett is like me. He came to visit my Granny in hospital with me when we were together and I was 17, I bet he couldn’t believe she was still around. My school friend Victoria had also commented and she would have met Granny many times over the years, along with Lucy, who would have known her from when she worked at Mum’s restaurant, and my friends Pauline and Jim who have known us for over 20 years and would have met her at our wedding, kids birthday parties and so on.

A big cry is exhausting so I was pretty early to bed and although I didn’t dream about Granny I had some weird dreams.

Today – It rained pretty much non stop, with added gale force gusts of wind. In the end we tied the small turbine up as it was screaming. Winter is here. Ady had promised to help Dave and Faye with some ditching. I was only too happy to stay in all day and make use of the internet provided by wind. I caught up on a couple of chapters of the book I am writing for on Home Ed, answered a long email from a blogger who has made contact about WWOOFing and food production. She has already written a bit about WWOOFing but wanted a longer feature piece on us having read an article I had written for the WWOOFing newsletter. I also wrote a piece for the next Barefoot Diaries this week. Sadly none of the writing is for money – yet, but I am definitely getting my name out there which is really exciting. The more widely I am published and known the more chances I have of people getting in touch with something I get paid for.

Ady came home for lunch, we watched the third Autumnwatch, just one more to go and had a really lovely piece of our gammon for dinner. I’m knackered again now, this sitting around all day is pretty tiring 😉