From Sweet April Showers Spring Lovely May Flowers in Scottish Meanderings

Problem is, the guy in charge of the sweet April showers in Scotland appears to have forgotten to have switched them off!

I got my second vaccination on the 26th and had a similar reaction to the first one although the fever/chills don’t seem to be quite as bad this time.

And I felt well before it this time - last time I had been unwell for weeks beforehand (not COVID symptoms) - but my legs still turned to jelly en route and my heart was thumping crazily by the time I got there.

Only to be faced with queues of people 4 lengths long which I hadn’t bargained for. We did move relatively quickly but when I got to the cubicle and was asked how I was, I was truthful. Doug, my assigned vaxxer, couldn’t have been lovelier.

I asked if I could lie on the bed instead of sitting in the chair for my 15 minutes and he said absolutely no problem but why don’t we just do the whole thing on the bed? So that’s what we did. Same reaction as last time but it abated enough after 10 minutes that I was able to drive home.

Have felt pretty lousy for the past few days and thought I was getting better but yesterday (Sunday) I had to leave Pitmedden early because I felt so rotten and today I’m battling a horrible nausea and still feel awful so I'm clearly not out of the woods yet.


I bit the bullet and asked for help with the back garden this year. I was making myself ill weeding it - it would take 2-3 hours and I would be useless for 2 days afterwards. I never put weed killer down because of the cats then after Bailey died, a cat from 2 doors up began visiting so that still stopped me.

My neighbour had also, for some unknown reason, stopped trimming my side of his hedge at the back - he’s done it fairly regularly when doing his side and whether lockdown apathy got to him last year or not I don’t know but in retrospect he probably did me a favour.

I don’t have a hedge trimmer so would have had to get someone to do that anyway so I thought right c’mon just get the weeding done at the same time and be done with it. But 2 quotes of £100 had made me stall until I was faced with this.


This is what it used to look like not all that long ago.


The face of chronic fatigue :(

I warmed straight away to the second service who came out - a nicer couple you couldn’t meet - they were efficient, willing, knowledgeable and apart from encouraging pics of their work, they posted cute little gardening finds on their website which really appealed to me :)

So we organised a date - they came - and after 3 hours I had this.


Which has done wonders for my flagging spirits ever since. And they transplanted my blue-eyed Mary - the only surviving plant from the back - round to the front buckshee.

I know this still looks awful but it's the first step in what will hopefully be A Big Plan. I can manage to keep the front tidy at the moment myself so I'm hoping to get the back all paved over (with bonnier stones) either completely or partially and get a new shed and fence at the same time. Which will hopefully make me sort out the gunnel that is the present shed and make me feel a whole lot better about myself in general.


Nikki, obviously having decided that being a single mum with 3 kids, 3 cats and a part-time job wasn't stressful enough, made the decision to add a puppy to the mix as well! Her neighbour, Michelle, had mentioned that her cockapoo was having puppies and she might be stuck for a home for one of them. They weren’t sure how many puppies there were - if there were four she had homes for them all but if there were five that would be Nikki's.

There were four. So that was that.

And then two weeks later one of the prospective owners had to pull out. So to Nikki of course that was 'a sign'.

It cost a lot of money and I was a bit annoyed about that when there are so many rescue dogs out there desperate for a home but OMG - I got to see them last Sunday. Let's just say if the little girl puppy who fell asleep on my lower legs and peacefully snored for the whole hour I was there wasn't already spoken for, I think she would be coming home with me! :)


I’m such a hypocrite!

This is Nikki's one. She goes to see him on a Sunday when I come out - last night she took Lily and they finally decided on a name.

Meet Alfie😍


I do feel sorry for the cats though who have no idea what's about to hit them in a few weeks' time😟.


I managed to claw back a few Wednesdays this month which really made a difference overall. As I've mentioned before, I was helping Nikki out with childcare on a Wednesday when she worked, picking Ruari up from his childminder at 3 and the girls from school. Then the girls got into the After School Club so I just had Ruari but drama classes started up again (they’re over teatime on Wednesdays) so I had to stay at Pitmedden with Ruari and give him his tea while Nikki drove the girls through to the next town for classes at different times.

That took its toll and there were a couple of Thursdays when I realised, if my Italian class hadn't been on Zoom, there was no way I would have been able to drive over to the teacher's house for one o'clock.

I don't purport to any specific religion but have had evidence in the past that the spirit world exists so I often ask them for help with anything I'm stuck with if I can't see a solution. So I asked for help with this.

The following week Nikki texted "Kate (Ruari's childminder) has just messaged me to say there's a place for Ruari on Wednesday afternoons but only until the summer - should I take it?" I refrained from replying "OMG YES!" And just did a nonchalant that sounds like a good idea instead :)

Huge help! Still meant I was doing the teatime slot for drama but she’s been trying to see if she could manage doing it herself to save me coming out just for that (changed days eh!). It’s proving pretty stressful though so I get the feeling I'm going to be asked to go out again from this week.

However those few free Wednesdays meant I was able to write something for the writing group for this month. They've been doing Zoom meetings but they were on the same night (Tuesday) as the family chat Messenger video call so I hadn't been going plus I have a bit of a personal rule that I have to contribute something if I go and I just haven't had the bandwidth to write something each month.

This month our theme was Celebration. The Scottish Book Trust have that as a theme just now for a competition and are looking for submissions - the best get published in a book they produce. So the group thought it would be a good idea to do the same theme so that we could practise writing something for it.

When I sat down to attempt something I had no idea what I was going to write about and eventually decided on the personal celebration of managing to get to see Ruari being born, something I thought I might have had to forego because of the CFS.

I mentioned that this was the first great grandchild Mum wouldn’t get to hold and then to finish it off, I told the story of the competition we had for his weight after he was born. I had thought 8lbs, 8 2 at a pinch - the others had similar guesses - and then I very clearly saw the numbers 8 and 6 in my head which I knew had nothing to do with me! So I changed my estimate and he was - 8lbs 6ozs - right on the money - so we laughed and said Granny was there after all!

I had actually forgotten that bit about the weight when I was writing it all out so I smiled thinking she’s making sure that doesn’t get left out :) Then I realised the day I was writing all this was the 15th May - her birthday! And not only her birthday - it would have been her 100th birthday!!

I think someone wanted to be remembered😊❤️