January Japes in Scottish Meanderings

Right let's see if I can make better progress this year.

We started the month off with a trip to town to see the pantomime 'Cinderella'. We still had snow on the ground and the kids had come from the dog park with Alfie hence the wellies.


It was held in the Tivoli Theatre - a very old theatre which has been renovated in the last few years. I love the ceiling in it.


My sister was talking about pantos of old when we were kids and we felt there was much more audience participation with kids then. I can remember going up on the stage in Edinburgh when we went to see 'The World of Jamie' and how amazing that was - there just doesn't seem to be so much of that now. This one was a bit flat I felt but Ruari totally stole the show - they were doing a skit of a ghost appearing behind 3 of the characters and the kids had to shout out when they saw it while the characters could never see it.

Poor Ruari was getting more and more frustrated that they just couldn't see this damn ghost and because we were in the front row, he could see the ghost disappearing off the side of the stage so was desperate to tell them where it went! Buttons could see what was happening so he made a point of stopping everything to talk to him and made a big thing of it - it was so funny - we had folk coming up to us after the show to say how much they'd enjoyed that bit :) The poor wee guy was almost in tears though!


Then a few days later, my niece, Caroline, made a trip through from Inverness with her 2 boys, Dylan and George, to see us and we met up with my other niece, Catriona, and her 2 boys for a lovely winter's walk at a country park.

That was especially nice as none of us have seen Catriona's youngest, Oli, who is now 3, because he was born just before lockdown and right at the time his older brother, Matt, was battling a brain tumour so they were all off to hospital in Birmingham for weeks to get him treated. Then came lockdown so no-one was seeing anybody and unfortunately, when we had our family get together in Blairgowrie last May, their whole family got Covid and couldn't come. We're having another one in May this year in Dundee so we're hoping they'll all manage this time.


From left to right:
Catriona, with her two boys, Oli & Matt and their two dogs, Tara and Amber, Nikki, Ruari, me (the girls were at their Dad's that weekend), George, Caroline and Dylan and their dog, Buddy.

And what was even nicer was that Caroline has fallen out with 2 of her sisters, Marina and Jenny, and refused to come to the family get together last year but also refused to let Dylan and George go (my sister, Lorna, would have taken them) which wasn't fair. So as we were saying goodbye I brought the subject up and we've managed to persuade her to come to this year's. I just hope we haven't opened a can of worms and it all goes off okay! I feel that in a large group like that it's easy enough to avoid certain people if you don't want to talk to them but we're spending the night away as well so it might not be so easy to do it for that length of time! Oh well - soon find out. It would be so lovely if they could make some sort of peace with it but I don't think that's going to happen.

It was a lovely day but really really cold and we all got soaked when we reached a boggy bit with no way round it but through calling for some drastic measures! Dylan was only wearing crocs and his feet must have been absolutely freezing but he didn't seem to mind. Must admit I was wishing I'd had a pair of wellies to wear myself.


When we were feeding the ducks at one point, a little robin came down and perched itself beside Nikki. She was convinced that it was Mam come to see us all then the robin flew off and joined a mate. Squeals of delight - "Granda's here as well!" Be lovely to think that was true :)

Speaking of which, my niece, Marina, sent a couple of photos to our family chat - her and her daughter, Jessie, who was called after Mum, had taken a walk to the cemetery (Mum and Dad are both buried in Inverness) and put home-made fabric flowers on the grave. I loved the fact that Jessie made flowers for Jessie whom she'd never met and it's so good to know the grave is being visited and kept taken care of.



We took Ruari to the local amusement arcade one weekend when the girls were at Joel's and reflected on the changes over the years. Even Nikki was saying it was sad how the rides were so heavily dependent on screens these days and hardly any of them had any movement where previously they would - I remember the girls' favourite being a little helicopter thing which went up and down. He actually had more fun on the 2p moving shelves - we should have saved our money and just got him a few pounds' worth of those!

When your band stops playing unexpectedly.


So the shed.

It's getting there.

I phoned a charity which supports young families locally and they came out last Tuesday and took quite a bit of stuff so that helped tremendously. It was a combination of things from the house and shed and I decided at the last minute to take in the stuff from the shed so that they wouldn't see the state of it and pile everything in the sitting room - I think that was a good move in retrospect. All they wouldn't take was a cat bed, litter box (new) and cat scratcher and they'll be easy enough to shift. Since then I've gone to the skip a few times with 3 or 4 things each time and what's left seems a bit more manageable now.

This was part of it a few weeks ago.


And this week.


The other side.


And this week.


The window.


And this week.


What I need to do now is make some more space in the house so that I can take in things like pictures, scrapbooks, books, DVDs, CDs, cassettes, cards and get them all in one or two places then I can go through them at a later date (ha!) and gradually take them in to charity shops. As long as I can get the shed emptied of everything I can practically move then it can be demolished. I can't bring myself to part with the bike for some reason but it won't take up too much space thankfully so I can always plonk it in the new summerhouse once it's built.

And going through the baby clothes wasn't as upsetting as I thought it might be although I'm annoyed I didn't do something sooner with all the knitted stuff Boyd's Mum and sister made while I was pregnant - much of it I didn't use before she grew out of it. Luckily most of it was in a plastic bag so the condition is pretty good so hopefully a charity will take them once I get them washed.

Which is a work in progress.



Reading about a lovely Prosebox friend playing Scrabble and how she had always done that as a family I realised there's actually a lot to be said for playing board games together. Some of my fondest memories are of the whole family playing Monopoly at Christmas or me playing double patience for hours with Mum and Auntie Nellie (keeping your wits about you with those two was an understatement) - they would often go down memory lane together and their chat would have me in absolute hysterics. Our family always played games - Scrabble, Cribbage, Canasta, Rummy, Sorry, Nominations, Newmarket - and it was often something which happened when they had friends round as well. It would also be a part of going to our caravan in the next town which was what our holidays consisted of as kids - many a night was spent huddled round the little table at the window playing whatever took our fancy.

Even when the TV began to be part of evening entertainment it didn't replace games when there were a few of us together I'm glad to say and even when there was just me left at home Mum & Dad would often play games with me or teach me something new. When I was married Boyd & I would have lots of games of Scrabble and when Nikki was growing up she loved all kinds of board games so her and I played loads and now when I go out to Pitmedden, once Ruari's in bed, the girls love playing Rummy or Newmarket or Sorry with Nikki & I and then once they're in bed, Nikki & I play Rummikub, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Mastermind, whatever takes our fancy and yap at the same time. It's really nice. And we play games of online Scrabble during the day as well. I just hadn't realised what a constant it had been in my life until I read T's entry just now.

This is what I really miss about being on here. All those little connections that make us feel a part of each other's lives.

I'm still writing my paper diary but I've noticed it's becoming more and more difficult to write longhand - it's like the muscles involved are a lot weaker and it's harder to get it to flow properly. I've found this really distressing and I just wondered if anyone else has had a similar problem as they've got older and if they found anything which helped? Would be good to know.

Ok well I only have 6446 unread entries to catch up with everyone. Should get there around 2025😁