March Murmurings in Scottish Meanderings

God I've had a really rough month this last month with this withdrawal and it's really getting me down. Sleep is all over the place - either I don't sleep at all or I have a sedated sleep for 11/12/13 hours where I can literally spend 4 hours just trying to open my eyes! It's horrible - you feel ghastly either way and never refreshed - I've actually forgotten what it's like to have a 'proper' sleep and feel awake! But it means my mornings are completely obliterated - I'm either trying to wake up or trying to snatch an hour or two later on to get me through the day. And then I have no appetite until 2 or 3 in the afternoon so by the time I get up, dressed, wash my hair and have lunch, half the afternoon is gone as well.

And then this last week and a half I've had what appeared to be a chest infection so the fatigue and feeling crappiness got much worse - it's been a real struggle just to do the basics a lot of the time and I'm getting so behind with everything - I feel the days are just slipping away.

Not fun.

Thankfully this week it seems to be clearing up so I'm feeling better today I'm glad to report.

And despite that I've managed to have some meals out in March - on the 5th this wee man turned 4.


We took him to Smyths (toy store) to spend money he got from Boyd then had fun at the penny machines at the amusement arcade -


then we all went to TGI Friday's for tea where he had the obligatory Happy Birthday song and got all shy!

Then it was Nikki's birthday on the 9th and we went to a restaurant which had a play area so that the kids were kept occupied and we could have peace to talk!


Ruari likes to try new foods but anything that has a strong taste is labelled 'spicy'.

And on the 19th we were out for another meal for Mother's Day at a Brewers Fayre just outside Aberdeen but that one wasn't so great. We picked the Brewers Fayre because of the play area but our table was positioned such that we couldn't see into the play bit and the screen above the table which showed it was at such an angle that you couldn't actually see the kids in it. So that meant Nikki had to keep nagging Lily to look after Ruari when they went to it but the girls discovered the play bit was pretty small so it was labelled 'boring' and they didn't particularly want to keep going back whereas Ruari is still at the age anywhere like that is exciting so did - ipso facto - stress city!

A couple of times Lily came back to the table without Ruari - luckily Nikki was either in the loo or up ordering food so didn't see - and Granny did the "get back in there pronto and look after your brother" - but it just meant we couldn't really relax. Then there were other niggles - some of the carvery food was lukewarm, my dessert was completely forgotten about and I had to stand for ages while it was made up after I told them - obviously in a hurry 'cause half of it seemed to be missing (it was a Sundae). Lilah needed a poo just beforehand and I went to the toilet with her so I had no idea my pudding hadn't come and she took forEVER in the loo so when I went back the rest were all almost finished and I had to rush through mine when I finally got it and got brain freeze!

Nikki seemed to be generally stressed out to the max with the kids and kept moaning throughout the whole meal then at the end she said "Well I didn't enjoy one second of that" and I thought great thanks! I mean I get it - you're stressed out - but there are TWO mothers celebrating their day today - you could have had a moan then tried to be a bit more positive for at least PART of the meal for my sake! It's a difficult one because she probably has no-one else she can really vent to but there are times I feel she needs to make just a bit more effort in the thoughtful stakes.


One thing I noticed that was happening this month was that, if I had a sleepless night, I was able to dip into a few diaries and try and catch up - I haven't been able to do that up to now so that's progress. And I've also managed to keep on top of comments within a few days of them coming in which definitely wasn't happening before. So that's a good sign. I'm still trying to read all the entries I missed from October 2021 which I get sounds crazy - but I can't stand just not knowing what you've all been through. Birth, death and everything in between has been going on in all of your lives and I want to be part of that just as I've been part of it since the OD days. Some of us have been writing these epistles for 22 years - some even longer -although 2001 seemed to be roughly around the time most folk were joining.

It does make me wonder how our kids will access our stuff after we've legged it to the Great Beyond because so much of it might be on our computers and they'll need so many passwords etc. So much vital information about family might get lost. We were talking about this in the family chat I have with Ian, Lorna & Margaret last week and saying how frustrating it is that generally people don't seem to get interested in their family history until they're older when the folk they really need answers from are gone or too confused to remember!

I always wonder how much 'incorrect' information is passed down through the generations because someone's misheard something or someone has been confused about dates/names/etc. Even in our chat 2 weeks ago, Lorna, who is recovering from a second hip operation and is trying to research Mum's family while she's inactive, happened to mention what our grandfather had died of and I asked "how do you know that?" "You just told me!" she said - when I'd done nothing of the sort. I've got some birth, marriage and death Certificates which have come from Mum and my Auntie Nellie (Mum's sister) so had relayed some info from them but she was getting mixed up between different people. Then it happened again later on - "oh well at least we know so-and-so lived at this address so I can search for that" - "oh did he? How do you know?" "You told me!" "No I didn't!" And so it went on.

And I remember when Mum used to talk about the old days I was always saying to her 'write it down!' because I was happy to collate it all and type it up but also well aware she was in her late eighties by that time and writing long hand was becoming increasingly difficult for her so I was quite surprised one day when she handed me a bunch of scrappy bits of paper on which she'd made equally scrappy notes of memories as they'd occurred to her. As I waded through them I realised she'd got pretty confused with a lot of stuff - dates, names, ages - so was able to correct it as I went along but it occurred to me that if I hadn't known that info - if it was a grandchild, say, who was doing it - that would have been taken as gospel and passed down to future generations causing mass confusion!

I was so glad I was able to do that for her though - even though I was pretty ill at the time I managed to get it made up into a book for her 90th birthday and it came in really handy when she was in the Home in later years - we would read bits of it out to her and it would spark off memories for her - and of course was dead handy for the nurses to read to get to know her a bit better.


I was also able to intersperse the text with family photos and relevant pictures of the times -


I took her copy home with me after she died and it cracked me up to see she'd made corrections to almost every page in it - she obviously didn't think much of my editing!


Lorna had us all going last week because she was getting nowhere fast with the research then on the Tuesday (we chat on a Wednesday) she sent a message saying "Don't be late for the chat this week - I have lots to tell - including a surprise!" So we were all agog and I was thinking ooo she's found a new stepsister/brother/family or something at least. When we logged on she was all excited to tell us the news and she bombarded us with names and dates and what have you for about half an hour until we were all totally confused then said "So basically there are TWO Jessie Jones" and then waited for that to sink in. Ian, Margaret and I on the other hand were desperately trying to make sense of what she'd just thrown at us so couldn't figure out what she was on about at all and I think she was a bit frustrated that we weren't all going OMG!! That's incredible! Who would have thought! etc.

So what it boiled down to was the fact that I held a marriage certificate for a Jessie Ross and a David Jones which we all assumed was my granny's first marriage. Mum was Jessie and was called after her mum - also Jessie. From a death certificate we learned that sadly David died 4 years later then presumably a few years later Jessie went on to marry Willie Morrison, Mum's Dad. Her name was always down as Jessie Jones on Certificates/grave/etc so we just presumed it was her. However when Lorna was researching she realised the marriage took place in 1891 and she figured out from Jessie's death certificate that she would only have been 3 in 1891 so this couldn't have been her. So after a bit of digging further, she worked out it was actually Jessie's mother the marriage referred to - also called Jessie - and the Jones part of her name was actually her maiden name!

So Jessie, our granny, was actually illegitimate.

That was the big surprise.

Considering the number of illegitimate babies born in those days I felt like saying "Is that it??" but refrained because I could see she had sweated blood to get to that point!

But then I felt sorry for my poor wee Granny. Jessie's mum was a domestic servant (which may have told a story in itself regarding the pregnancy) but we presumed she couldn't take wee Jessie to work with her so from Lorna's findings, it looked like the neighbour next door took her in as she appears there on the next census and is down as their 'granddaughter' but then disappears from there in the next census and is now living with Jessie and David after they were married. So presumably she gets some stability from that - and then David dies of pneumonia 4 years later when she's 7 and we don't know what happened to her after that - Lorna can't find her anywhere. Although of course we know she eventually met Willie, moved to Aberdeen and went on to have 5 kids of her own. And she may have had a perfectly happy childhood but it just seemed to me like a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and uncertainty for a wee one.

Willie had also been married before - to Lizzie, who had died the same year she had given birth to their only son so they would also only have had a few years of marriage. And the son himself had died of pneumonia at only age 20 in 1929. We wondered if dad and son kept in touch with each other - we think he was staying in Banchory, a village about 20 miles from Aberdeen. But of course in those days (1920s) 20 miles would have been a vast distance to cover and quite an undertaking - but I do wonder if Mum's siblings knew about him because they would have been ages 10-16 at the time he died.

Life was so much harder in those days - it was a risky business living - and there was no counselling or therapy or talking it out when you experienced so many losses - you just had to get on with it!


One last thing before I go - Lilah has had some weird bruising appear lately - mainly on her arms - it's almost like a graze kind of mark but under the skin - and they come up quickly - like not there in the morning - there a couple of hours later kind of thing.


They're not painful like a bruise would be - they don't cause her any distress - but they just keep appearing randomly so Nikki took her to the doctor. He wasn't sure what it could be and wanted to refer her to a senior colleague so she had another appointment with her and what shocked both of us was that after a few minutes, she said "I've seen this before - I think she's doing this to herself". Nikki was quite startled that this was the first diagnosis but began to wonder so she's kept a close eye on her since and believes Lilah when she says she's not doing it. 3 of them came up yesterday morning and Lilah had been in the same room as Nikki pretty much all morning so she's made an appointment to get a blood test done.

It shocked me though that this was the doctor's first port of call - I would have thought because there was no pain/distress/danger involved, doing a blood test first would have been pertinent and then if that showed nothing, the suggestion could gently be made that perhaps it was self-inflicted. Kind of worried me that it was the other way round and the implications that could have had.

She also got her ears pierced on Friday and the backs of the lobes are now all bruised and discoloured. They're being cleaned regularly and properly and there's no pain like there might be if they were infected - also Lily got hers done at the same time and hers are fine.

So Lilah certainly couldn't have done those ones to herself!!

I just thought I'd put it up here in case any of you have come across this happening in your family and might have an idea what it is. Hopefully the blood test will come up with something.