Dad's Ashes

Buried Dad's ashes on Saturday, and when everyone else had left, my brother and I found ourselves chatting to him as if he was still alive in his little grave, or floating around us in some ethereal way. It's good to have a point of focus to remember him from, and a crisp new stone with white writing and fresh flowers in a timeless country graveyard is as good as it gets.
The vicar did a great piece about dead looking things going into the ground, like daffodil bulbs, and producing something unexpectedly beautiful.
Mother cried and thanked everyone, and said how good it was and cried some more. Then she asked if she had died yet, or whether it was just Dad.
After a great tea party upstairs in the care home that has been her home for 8 months, and half an hour in the garden, we wheeled her back into the day room. A look of genuine astonishment appeared on her face, "Who are all these people? I'll never be able to cook for them all."
But despite that, she's starting to make friends now.

Teak

A crackle of splintering wood and a teak garden chair collapsed. Nobody hurt, but the broken wood was pink all the way through, like cheap mahogany.

School

A day at the amazing Colet Court School today produced one thousand four hundred pictures to sort through - this one shows lunch time.

Dad

It's six months since her man died, and she sometimes remembers, sometimes not.
He died at 96 of the cigarettes that he quit fifty years before. The cilia in his lungs were too damaged to waft away the infected mucus and the 30% oxygen level in his blood could not sustain his fragile life. He died in his sleep. It was time anyway. Everyone said he was a gentleman, and never complained, even though he couldn't walk from the pain.

Bossy e-mails

Has anybody else noticed that e-mails that have "Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail" added at the bottom actually take two pieces of paper to print instead of one?

Scotland

And so for The NY Times to Edinburgh and on with journalist Abigail Saltmarsh to Fenton Tower, an East Lothian castle destroyed by Cromwell in 1650. Ian Simpson and John Macaskill realised their childhood dream of rebuilding it in 2002.
Then to Leith's harbourside, to The Shore, a gastro pub long before the word was invented, to meet fisheries expert and long time friend Crick Carleton for good conversation and fresh fish beautifully cooked - nothing better.

Airport

Bristol Airport, 4.45am, an elderly lady who doesn't walk well has to put her shoes through the X-ray machine twice, but the three radio triggers in my camera bag go unnoticed.
Departure lounge, 5.00am, a family with five kids has to go without breakfast because the queue of men waiting to buy pints of lager at the same counter is too long.