Tag: Family
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Picture It
It’s my son’s nineteenth birthday today. We sat on the sofa last night as he opened presents, one of which was a book of routes up Scottish mountains, and he said he’d recently stood in Glasgow bus station and felt the west coast wind rush at him, willing him to get on the waiting bus…
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52and40/34 Passing Place
My nephew moved in with us a few months ago, all the way from a Pyrenean idyll in the south of France. It’s really interesting seeing someone discover Edinburgh, it reminds me of all the compromises we’ve made along the way as well as the rewards of the move. It’s also interesting living with a…
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52and40/26 Out of the Blue
My daughter tells me she learned at school there hasn’t been a May as dry as this in Scotland since before I was born in 1976. It seems we picked a lucky time for digging a new border in the garden and moving plants around to fill it up. It’s become habit, to go out between…
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52and40/20 Pigs Might Fly
We took ourselves to Raasay in February. A proper road trip – a long time in the car, sweets, music, stops for the dog to wee, chats about memories. Maniacs in white vans, eye-spy and the name game. Does it all sound perfect? It wasn’t. We fought, too. There were hideous tensions as well as…
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52and40/14 Benediction
We saw Collateral Beauty. The film whisked me back ten years to a hell of a week. Mum had been admitted to hospital in Aberdeen with a DVT. My son had his sixth birthday party. I hadn’t organised a thing for Halloween. The morning after cobbled together trick or treating, Mum called from hospital and gently explained…
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52and40/13 Staging Interventions
I’m battling to feel Christmassy. The weather’s telling my senses it’s Autumn. The bagels in the cupboard and alarm clock scream that school’s still in. My diary’s saying it’s a few days before my annual crying at the song in The Polar Express which I love but will make the rest of the family roll their eyes…
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Install/Uninstall
I’m working on clearing a great big thing right now. It’s tightly bound with a lot of the things I thought about last year along the themes of self-actualisation, self-esteem and self-sabotage. The thing I’m clearing is the programming of a few hundred ideas and memories that all lead to one beautifully pleated but ultimately useless…