Family getting together

 Blogger is becoming impossible.  I don't often write here but I've started a post twice and, after a couple of lines, everything I've written has vanished.  This will be my final attempt.

I've continued to blog on the newer site, of course, but i know some people only have this one marked.  So, a quick update, from the middle of lockdown 2.

Rose and family moved out during the summer from the annexe.  She had been my very welcome guest for nearly six years and her Boy lived there too, once he'd finished university.  A year or so ago, he moved his girlfriend in and then Rose moved her new partner in.  Everyone got on well but the whole thing wasn't really sustainable, especially once lockdown came along and, in the end, Boy and Girl moved to Ipswich and Rose and Man moved nearer to Norwich, but still on the edge of a village next to a field.

We were perturbed about the prospect of the annexe being empty - there was no question of renting it out. The council had allowed me to have a friend living there as a guest, but it's a family annexe, not a letting property and that's fine by us.  It adjoins our house and you have to be very confident of a relationship to have anyone else here.  I didn't have anyone else who I thought I'd welcome except for a short time.  But it suddenly struck me that my sister Wink wanted to move up here and, though she'd been thinking of buying a place - no one thought of taking away Rose's home! - she might like to move in.  So, in short, we asked and she said yes.

It's been several months' process, but she finally moved in this week.  And all is well.  

Z chatters about anything but what's on everyone's mind

What strange times across the world.  I'm blogging (in The Other Place) to take our minds away from it - this has its disadvantages in that I won't have the memories of how it feels to look back on, but I see my role in life as cheering people up, on the whole.  Anyway.  http://razorbladeoflife.co.uk, if you're looking for it.

HNY and all that...

Trying to comment on a friend's blog, I find I've been signed out of Google.  I haven't of course, but I do get signed out of Blogger and it's quite a trick to get back in again.  I come here and I'm signed in but I go elsewhere and I'm not.  Of course, Blogger is free at the point of use, so not important to the mighty Google.

Hope all is well with you.  I do have notifications of a visit a day or so and, though I assume they're from spammers, if you're a real person and prefer me to post here than on my other blog, I could do both.  Let me know.

Z remembers the house - er, hotel - where she was born

A friend said that blogging with Blogger is awkward on a Mac, so I thought I'd have a go; though in fact, she uses an iPad and I'm on the desktop.  The desktop iMac, that is, for you literalists out there.

We went to visit my sister last week, which was a lovely break.  We visited Weymouth one day, where I was born.  LT grew up a bit further along the coast, so knew the town rather better than I did; though everywhere has changed a lot in the past half century.  He decided not to go to his home town of Bournemouth, he thought it would be too depressing.  However, we were rather gratified to discover that Weymouth seafront and the old harbour were much as they had always been.

This is the old harbour. The side where we walked still has cars parked facing the water, but now there are huge sleepers to stop them rolling into the water as well as a kerb at the edge, which is very sensible but, perhaps, removes the little frisson of daredevilry that there used to be.

And here, in the random order that Blogger always loved, are pictures of the Riviera Hotel, where I was born and lived until I was three or four. It looks magnificent as you come round the bend and down the hill but is, unfortunately, marred by the funfair in front. It has been nicely maintained but it's not as smart as you'd think such a fine Art Deco building would be.

Up and running

Not me, darlings, my other blog.  I just couldn't face dealing with it yesterday, though I had plenty of time.  I had a sense of despair at the thought of it.  I'd perked up by the evening however, so looked up the details and cracked on with it this morning.  It took quite some time with a helpful chap in IT support on the host website and now I've got a much better deal for less money.  He tried to point me in the right direction to set that up myself, but I knew that wasn't going to happen and pleaded uselessness.  Just as well I did because, it turned out, there was a fault after all and he had to disable *something or other* to get the blog back.

I appreciate this stalwart old blog, though, and was glad to use it.  So I'll double-post sometimes, for the benefit of those who prefer to come here.  The 'official' site is, again, razorbladeoflife.co.uk, all the same.

Thanks to you kind people for leaving comments while I've been here.

As the Bard said, what's .......

I can't now remember why, at dinner, Tim told me the Italian for onion.  I was intrigued though, because it's nothing like the French, which the English is derived from.  I looked it up in several different languages and I'm still puzzled.  It seems that both the Spanish/Italian/Portugese/Romanian come from the Latin, but so does the French, from a completely different word.

Time was, I'd have done all the research and discovered what I wanted to know.  Now, I'm not sure I can be bothered.  I will remain intrigued, without quite enough zest to mind.

We were talking about names, too.  I know several people who've chosen to change their name, for one reason or another.  Brenda was 70 years old when she finally decided to change to Zella and, such was the strength of her personality, no one ever called her Brenda again.  Sophie was called so by her husband-to-be, who mistook what her name actually was (not his fault) and said that Sophie suited her far more than Janet, and so it does.  Dorothy changed to Jane because Dot rhymed with Stott and she'd been teased for too many years - her mother (and Sophie's) never accepted it though, so which you called her depended on which side of the family you knew better.

Most people seem not greatly to like their given name.  I liked mine, growing up, because of the Z, mostly.  I enjoyed the slash - slash - slash of the Z, like Zorro (I was a child addicted to television, so have always been tolerant of computer games and so on), I liked the ë diaeresis, that the name was a Greek word, that it was distinctive and I didn't mind too much that no one knew how to pronounce or spell it, if they could remember it at all.  I quite happily answered to Snowy, Suzie, Zo or anything else, and still do.  Indeed, my friend Sophie and I were quite used, as adults, to answering to each others' name.

I really do call my sister Wink, or Winkie.  But her name is Melanie, though she's usually known as Mel nowadays.  Why she's Wink is quite another story, however.

Wince

Wince, our gardener, is such a nice man.  He's worked here for nearly six years, having been at the same job from the age of 15 until 60, when he was made redundant because the business closed.  He didn't want to look for another job, so decided to do odd jobs - just what we needed.

He rescued me, many years ago, when I fell into the icy river and, though I could stand, couldn't get out, and we'd always passed the time of day (what an odd expression, but you know what I mean).  He always lived at home with his parents, then his mum, never married, though he has got a girlfriend   and now he lives alone since his mother died a few months ago.  He's very interested in nature, conservation, photography, engineering and music, but it's not easy to know him well, he's quite self-contained.

He was such a help to me after Russell died.  I'd been really struggling to keep the garden going - mostly, the grass cut - for several years but, even though I thought I'd sell and move on, I didn't want the place I'd lived happily for nearly thirty years to be neglected.  So I bought some new equipment and Wince was very pleased with it.  He isn't as much of a gardener as I (theoretically) am, to tell the truth, and has sometimes dug up choice plants when he is carried away with the weeding, but that's accidental.

When he arrives on a Thursday morning, he wants to know if I have a Plan, and professes to be disappointed if I haven't.  I can usually tell what he has in mind, though, because he brings a wheelbarrow with any tools that I don't have and he does - today, it was a hedge trimmer because Rose had some tidying up in mind and Wince correctly surmised that I didn't have many jobs for him.  Often, I've mentioned two or three things that need doing, sometime in the next few weeks at his convenience, and he's done them all by the end of the day.  He just never stops.  Today, having done the pruning and tidying that Rose needed, it suddenly poured with rain - so he took himself off to the barn and split logs until the rain stopped.  Then he said he'd finished an hour early, so wouldn't take a full day's money.  As I said, such a nice man.