A visit from Skye the dog

James’ cousin Andrew Eadie and his wife Caroline came round for coffee on Thursday. We haven’t seen them since one of the Covid lockdowns when we met in their garden to hand them photos of the Eadie family which they helped us to identify. This was part of our ongoing and endless attempt to sort and label the old family photos. In fact we have only ever really met them very briefly over the years; we knew Andrew’s Mum and Dad, Margaret and Bobby, much better because they used to visit James’ parents. Bobby died years ago but Margaret is still alive, although with severe dementia, sadly. It was very interesting to chat with Andrew and Caroline because Andrew knew all sorts of snippets about the family that James didn’t know, and since he is nine years older than James he can remember more of family events. For example he can remember James’ maternal grandfather, who died in 1958. And he knew quite a few of the Andersons because the two families were friends. He and Caroline are very pleasant and we had a great afternoon. They brought their cocker spaniel Skye with them, to the outrage of Tom and Flora, who fled upstairs and hid under our bed. We kept Skye in the back room with us, so they were not under direct threat, but they remained under the bed for hours and didn’t emerge until the evening.