Our journey home on Tuesday went smoothly and by mid-afternoon we were reunited with Tom and Floof who seemed very pleased to see us and followed us around the house and garden.
I was shocked to see on the news that huge forest fires have broken out near Cap Ferret on the Arcachon Basin, where we were only a few days ago. And two local firefighters died earlier this week fighting another fire close to Bordeaux airport. As I have already mentioned in my last few blog entries it is very, very hot down there in South-West France and all of the grass and trees must be extremely dry and ready to burst into flames.
I have recently been in touch with my Mum’s friend Heather from Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s. Heather has sent me a bundle of letters that my Mum wrote to her in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was a little bit worried that I would feel very sad when I was reading them, but they were lovely letters and it was just like hearing my mum‘s voice again. The first letter was written just three months before my dad died in January 1997; at that time they couldn’t find anything wrong with him but with hindsight it seems obvious that the cancer had come back. Mum was never really the same after he died. She tried, and in a lot of ways succeeded, to get on with her life, but she had loved and relied on him so much, and missed him very much for the next 13 years. She did get a lot of joy out of all five of her grandsons, and she was a fantastic grandmother. She used to make all sorts of arts and crafts with them, they were very lucky. It was great that she lived just along the road and we could all pop in and out to see her. In one of the letters she had written a wee poem about Dad and her, here it is:
He was my life, he was my friend.
Our parting had to come one day.
But surely this is not the end
He waits for me? I cannot say.
But if we never meet again,
If what I had is all there is,
I will not be ungrateful then
That he was mine, and I was his.
I was shocked to see on the news that huge forest fires have broken out near Cap Ferret on the Arcachon Basin, where we were only a few days ago. And two local firefighters died earlier this week fighting another fire close to Bordeaux airport. As I have already mentioned in my last few blog entries it is very, very hot down there in South-West France and all of the grass and trees must be extremely dry and ready to burst into flames.
I have recently been in touch with my Mum’s friend Heather from Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s. Heather has sent me a bundle of letters that my Mum wrote to her in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was a little bit worried that I would feel very sad when I was reading them, but they were lovely letters and it was just like hearing my mum‘s voice again. The first letter was written just three months before my dad died in January 1997; at that time they couldn’t find anything wrong with him but with hindsight it seems obvious that the cancer had come back. Mum was never really the same after he died. She tried, and in a lot of ways succeeded, to get on with her life, but she had loved and relied on him so much, and missed him very much for the next 13 years. She did get a lot of joy out of all five of her grandsons, and she was a fantastic grandmother. She used to make all sorts of arts and crafts with them, they were very lucky. It was great that she lived just along the road and we could all pop in and out to see her. In one of the letters she had written a wee poem about Dad and her, here it is:
He was my life, he was my friend.
Our parting had to come one day.
But surely this is not the end
He waits for me? I cannot say.
But if we never meet again,
If what I had is all there is,
I will not be ungrateful then
That he was mine, and I was his.
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