Writing 2

3 years ago Family, garden, Livestock, Scotland, Smallholding, writing

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from The Sparrowholding!. Festive bleatings from Scotland.

Another action-packed year has been duly consigned to the family history, and I am pleased to report – in this, our twenty-somethingth annual Christmas epistle – that all five of us are still (just about) standing. Two thousand and seventeen was the year that saw all five of us – plus the daughterly duo’s brave boyfriends – head en masse for a ‘cinq-jour séjour’ (apologies to any native French readers) in the excellent and enticingly named “Villa Lavande” in southern France. This trip will no doubt one day be immortalised by the ghost of Enid Blyton as part of a hybrid adventure series entitled “Seven Drive on the Wrong Side of the Road”, but that is another story. It was also, sadly, the year that our unfortunate feline, Chuck the cat, proved that he shared his mistress’s lack of mathematical prowess by miscalculating how many of his nine lives he had left (none, it transpired). And finally, it was the year that Yours Truly formalised her tutoring activities and launched a new business, The Learning Cauldron, on April Fool’s Day...

When not pontificating about the finer points of poetry and prose or assuming the guise of grammar guru for my expanding band of avid academics, I now find my life being governed by my faithful companion and friend, the Fitbit. For any of you not familiar with these devilishly addictive little devices, they are essentially a smart watch that warns you that you have either been shockingly inactive (the perils of prolonged periods of proofreading) or impressively athletic (rarely, in my case). Mark you, having contemplated my retirement from the hallowed green Astroturf at the end of last season, I eventually decided that there was a little life left in this old hockey dog yet, and elected to stay on for another year. There are, according to my fellow team members, occasional moments when I become a little ‘excitable’ – such as the time when, having been belted in the foot by a particularly pernicious opponent, I yelled “You’re dead” in a moderately aggressive fashion at the offender – who promptly removed herself to the other side of the pitch for the rest of the game. In addition to my genteel hockey activities, regular bouts of badminton, weekly Zumba sessions (I still head in the opposite direction from everyone else during most routines…) and the occasional scoot around a squash court all conspire to ensure my Fitbit is still speaking to me at the end of each week.

Fresh herbs still available in the garden at ChristmasHunterGatherer’s exercise quotient since last Christmas has been mainly achieved through his customary forays across the fields of Scotland à la recherche de multifarious soil samples. During his leisure time, he merely switches agricultural soil for the horticultural variety, as he has been going potty in the garden… I should explain here that this turn of phrase is no reflection on the gardener’s intellectual faculties, but rather an allusion to the burgeoning collection of giant red plastic tubs that he is amassing. The said pots have proved to be the ultimate weapon in his war against his arch nemesis – the chickweed that had previously laid siege to his beloved polytunnel and veggie plots.

His lapidary interests remain 'rock' solid (see what I did there?), and this year's finds have included a rather attractive chunk of Scottish amethyst. His wife and daughters are still fervently hoping he’ll stumble across a seam of gold, though Yours Truly suspects there’s more chance of him finding some at the end of a rainbow!

amethyst stone, lapidarySon&Heir (22) currently enjoys one of the best workplace views in the country as he plies his barista skills at Kinross’s lochside venue, The Boathouse. When not there, he is to be found wielding weights at the local gym and is currently channelling his mental and physical energies into becoming a fully qualified personal trainer before moving south next year. Yours Truly hadn’t quite appreciated how much theory was involved in this until she’d to print off the 267-page course manual for him the other night! Here’s hoping that amongst all those words of physical wisdom there’s a unit on how to transform the body of a 54-year-old into that of a 30-year-old before the resumption of the hockey season in February…

Although we rarely see our daughterly duo in person, social media and Facetime occasionally allow us a vague insight into their London lives, and – as ever – any lacunae in information can be readily compensated for by liberal use of poetic licence by Yours Truly.

This autumn, DD1 (26) had to decide into which branch of commercial law she wished to qualify, and – as any self-respecting first-born child would do – she opted for ‘competition’. More than this about her work, I cannot tell you, as for reasons of confidentiality, she is unable to share anything of her professional life without having to kill us afterwards. Fortunately, having had sight of the density and dullness of the legal literature she was revising for her exams a couple of years back, her father and mother are – in all honesty – rather relieved not to be privy to the inner workings of English corporate law...

We are, however, wondering why our considerable investment in her education has resulted in a lawyer who doesn’t ‘do’ Scottish law and is thus of no use whatsoever to her poor parents! Actually, that is possibly slightly unfair, as she’s currently working in Berlin for six months, which allowed her fond parentals a welcome low-cost pre-Christmas winter break in mid-December – although Yours Truly’s sheep-covered Christmas jumper attracted the attention of airport security, evidently marking her out as a baaad(!) character, and she was promptly marched off to have her luggage and trousers drug-tested.

HunterGatherer surveys the beach as mentioned in our Christmas newsletter.Ironically, DD1 had been far more concerned about the attire that her father might arrive in, judging by this Facebook message received prior to our visit: “Please tell dad to bring boots for dinner that aren’t from a hiking shop. And does he have any clothes that aren’t hiking-esque?” Her angst may have been prompted by HunterGatherer’s behaviour on the beach in France, where he stood bewildered in his full-length trousers, long sleeves and ear-flapped hat, beholding an entire beach bedecked with bikini'd and bikini-less bodies. By the end of the afternoon, however, he had taken the very daring step of rolling up his sleeves and even... his trouser legs.

Hot on the heels of insulting aging rock stars in 2016, DD2 (24) continues her precarious path to musical supervisorial (yes, it is a word) supremacy in London, and this year was caught pondering aloud in the office how interesting it was that quite so many of the songs in the Take That ‘Wonderland’ show she was working on had been written by some unknown guy called Robert Williams… She also managed to engage a certain well-known actor in conversation for 30 minutes in the office before casually asking him, “So what do you do?” Fortunately, the said thespian had a sense of humour and merely responded, “Do you watch TV?” When not listening to music and watching films all day (and getting paid to do so… call that work?!), DD2 hares around a hockey pitch in her usual inimitable fashion and apparently has moments of ‘excitability’ (can’t think where she gets that from…).

So the time approaches for New Year’s resolutions to be made (then promptly broken), all that remains is for me to wish all of you a very happy Christmas and a ‘merry’ New Year when it comes.

Hope 2018 brings you and yours good health and lots of wonderful memories!

11 years ago Family, writing

Spelling be(e) damned. Living with dyslexia.

This was going to be a blog about how frustrating it can be living with a dyslexic partner - which, I still have to admit, it can be.  In fact I already decided years ago that there was definitely a call for a book explaining a dyslexic’s habits and problems to prepare people who, by some quirk of fate, find themselves about to share their lives/homes with one. A book which explained that dyslexia is about so much more than poor spelling. The book I wish I’d had, in short.
However, my feelings of indignation vanished suddenly five minutes ago. You see, there I was, all ready to rant and rail on screen about how it nearly drives me to drink (luckily only hot chocolate in my case, being teetotal!) always having to be... the one who deals with every last piece of the dreary domestic paperwork... the one in the firing line when it comes to requests for help with homework and projects and filling in permission slips... the one who has to clear up yet another Inca-esque trail of coffee granules across every inch of every kitchen surface (even though I detest coffee and never drink the stuff)... the one who has to remember which offspring has to be where and when… and who regularly has to retrieve forgotten garden tools, footwear or clothing from every corner of the garden... and... and...(did I mention the coffee granules?).
Of course, I should have seen the writing on the wall (if you’ll excuse the pun) 20 years ago, when I first received letters - riddled with spelling errors - from HunterGatherer. However, love was blind - and love at first sight (of which more another time) even more so.  Despite being someone who normally breaks into a sweat at the sight of a single errant apostrophe, I blissfully ignored even the most convoluted combinations of vowels and consonants, such was my eagerness to devour the sentiment behind them. 
Once we were married, though, I did begin to wonder why someone who has the proud total of one O'Grade to his name (a C in technical drawing) and who once asked me how to spell the word “snow” when writing up the farm diary one evening, could beat me hands down time and time again at Trivial Pursuit, his boundless knowledge of geographical facts and historical events putting mine to shame. It simply didn't add up. I'd heard of dyslexia and had a vague notion that it meant folk struggled to spell, but I suppose that - being fortunate to have sailed through school - I’d never really paid much attention to the concept before.
All the same, I booked HunterGatherer (then in his early 30s) in for an assessment at the Dyslexia Institute in Glasgow, and three hours or so later we emerged several hundred pounds poorer, clutching a definite diagnosis of dyslexia. It was a rather emotional moment for him, as suddenly all the miserable years of schooling that he’d endured, plus the memories of the many taunts – from teachers, classmates and some even from his own mother (who came from a generation that had no understanding of dyslexia), came flooding back.  The sad fact was that he could have been helped, but that no one during his primary school or adolescent years did anything other than tell him he was stupid. 
It is probably no surprise to learn that this unhelpful approach did absolutely nothing for the self-esteem of a young lad who was nonetheless determined to read his first ‘proper’ book - a feat which he achieved at the age of 17 after weeks of dogged perseverance. 
The impact that the lack of a diagnosis or any support had on his teenage years was major and indeed continues to dominate his adult life daily, because it restricts him to working in roles where his short-term memory problems don’t lead him to forget to do things. It also consigns him to doing jobs which involve as little reading or writing as possible (in one removals job, when he had to write a list of household items, he resorted to ringing Yours Truly from his mobile phone inside a cupboard to ask about the spelling of ‘pagoda’).
Last but not least, being orthographically challenged has resulted in him often having to take up employment where a lot of physical graft is involved.  Not that fitness is a problem for HunterGatherer – I suspect he could race a 100 m and give many chaps half his age a run for their money! – plus his good spacial awareness and 'out-of-the-box' thinking (which often go hand-in-hand with dyslexia) are useful assets for practical tasks . But the frustrating fact, for him, is that he has never had any choice about what path his career should take, instead being obliged to take whatever work was “manageable” within the constraints of this hidden disability, and this has left a huge gaping void in his life.
Which is something that shamefully (even if it is because I’m frazzled from the daily stresses of the dizzying working mum merry-go-round) I tend to forget.  Until moments like tonight, that is, when he saw me checking my Facebook page (and leaving messages under photos posted by friends) and said, in a small, sad voice:  “I could never have a Facebook page. There’d be no point, as I couldn’t even write on it.”  That’s when it hit me full on, like a very large truck, that living with a dyslexic person – frustrating as it might be – is so much less difficult than being that dyslexic person.