Ghost-tours are much advertised in Edinburgh, all those spooky old haunts with the wind whistling through ancient corridors… I had resisted the temptation.

However, just the other day, I was lost in Edinburgh. So I stopped, parked the stroller outside a shop that was being renovated and pulled out my map. I was attempting to find by bearings by turning the map in different directions when I heard a tap on the glass window of the shop. Turning my head to look into the shop I saw a big bloke with a painting drop-sheet over his head.
“Whoooooo whoooooooo” he said, waving his arms within the confines of the sheet. Behind him, a bloke in overalls was doubled-over in giggles. I paused for a moment at the sureality of the scene before bursting into laughter.
I kept walking down the street and chuckling to myself for a good two blocks. Then I realised I was still lost and stopped.

They’ve got a good sense of humour, those Scots.

Thanks for your email, Janet.

No need to apologise for your message being a short one. I have been writing short, unpunctuated, slighty illiterate, staccato emails since Timshel returned to ‘work’ ten days ago. Naps are the only chance to write. Ten days of lovingly reading my golden-haired cherub a golden-book, singing sweet lullabies until his eyelids grow heavy, and then sprinting like buggery to get to the laptop.

I have been thinking a bit about parenting lately and have come to the conclusion that parents rock. I think they are wonderful. (Naturally, I include myself in this sweeping generalisation.)
It’s just that parenting is such bloody hard work! That had been my experience, but living with our Edinburgh family (mum, dad, 3 kids) made me realise that no, I wasn’t doing it wrong: it really is long hours and hard yakka. Daniel, Robert and Francis are 10, 8, and 4 respectively and although they are really well-behaved (and gorgeous) kids, the work of parenting still keeps their parents (David and Marie Lousie) busy until about 9.00-9.30 at night. I would put Reuben to bed at 8, collapse in a relieved heap to watch Scottish television dramas and notice that they were still at it!

It’s not just the hours either, it’s the constant caring for other people bit that I admire. David (the Dad) came back from staffing a school camp REALLY EXCITED because he had had a cooked breakfast appear magically on his table every morning. He was like “I didn’t even have to cook it, it would just ‘appear!’” I so understood his reaction: after a year of grappling with the fact that I have to get breakfast for myself and OTHER people EVERY morning, I can understand that it’s not just the scrambled eggs he appreciated, it’s the fact that HE didn’t have to scramble them.
Just as I began asking myself “What makes normal people give up their freedom to tolerate a ‘work-fun” ratio of 1:25?” I realised it’s a dodgy question to ask because parenting is great fun. It’s just a more in-house kind of fun, than say, sea-kayaking.

I’m 14 months into the role of parenting, loving it, but still casting wistful looks at the kayak in the corner. “Vanuatu’s only 500km off the coast of NSW…” So I’m impressed that most parents seem to put in the hours quietly and constantly without (or despite) a lust for grass skirts and blue seas. I think they deserve a cup of tea and a good lie down. And a trip to Vanuatu.

Sorry I can’t be there to make you a cup of tea.
Love Shelley.

p.s. attached is photo of your baby girl casually eating grass.

Disclaimer: Those sensitive to the over-supply of information concerning others physical ailments and bowel movements may wish to avoid reading the following entry.

We have had a run of bad health. Very ill.

The baby was the first to show symptoms.
“AAAhhh stinky nappy. Reuben has diarrhoea. Oh, what a smell! Quick Timshel, open the window!”
“Argghhh it’s freezing out there. Please Timshel, close the window.”
“Ohhhh, it’s really stinky. You’ll have to open it again.”
and so on. and so forth.

Two days later, I went to bed with a headache and woke up with a mad dash to the bathroom which left me giddy and groping for the toilet in a state of black spotty blindness. Vomiting, diarrhoea, sore muscles, throbbing headache. Timshel not feeling too brilliant either.
Feel awful in body and soul because the Igoe-Cochrane family have been such generous hosts (and great friends) and to repay them by disintegrating into the houseguests from hell hardly seems fair.

If we are not moaning on the couch, we are moaning at each other
“You change his nappy, I’m too nauseas. Well, I’m all woozy, can’t you do it?”.
We also hog the bathroom for hours on end, making strange noises and putrid smells that slide under the door and seek to fill every corner of the flat. I fear that weeks after we leave the Igoe-Cochranes will receive guests who enter the flat, scrunch up their noses and exclaim
“What is that smell?”
To which the Marie Louise and David will explain
“We had Australians all through the house. We’ve fumigated twice but the smell is still in the carpets.”

Woke up this morning and decided that TODAY was the day to go op-shopping for warm clothes. Yesterday’s exploration of Edinburgh with Reuben saw us freezing in the rain, hail and icy winds. Trudging over puddled cobblestones with the hail bouncing off my soggy beanie, I silently vowed to NEVER AGAIN go out in inclement weather unless better prepared. So ACTION STATIONS, a’ op-shopping we will go. I’m thinking balaclavas, ski-overalls, and those coats that look like sleeping bags with arms.

Of course, going anywhere with a baby/toddler takes a while.
So first I must wade through the preparatory tasks;

• breakfast (includes lesson for baby in how to eat with a spoon)
• clean up (includes hosing down of all surfaces that suffered the results of spoon-mismanagement)
• wash up (punctuated with swift movements to and fro various rooms to plot baby’s trail of destruction)
• change nappy (despite protestations)
• dress baby (despite rigorous wriggling)
• pack nappy bag
• pack food bag
• pack shelley bag (purse, cash, glasses, keys blah blah)
• dress baby in additional cardigan, coat, scarf and hat (despite back-arching reluctance from Reuben)
• take stroller and bags down 2 flights of stairs
• return to take baby down 2 flights of stairs
• unfold stroller and insert baby in stroller (threading various limbs through relevant straps)
• put on my own coat, scarf, beanie and gloves

Now ready, I open the front door.

It’s raining.
Hard.

The Celts have a strong and powerful spirituality. As I trudge upstairs I ponder that perhaps this is because the weather is so bad, there is nothing to do but go inside and pray for better weather.

 

 

Our Edinburgh adventures started with a trip to the good people of Mac. I would like to say that the good people of Mac are an ancient clan of piping, black-puddin eatin kilt-makers with red beards and a tendency to shout a lot. But no. It was an excursion to see a pimply faced teen who pressed a few keys and revived our dead Macintosh laptop. Bless ’im.

Next visit turned out to be a taxidermist’s wonderland: the exotic (but very quiet) menagerie of stuffed beasts at Edinburgh Museum. Oh and here’s something I learnt (which the rest of the world may already know) by peering into a box of dirt that had been artfully arranged to suggest a series of little tunnels; moles are TINY. About the size of a mouse, unless the taxidermist ran out of stuffing. I imagined them to be as big as a baby’s arm!

The Igoe-Cochranes middle child, Robert, came with us for our next adventure; a long hike through the back streets of Edinburgh to a swan-bobbing pond at the base of Arthur’ seat. Arthur’s seat is the site of an extinct volcano and rises 250 metres above sea-level. Our original plan was to climb to the top, but after dragging the stroller up 50 metres of a rocky and slodgy hillside, we folded up the stroller, chucked it into a thicket of gorse bush, and staggered to the wind-swept ruins of St.Anthony’ chapel for a rest. With our backs to the bluestone and big relieved grins, we pulled out our packed lunches and made fumbly attempts to unwrap the contents with pink numbed hands. Before us was a wide and generous view of Edinburgh and it’s surrounding seaside suburbs, including Leith where we are staying.

Incidently, Leith is in the history books as the place where the game of golf was invented. We are on the penultimate floor of a four storey building which faces out onto a big park known as Leith Links. According to the folk at the local pub ‘The Golf’, the game of golf has been played at Leith Links since at least 1600. In 1640, King Charles 1 heard news of the Irish rebellion whilst playing golf on the Links. The game gained more formal recognition in the 1700s when a club formed, calling themselves “The Gentlemen Golfers”. They would meet on a Saturday and lay wages on their game before retiring to a local hostelry to dine and settle their bets. In 1744, thirteen rules were drawn up, the first acknowledged rules of golf. They were titled ‘The articles and laws in playing at golf”. In 1754, The gentlemen of Fife invited The Gentlemen Golfers of Leith to join them in forming a club at St.Andrews which adopted the rules of Leith… and so ‘playing at golf’ spread throughout the world.
When David first told me this history of the park I looked around me and said “Ahh that explains the little hills doted about.”
“Well no.” He replied, “The mounds of earth were used to mount guns during Oliver Cromwell’s siege of Edinburgh”.
That siege was in 1650.
So let’s think this through, given that the game of modern golf is devastatingly boring, how boring would it have been without the little hills and sandtraps? If golf was first played in 1600, that is 50 sad years of wandering in the rain with a stick, a ball and a saggy cap with pom-poms. As I write this looking out over the Links, I imagine the golfers of the day would be very happy with the outcome of the siege of Edinburgh
“Today, men, is a day of Scottish pride, for although we have lost the battle, our independence, and the fine city of Edinburgh, TODAY my friends, we have made wee hills with wee flags to hit our wee balls into! No longer will we face the tryranny of flat parkland!”

HOORAY!
Hooray!
HOORAY!”

I spent my first day in Edinburgh making loud oohhs and ahhs punctuated by the zink-flash! of the digital camera.

The capital city of Scotland is a world heritage site, and to quote my Lonely Planet guide “An architectural wonderland dispersed among the rocky crags of brooding volcanic hills”.

It is a beautiful, old, stone city set in such a dramatically grand location that it reminds me of the model cities that you would make out of paper mache in grade five (though you know, the BEST model in the class). There is a huge extinct volcano (Arthur’s seat), a crowded old town (called The Old Town) with secret lanes, nooks and crannies, and a swanky grand new town (called *New Town) with posh squares, circuses and greens. The best bit: a huge rock (Castle Rock) smack bang in the middle of it all with a castle (Edinburgh Castle) on top and a train running around it’s base. Coooool.

As an Australian, I was amazed at the age and grandeur of the buildings. In Australia, you may have a nice old church here, or some impressively grand mansion there … but to make a city comparable to Edinburgh’s “architectural wonderland” you would have to employ the talent of a (rather clever) grade fiver to carefully prise off all of Adelaide’s gorgeous old churches, Tasmania’s convict-era stone buildings and Melbourne’s memorials and cathedrals, and then deposit them (lots of blue tac) in a model with the prior mentioned “rocky crags of brooding volcanic hills”. Oh, Oh, and the train! Don’t forget the train.

The buildings are brilliant; stone monuments to an age of craft and classic design.
Timshel got terribly excited about the stairs of the flat we are staying in, and his letter home describes them (and the craft of the buildings here) very well.

“Like the majority of buildings here, Marie and David’s flat is a sandstone construction, which must have taken countless man-hours of painstaking labour to build. The spiral staircase which ascends to the flat is an amazing piece of work – each step is a single piece of bluestone supported at one end by the wall, but the remainder of the step is only held up by 2-inches of overlap on the step below. I can normally walk under an arched doorway with the confidence of knowing that the weight of the stone wall above only aids the work of the keystones, but when I climb this staircase I tend to hug the wall-end of the steps a little. But its masterful engineering is a striking reminder of the skill, care and effort required to build in a truly lasting way, especially in our present economy of cost minimisation where concrete and pre-fabricated steel abound.”

P.S. I mistakenly thought the Queen would stay at Edinburgh castle when in the mood for a touch of haggis and tatties but was put right a few days ago when we passed a glittering palace with serious stone walls.
“That’s Holyrood Palace, which is where the Queen stays when in Edinburgh.” Timshel said.
“What about the lovely Edinburgh Castle?” I explained.
“Not enough mod cons.” He said.

* New meaning 18th century!

We have arrived safe and well in Scotland!

Our hosts are a scottish family who stayed with Timshel’s family when visiting Australia a few years ago. The Igoe-Cochrane family (impressively Scottish-sounding name methinks) are Marie Louise, David, and their three boys, Daniel, Robert and Francis. It is lovely lovely lovely to be here.

We arrived yesterday morning, slept a little and then made ourselves get up for a few hours before crashing again. Reuben needed some convincing that 2am wasn’t 2pm. He wanted to play and kept shouting Ma! Dad! Ma! Ma! DAD! in a bid to rouse us from our our stupour. What a time to nail the whole “Ma/Dad” thing. He was very cute, but it WAS 4am. We stifled our giggles and feigned sleep. Until he woke up again a little later wanting lunch. Poor little fella. So a quick feed and re-settle.

I have just woken up to our second day in Scotland and Marie has assured me that it is friday. I had no idea what day or time it is. was. will be. or something. Bit jetlagged.

Their is eleven hours difference between Scotland and Australia. It was a trip to the other side of the world. As Timshel reflected, you can’t get much farther apart unless you flew from New Zealand to Oslo, and even then the weather would be more similar. The day we left Australia, it was 33C. The week before we left we had had a string of 40C days. When we arrived at Heathrow, it was -1C, and Scotland had had several -5C days in a row. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

So how was the flight?

Arduous, fun, arduous and fun again. This being our first
international flight we were like two excited ten year olds
“Look, a toothbrush and tiny toothpaste!”
“The alcohol is FREE?”
“Oh so the bassinet folds down into our lap, how cute”.
By the end of our flight, however, I had a working hypothesis that the person
who designed the whole parents bit of the plane had major issues with their own
parents and so subliminally wished all parents all over the globe to SUFFER. The bassinett did fold down into your lap, the armrests were immovable and the nappy change tray was just that; a tray. Everytime I changed Reuben I would return to
Timshel muttering “Change tray my ass! A tray is for a cup of tea and a piece
of toast, not a squirmy 10 kg pup of a lad!” to which he would respond
“Look,they gave us a pair of socks with no heels!”

Reuben did very well and was super-keen on meeting and greeting EVERYONE. He has only just learnt to walk and delights in squirming his way into little gaps. Planes are full of little gaps, mostly between people. I spent a lot of time trying to guage whether his visitations were welcome or not, “This is our baby Reuben, do you mind if he looks out your window/climbs into your lap and sucks your tie/tries to drink your chardonnay?” Most people were happy to have a quick visit before Reuben moved on to the next seat.

The flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh was exciting and beautiful. We had a
WINDOW SEAT (!!!) at the back of the plane, a sausage, chutney and scrambled egg ciabbatta roll and sleeping baby across our laps. Only an hour to go before we reached our destination. Bliss!

I really cherished that window seat; after 24 hours in the air it was wonderful to finally FEEL like we were flying. I watched the landscape slide under us in that seemingly miraculous way and half-expected an angel to fly past and give a little wave.
It’s a great opportunity and always bizarre for me.

So hear we are. Edinburgh. Haven’t been out to explore yet. On the way home from the airport I noticed lots of stone buildings, deciduous brush and double-decker buses illuminated by a very beautiful blue-white light. I said groogily “I feel like I’m in an episode of ‘The Bill’”. (Which is, of course, a pretty stupid thing to say. especially to a Scot.) Later that day, someone arrived on the front door for Robert’s guitar lesson and he had an accent just like the Igoe-Cochranes. I realised with a shock that EVERYONE here talks strangely. No wait, WE talk funny everyone else talks normally.
So I’m enjoying the differences. The water does goes down the plug hole in the opposite direction (no really, it does, I checked). The Mac keyboard has a £ key. The weetbix here are called Weetabix and they have round edges! The toilet flushes with a little handle.
We haven’t ventured out of the house yet so I’m busting to get out this morning. I haven’t ridden on a double-decker bus since kindie. The stroller is packed, very excited must go will write soon bye.

just went outside arrggh VERY cold must wrap baby in more clothing bye.

Arriving in Heathrow Airport for the first time was like meeting an old Aunt who had been a famous movie star in another age. Having her so much about her I expected her to be sassy, bold and polished but she was the airport equivalent of an old lady with saggy pantyhose and her petticoat hanging low. Heathrow was vaguely familiar in a familial kind of way, but in such bad repair that it was depressing. Old travelators that had ceased to function were left lying about with their inner mechanisms exposed and piles of old chairs could be found napping in strange corners. Bits of machinery that I expected to be hidden behind shiny panels were just kind of hanging around. I spotted gaffa tape holding bits together. Very disconcerting. Being a practical person I understand that gaffa tape does have an important role to play in the mechanics of daily life but I do not want to see it in an airport.* Especially moments before I lock myself up in a metal canister which is then “driven” into the sky.

* If the Singaporeans ever had to use gaffa tape to stick bits of a machine together then it would be colour co-ordinated tape, cut (not ripped off the roll with their teeth) on a neat diagonal. They would place a nice shiny panel in front of the offending gaffa tape and perhaps post a guard in front of the bit of recalcitrant machinery. Just in case. I know some may think that approach is ridiculous (HI Timshel!) but that’s the level of control I expect from an airport.

Reuben peering out of the plane window on arrival at Edinburgh Airport