Spring tour of Googie's garden

I’m up at my parents’ house for a couple of days. Normally I try and have a written piece for a Tuesday morning, but yesterday Mum and I walked around her garden with the camera and she made a #30stemchallenge in a little frog she found at Kendal market, made by a potter whose details she wanted to share.

As usual it’s bitter sweet here: Mum has miraculously been given a seven year old bichon frise to fill the gaping hole left by her beloved sixteen year old bedlington who died in late winter. This fluffy little charmer which is, I think, possibly more dandy dinmont than bichon, is refreshing everybody’s spirits. On the other hand I’m going through the locked cupboard Mum calls ‘the safe’ and will take seven printers from Dad’s old office to the tip today, not to mention heaps and heaps and heaps of never used writable cds. There will be a bonfire of the many carefully stacked empty cardboard boxes kept in there, old enough that their glue has perished, making them useless as reliable containers. And the tent I found is going somewhere to some young people Mum thinks will find it useful.

We saw Dad’s dementia evolving for years and years. But rather than admit or ask for help, Dad just blamed his tools and bought another and another and another printer/screen/hard drive. In amongst the boxes of carefully arranged other empty boxes I find heartbreaking little notebooks in which he tried to write the turnings one takes on a journey from here to Sedbergh (few) or Kirkby Lonsdale (fewer) his handwriting, never especially legible because as a child they tried to make this naturally left handed person write with his right, less decipherable the more frustrated he became. Years of hiding that he knew something was wrong with his brain but never admitting it - the grandson of Victorians who never showed weakness, the son of a man who went down with the Repulse in WWII and who died young enough to be venerated as perfectly strong for ever more, reduced to a person who can’t work out how to drive a few miles along the valley to the village where he grew up.

Bon, so no writing for you today, though we invited friends for dinner on Saturday, so I had grand and rather complicated ideas of forcing a possibly unsuccessful comparison between my rushing about laying the table and arranging flowers and remembering to put the food in the oven and Mrs Dalloway.

Instead I give you 85 year old Googie taking such endless pleasure in the gorgeousness that is the garden she made in the poke of field stretching down the fell from the barn they converted into a house thirty years ago, where she and Dad still live.