Mother’s Day

I was very emotional and quite sad in the run-up to Mother’s Day, it’s the first one without my mother passed away at the end of May last year and coincidently today is her late partner Gerry‘s birthday, I still don’t really believe they’ve both gone.
The boys came upstairs with lovely cards and messages for me and Max made me breakfast in bed. Gulliver assures me that he wasn’t thinking of me when he chose the bulldog lol.

Max and I spent a couple of hours going through The downstairs cupboard under the stairs, deciding what to get rid of, re-organising things et cetera, my cousin is kindly taking my great grandmothers singer sewing machine on permanent loan as I just don’t have room for it, our great grandmother Elizabeth slack nee Haslam 18 at the Royal Albert Hall in 1893 singing opera, there is a picture in the scanners which I took of Rosie with the original machine, there is a 1950s model in the table at the moment, the old machine was at the back of the cupboard which prompted us to clean it out.

My cousin Sophie is my mothers older sisters daughter, she arrived at three with her husband Iain and daughters Rosie and Gen, they bought us delicious chocolate‘s manufactured by a friend of theirs and Rosie made a wonderful cake, we all had tea and then I got out a small suitcase full of mums old letters and diaries and we had a riotous hour or so reading through them, it seems that mum had a lot of admirers and spent most of her time thinking about boys when she was younger LOL, there are fantastic phrases like ‘we kissed passionately in the scullery’ , I may transcribe them at some point I think they would make interesting reading.

Last week I spent some time going through my Jewelry and clothes and bags and girls were delighted to take some of it off my hands, I was glad to be giving them to the girls and to know that they would be using them and enjoying them.

I was looking through the globe Vernica with Sophie and Rosie and gave Rosie a very old book but they seem to know about that which I have never heard of, something about the Farne Isles, there was a handwritten inscription from the 19th century in it, it was given to my great grandfather Joseph Travell and in 1950 it was given to my mother on her birthday by Joseph‘s wife Jessie, I wrote an inscription to Rosie in pencil with the date. It’s a beautiful hardback blue book Gold detail, the golden picture on the front is a young girl with flowing hair in a rowing boat.

After they gone Max made a wonderful curry and the four of us had dinner together and watched a funny film.

Gulliver played me a tune on the guitar that he had written especially for me for Mother’s Day, he wouldn’t let me record him but he says he has made a recording of it which he is going to send me, I am so touched by this, it is beautiful and I’m going to pester him to send me a copy so that I can listen to it more.