Looking back ...

This being a relatively idle morning, I was still clearing away after breakfast when the post arrived. An income tax code notification (memo to self: check it's correct soon!) and - more puzzlingly - a hefty brown envelope which had somehow been opened and then re-bagged in plastic by the Post Office, with their apologies. What could it be? And why had the PO opened it?

I still don't know the answer to the second question, but the contents were undamaged and quite a surprise. At some point during the last two years I may well have blipped about an interview I did over Zoom with a researcher into growing up during and after WW2; she prompted me with questions and I just ... talked. At the time I didn't really know what the final outcome would be, and I'd all but forgotten about it as one of the strange things that happened in a very strange time. I think there's more on a website that I've not had time to check, but right now this book is the end product of all these interviews, and snippets of my story appear all through the second (post-war) section of it, including a photo I sent them of me aged 3 with my parents on the shore at Lochranza. The interviews are reproduced with a kind of careless rapture that makes every interviewee sound equally illiterate, but there you are - it's clearly been transcribed from the video in a sort of flow-of-consciousness style which looks... authentic. The book is beautifully produced and they've sent me two copies. I shall bequeath one to each son whether he wants it or not...

Talking of sons, this was my younger son's birthday today. He's just off the phone in a late evening FaceTime call, which was nice, as was the earlier call as I was cooking and he was entertaining his brother who'd dropped round with a present. They are beginning to look more and more like one another, something I hadn't noticed before. Last week I hinted at the rather grim experience of an induced birth in Glasgow; today I was remembering the very different experience of having a baby in Dunoon, where my GP delivered him and one of the midwives stayed on after her shift to see what I had so that she could tell people in our church. I had a lovely peaceful week in the local hospital afterwards, with twice daily visits (my mother and #1 son in the afternoon, Himself in the evening) and nightly trips to the nursery because I had insisted that I was the only person who was to feed my baby and they didn't leave them in the wards overnight so that everyone could sleep. And the food was great...

As for the present day, I went a crazy walk with my pal and two dogs in the afternoon; we were both soaked and the rain turned to sleet as I drove home again. I think the grass is white now, and it's colder again. I'm going to fill a hot bath...