“I SHOULD BE SO LUCKY (SO LUCKY, SO LUCKY)”

Oh well, it’s November all right.   Here it is raining and cold in Bonnie Scotland.   The leaves are shades of orange and yellow, lots are still on the trees in Lochardil, Inverness, but a good percentage of them are now lying around the paths of the garden, and along the streets.    In some ways Autumn is sad   -----

‘And the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,   And I haven’t got time for the waiting game.’

I think it was John Houston that sang September Song in some film or other.  He was finding it melancholy trying to have a love affair and realising it was probably going to be kind of heartbreaking for an aged person.

Really I am lucky,  -----  old as I am.   I mean I am having steak and sausages for my meal tonight.   Me and Gerald.   And we will watch TV and try not to eat too many chocolates.    The freezer if full of waiting meals for my guests tomorrow – sister (Stella) and brother-in-law (Stephen), and sister-in-law (Irene) she, from another era, like the nineteen fifties.   Anyhow, we will laugh, drink, eat and be merry because 23^rd November is my birthday.   So that can’t be bad.

Unlucky is to be in the Gaza Strip, or Israel with rockets and bombs going off, people injured and dying, and whole buildings being smashed up.   Politicians try to help to get some form of compromise going in this latest upheaval in the Middle East.   Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Egypt.   They have a Cease-Fire just yesterday and today, but people don’t believe it will last.  

‘And the days dwindle down to a precious few, September, November, And

these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.   These golden days, I’ll spend with you!’

 That’s what I’ll sing to Gerald tonight, Well maybe, if we can stop  arguing about, you name it, we can make an argument out of it – all in a good cause, of course.

He has been making a flat-pack shelf-unit I bought from a catalogue.   Swearing, of course, as the instructions were incomplete, obscure, and WRONG!   In his dressing-gown as usual, and kneeling in the hallway, he announced to me that the illustrations were wrong, and that the screws DID NOT FIT!.   ‘They’re never wrong, dear’, says I.   But no flies on himself, he goes and looks the catalogue up on the computer, still cursing me, and finds out what?   THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE WRONG!!  Oh well, the unit is completed now and looks as if it had always stood in the kitchen holding Cookery Books.

Reading a library book called  “To Travel Hopefully” by  Christopher Rush.   It is about the author who, after the sudden death of his young wife with undiagnosed breast cancer,  he is devastated and experiencing a tragic time of it, almost a mental breakdown.   Eventually, he decides to make a change in his life, really to get his life back.   He makes up his mind to follow in the footsteps of R. L. Stevenson, and to go walking in France in the Cevennes with a donkey.   You may remember the book is called “Travels with a Donkey”.   I remember reading it in school when I was about thirteen.   It had been translated into French and we had to learn to read it in class in French in school.   The author, Christopher Rush’s experiences are quite fascinating, once you work your way through the devastation of his bereavement in Edinburgh with two young children.   However, I stuck it out and now he has just got his donkey and is getting ready to start alone on his journey through the lonely hills of South West France.   Good luck!   Bad luck!   We all get our share.   Let’s hope good luck holds for me over the weekend, the month even, and maybe until my next birthday.

As they used to say in Scotland in the olden days, when we had coal fires.   “Lang may your lum reek!”   which translated means “Long may your chimney smoke!”   And Christmas is only 32 days away!    Yipee!  Good luck to all my distant relatives and friends who find the time to read this!!