Catch Me If You Can

 

After my last blogpost, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd dashed off for a sabbatical on a desert island thus explaining my apparent absence from this platform. Sadly, and much as I might wish otherwise, I've instead been maintaining the huge effort required to re-establish our home. I'm not sure if it's age that's catching up with me but I'm certainly not finding it as easy as I might have imagined. There again being forced to knuckle down in retirement and tackle work that I would not have chosen, if it weren't for the circumstances, is a strange phenomenon after the carefully orchestrated freedom of the past decade.

That said, I did manage to squeeze 6 nights in London when I helped out with Grandotty's childcare. I'm unsure what the expectations of me were but, for some bizarre reason, the Eldest and Dilly seemed to think I was the ideal person to  sort potty training. Perhaps they assumed that my memory would extend back 30 plus years to a time when I was first initiated to all that palaver. Again it could be an age thing but quite frankly it doesn't and so Grandma was clearly not the nannying supremo they imagined. She and Grandotty did have a lot of fun, however, going out and choosing a potty, although I'm not so sure that either of us enjoyed the accidents that followed.

At least I managed a night at the theatre with the Youngest to see The Book of Mormon. Over pre-performance drinks, she warned me that I might be offended by the content of show and that her friends had been horrified to learn that she was going with her mother! Well there's one thing that doesn't come with age and that's innocence (unless I'm so naive that innuendo passes over my head), so I still don't understand what she was fussing about. Whilst obviously neither Uganda nor the Church of the Latter Day Saints were portrayed fairly and would not have been my obvious choice of subject matter for a musical, how can you, however prudish, not laugh at a production where the lingering catchphrase appears to be: "There are maggots in my scrotum"?

Since then I've continued my life of unpacking, cleaning (that grime has got everywhere), visiting the tip and charity shop as well as decorating and gym workouts. The garden has suddenly sprung into abundance too, but growing vegetables and bedding plants is going to take a back seat this season, as the need to weed and prune back after a year of neglect takes precedence.  Meanwhile there's a lot going on in the background with support for my own mother and then, just when I began to feel totally overwhelmed, something popped up and reminded me about putting on my own oxygen mask first. A bit like flying to that desert island but without getting on a plane or the holiday afterwards. When I come back down to earth, bumpy landing or whatever, it will definitely be time to plan a vacation or two.