White Haired Woman

I answered this question in detail!

…..I have white hair, I walk more slowly than I used to, I always wear trousers or leggings, I am short.

That could be any one of lots of people?

I speak with a very soft accent that has evolved from Ohio American to not quite British English. I still say ‘banana’ rather than ‘banarna’. (American friends, the ‘r’ inside English words makes the vowel in front of it somewhat longer, it isn’t pronounced like the ‘r’ in ‘farmer’. Real, proper Brits don’t actually pronounce either of the ‘r’s in that word – it sounds more like ‘fah-mah’. But, the ‘r’ in ‘trend’ or ‘screen’ is pronounced just as in American English.)

I am overweight but trying to lose some. I’m more pear shaped than apple shaped. Even when I was skinny – from childhood until late 30s – I was the same – big hips, small bust.

I have short legs which are sturdy. Nowadays my ankles tend to swell in hot weather. Both of my knees have been replaced but I can’t fathom what it was that caused the cartilage in them to disappear! I have never been sporty, never run when I can walk, never climbed mountains or even monuments if there was a handy lift.

I wear glasses. When I was young it was discovered that my right eye had astigmatism and I was prescribed glasses. I found wearing them made everything look like it was tilted. I gave up wearing them almost immediately! In my 40s I discovered that I couldn’t see to read as well as I had so bought some over-the-counter reading glasses. I continued with those, changing the strength as necessary but, it was in my late 70s that I slowly found that my vision was so bad that I could no longer read LOOP on my local buses until they were quite close. (The LOOP is a great service here in Thanet, joining the 3 small towns of Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Margate.) So, now, I wear bifocals. (I tried varifocals but didn’t get on so well.)

In early 2018 I had white hair down to my waist and found it annoying to look after. I wore it up in some sort of bun but I always looked a bit messy 5 minutes after I finished fixing it for the day. So, I decided to go to the hairdresser and have it cut short. After the cut, I quite liked how it looked, then I washed it myself and it didn’t look so great. I bought a special machine that would give my hair a bit of a wave but, that was useless – so I had it cut, even shorter! I liked it when I came out of the hairdresser – and you can guess how I felt a couple of days later! It never looked great. Nevertheless I continued going to the hairdresser every few months and having it shaped and dressed.

In January last year (2023) I decided to let it grow. In April, around my 80th birthday, I had a big party and invited many of the people I know. My hair was just long enough by then to be pinned back and ‘up’ just a bit. Now (July, 2024) it has reached well past my shoulders. It is still messy – but occasionally, with a lot of hairspray, it stays in place for an hour or two.

I quite like being on my own, but not all the time. When Julian goes away, painting, I have a lovely time not cooking for two, in fact, not always cooking for one! He has been away for the past ten days and I have only turned on the oven twice, once to cook 2 chicken breasts and the other time to cook some salmon. On those evenings I also cooked some veges and ate hot meals. The second chicken breast was a lovely treat for Lola the next day but I had the second piece of salmon, cold for lunch with salad – salmon is my favourite fish. (Tuna is a close second!)

I am a quiet person. I don’t generally raise my voice though there are some people, now in their 50s I think, who might disagree. I was a primary school teacher for about 10 years and I often seemed to be raising my voice to be heard above the cacophony of 30-odd young people. I’m happy to say that many of them don’t seem to hold it against me!

I have blue eyes, almost no eyebrows (I’m not sure why). I have a small nose, a rather long upper lip and a small chin. When I smile I almost look like I have cheek bones and try to remember to almost smile rather than let my face fall into repose which either looks like I’m going to burst into tears or that I am angry or very bored! When I was younger, people passing me in the street would say, “Cheer up, it may never happen!”

Well, I can’t think of anything else to describe me so will end here. Cheerio, ‘til next time!

Those of you who have read my posts before, know several things about me: I am pretty old, I won’t travel on an airplane, I love being at home, and I have a dog.

What has the dog got to do with anything, you may ask. Well, in the foreseeable future, later on today, I plan to take the dog for our usual walkies. We will set off after the worst of the school-going-home traffic is out of the way and we’ll walk to the first corner. We may make several (or more) stops along the way so that Lola can have a good sniff to see which of her pals (or enemies) has stopped and she will leave a marker to say she has been to the same patch of weed, grass or pavement.

At the corner, we will stop and wait until we can be certain that we are not in danger of being ambushed by a rogue car or electric scooter, then I say ‘okay’ to Lola and we cross the road and go right, to the end. (The reason we cross there is that there is quite a large crack in the wall that holds back the tree and garden of the house on the other side of the road and I worry that it will collapse on us! I worry about stuff like that! – see my earlier post, Risk-Averse. Who me? Yes me!)

At the end of that short little road, we turn left and walk to the end. This part of the walk is different to the last bits – it has a small grassy bank on the left which Lola has to examine minutely for any trace of other animals, particularly, of course, dogs. It is along this path that she leaves most of her special signal mixture these days.

Until May this year, her spots of choice would have been on the following large area – a small grassed park-like piece of land that boasts a wooden bench set back near the wall separating it from the house and garden behind. At one time this piece of land was the site of a very useful (to me) bus stop – the nearest to our house and one of the penultimate stops of the numbers 8 and 9 bus from Canterbury. Sadly both bus routes were changed several years ago and the bus stop pole on the side of the road was removed.

In May we rounded the corner to find a mini digger had removed all the grass. I asked one of the men who was working there why and he told me that they were preparing the land to sow wild-flower seeds! How wonderful!

After that day Lola still, occasionally walked across the area sniffing out the scents of her allies but, in the last few weeks she hasn’t been able to walk there because there is the most beautiful growth of wild flowers! There are corn flowers, tall red poppies, little white daisies, big yellow daisies and some others which haven’t yet opened. In some places, the flowers are almost as tall as I am (just about 5 feet), in others they are about 3 feet tall.

At the end of that bit of road we again turn left and walk back home, carefully crossing one road and arriving home in a very short time. One thing that hasn’t happened, though I am always prepared (just in case) is that Lola has not gone ‘squatties’, (as my mother and grand-mother called it.) I believe her previous owner taught her that the best place to do that was always in her own back yard because that is her squattie place of choice, at all times. When we went to Center Parcs in February, she only went squattie once during the whole week, saving the rest till we got home!

That, my friends, is the only plan for travel I have!

…..I have but I think if I did, it would be a sweet suet pudding and custard!

For those of you who don’t live in the UK, suet pudding is made with an animal based fat. I believe it’s the fat found on cows, ground up. That may sound disgusting to you – it does to me, but I love suet puddings! Chocolate suet pudding, vanilla suet pudding, raspberry suet pudding, all are lovely with custard.

Suet can be used for savoury British puddings, too like steak and kidney pudding. It is beyond delicious but, I hasten to add, not served with custard. It should be served with gravy!

These are all foods that I had no knowledge about before we settled in England and it was years before I was introduced to the sweet variety. When I was a teacher at a primary school in Snodland, Kent, I was allowed a school dinner if I was on ‘dinner duty’. The cooks at the school were absolutely brilliant at making so many gorgeous dishes and I was always pleased to see the suet puddings, be they sweet or savoury. Something else I loved were warm donuts with jam sauce.

It’s no wonder I started putting weight on in my 40’s!

You might think that I am a solitary sort of person and you would be right – now.

I used to love board games like Cluedo and Snakes and Ladders as well as card games like Go Fish and Old Maid when I was a kid. I’ve never been into Poker or Bridge though I used to play Pontoon (21) a little.

I’m old, I’m retired, I live with Julian who is either out painting or in our studio painting. The nest is empty. I no longer drive and I enjoy my own company.

My mornings are taken up with reading the more and more disturbing news, letting ‘Zoe’ know that I don’t have covid, and games! I subscribe to the NYT games which daily gives me the chance to have a go at Wordle, the Mini (a small crossword), Connections, and Spelling Bee. Later I pick up my Code Word magazine and work out which number is which letter of the alphabet, filling in the boxes until I have found all the words.

Wordle is a word game that I am so happy is available. Every day I start with the word adieu. Before June 27 last year I used any word I could think of that contained 2 or 3 vowels. On the 26th of June last year, I used the word CRANE and guess what happened….!

That will never happen again! (Adieu had already been the answer in the days before I played it).

Solitaire is a card game also known as patience. There are many ways of playing solitaire but my favourite is the straightforward one I have played for the last I-dont-know-how-many-years, on my iPad. It keeps all sorts of data for me – how many games I’ve played, how many I’ve won, how many minutes (hours, days) I’ve played, and it used to tell me how many of the games I’ve won were finished in under 2 minutes. I don’t think it does that any longer but I am a little slower nowadays so it doesn’t matter.

A few years ago I made a painting which was a lot of legs overlapping each other. I thought it would make a great picture on the back of playing cards and, for some reason, the game I play offered the opportunity to choose my own card back. Here it is:

Code Words is a puzzle which looks like a crossword but there are no clues. Each box has a number in it and the player is given one, two or three letters to start. So, say H is 13, D is 19 and O is 4. The puzzle will probably have one H, one D and one O already filled in, then the person who is doing the puzzle has to fill in the other H’s, D’s, and O’s before attempting to fill in any other square. When I first started doing these puzzles, I figured out that the E’s would be important because E is the most common letter used in English. My idea was to find out which number occurs most in the puzzle and then start as though that number is E. That usually works, but not always!

Anyway, I’m not going to give away all my strategies!

I have got better and better at these puzzles over the years I’ve been doing them but sometimes I get stuck and then I have to stop, put the puzzle down and wait for a while. Often, going back to one, I immediately see something I missed before and that sets me on my way.

So, those are the three games I play every day. I wonder if anyone else plays the same games or others I don’t know about…..?

In my life there have been many cats. Cats can be wonderful to have around and are usually friendly without being clingy.

Dogs are lovely, mostly. I’ve had two dogs, both loving and good companions.

Both animals have their down-sides though.

Cats like to be independent. They love to go out and keep an eye on what’s going on around the neighbourhood. They are, sadly, liable to wander across roads and sometimes find themselves on the losing side of a close encounter with a large and heavy vehicle.

I had a cat called Coco when I was about 8. He was a Siamese cat and very loving. One day he ran out the front door, down the 50-odd steps to and across the road, to hide under our parked car. I could do nothing but watch. Car after car drove by. I thought, “That’s good, he knows not to run when a car is coming.”

That was true but, sadly, he didn’t also know not to run when a huge, heavy, noise-making monster (a truck) came past. I think he was so scared that it could ‘get’ him, that it ‘got’ him.

This was an early lesson which I did not heed. If I had I would never have had another cat!

Scroll through Mocha and Java, a Siamese couple who had a litter of kittens – all of whom were allegedly taken to a rescue centre after Mocha (the dad) allegedly ate the male kitten; Burlap, whom we had to leave in America when we emigrated to the UK; Adam, whose name we had to change to Madam when he turned out to be a she; Daisy who developed a hideous growth on her forehead; Mama, who came to visit one day as I sat in our rooftop garden and who started to give me one kitten after another, twenty minutes after arriving; Orpheus, Winnie, Dudley, Frankenstein and Poppy, those same kittens; Moosh, who arrived when we had worked our way back down to having only one surviving cat (Orpheus); Tiggy, who came into our lives while we were living in digs* for a while; Pigpen and Tiggy 2, who were given to us by a friend; and Dizzy – my last cat who was my baby until, the inevitable.

Other cats wandered into and out of our lives. No cat could ever be as wonderful as Orpheus, who lived (unlike his brothers and sisters) until he was about 20 and my baby, Dizzy, who came to us as an unweaned kitten, sometime in the late 1970’s. He was the one who sucked on my ear lobe for comfort, even when he had grown up to a fully-toothed cat, until it just became too painful!

One by one the last cats we had, living in the countryside by a narrow but dangerous road, all managed to die of old age. Each one’s passing led to days of mourning. Dizzy’s passing was heart-breaking to me but fortuitous in a way, in that we were moving from the countryside to a suburban house on a very busy road. Time went by, more or less catless. Then:

We moved to the seaside. We went to the dog rescue place and found Rosie. Rosie was a dog of indeterminate heritage. She was the same colour and size, more or less, as a golden retriever and had a wide mouth similar to a staffie*. We chose her because she didn’t bark at Julian! From the minute she arrived, she was Julian’s dog.

She had been found wandering in a poor area of a city in northern England and no one knew anything about what might have happened to her between her birth, about two years earlier, and the day we adopted her. She loved people but took a complete dislike to any dog that came near her. This made it very difficult for me to walk her as there are loads of dogs being walked around here. One day I was walking her along a quiet road when, suddenly, I was face down on the pavement and Rosie was across the road trying to attack two dogs who were being walked by their owner. She had the presence of mind to grab Rosie’s lead and hold it tightly away from her dogs. I got up and went over, apologising profusely. After that, Julian walked Rosie!

Though she was fond of Julian, Rosie allowed me to love her. She would sometimes lie down next to me and fall asleep. She took up a lot of room on a bed!

Rosie got ill and died and for well over a year we couldn’t bear the thought of looking for another but, eventually, we decided to have a look and see if there were any smaller dogs that we could give a home to. For that story and more about Rosie, go into my archives where you will find photos and short articles about both Rosie and Lola, our present dog.

I wouldn’t have another cat – their nine lives don’t last as long as my one! I sincerely doubt that I would have another dog after Lola as her life is likely to be longer than the time I have left. If something should happen to Lola, it would be unfair to look for another dog. Perhaps a guinea pig or, even better, a goldfish!

*digs – rented room(s)

* staffie – Staffordshire bull terrier

1. I am absolutely certain that I love my daughter Veronica and her daughter, Chloe, more than anything in the universe!

2. I know it is true that I am old but can still function well!

3. I know that eating a big meal late at night is not good for me!

4. I know that alcohol is not the answer to all life’s problems. (Something my mother, father and sister seemed to believe)

5. I know that I am not scared of dying but would rather not, yet.

6. I believe that there is every chance I will be reincarnated after death.

7. I believe it’s true that Project 2025 is evil and those who wrote it are fascist scum.

8. I am certain that I have aphantasia. (See earlier posts or Google)

9. I am certain that Mozart was a great composer as were Handel, Vivaldi, Bach and Beethoven among many others! Also that the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Kinks and other 60’s groups were great and that music is wonderful!

10. I am certain that Wordle is a great word game!

I’m also certain that there are other true and believable things but I can’t think of any others right now! (After a big lunch and some Amaretto liqueur).

I go to bed some time between 11pm and midnight and get up when I want, usually at around 9am to 9.30 am. Julian will usually have been awake since 7.30 or 8 but I don’t hear him and we say good morning when I come downstairs, usually still in my nightwear – an old long-sleeved black t-shirt which is a couple sizes bigger than I am and an old pair of trousers which seem to have been some sort of jogging bottoms, not that I have ever jogged! The trousers are gradually getting very loose in the waist, not because I am thinner but because the elastic is ‘going’. A few weeks ago I decided to replace the elastic but found that the original is actually sewn to the fabric rather than in a little tunnel. I’m sure there is something I could do in the house-wifely way to make the waist a little tighter but, knowing me it will be a big safety pin!

Sometimes I feel a bit guilty. All the older people I know get up about 6am and go to bed, I suspect, around 9.30 most nights. I know I’m missing hours of sunshine, in the summer (if it’s not raining, which it seems to do very regularly, at the moment.)

It’s 11.10 pm, GST (Greenwich summer time). I’m sitting on my bed trying to make myself get ready for bed. Like other teen-agers, I keep putting it off and, anyway, I have to finish this post!

I can’t really think of anything to add to my post so I’ll just click ‘publish’, then have a quick look at my emails in case there’s anything important, and have a glance at the news to see if Great Britain or The Netherlands won the football (GB! hooray!), then look at the American news (who has done what) and…….then I guess I’ll go get ready for bed. 🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱

GOOD NIGHT, SLEEP WELL.

At the grand old age of 81, how much future do I have? I’m not being maudlin, just realistic. I am definitely past more than half of my life, even three quarters of it. If I live to be 100, that’s only about 19 more years which, is very little, in the scheme of things.

When I was 19, I was on the cusp of becoming an adult but, looking back, I realise that in many ways I was still a child. At 21, I became a mother. At 32, I became a teacher. At 40, I became a wife. Though in the wrong order according to many, those three things were the most important in the whole of my life. Everything I’ve done since then was because of those most important occasions. When, then, did I become an adult?

I’m not certain! Sometimes I still feel like a child. I imagine that many older people can look back and say the same.

Now – what is likely to happen in the future that I would find exciting?

I’d love to have a great grandchild! Of course, I would probably only see it once in a blue moon and I wouldn’t be able to look after it as I did when Chloe was a child.

Winning a big prize on the lottery would be exciting – the likelihood of that happening is minute, but it would be great to never have to worry about money again.

I find the thought of being able to see clearly, very exciting! I wrote, the other week, about my upcoming operation to remove the cataracts in both my eyes. I am happy to report that the first has been set to happen towards the end of August. If I survive that, I imagine the second op will happen in early 2025! I am finding my long sight is poorer and poorer and those things I should be able to see in detail, close up, I can’t see at all! Happily, I can still read (and write), which is great.

Another op on the horizon is one on my right wrist/hand, to cure the very annoying carpel tunnel syndrome. If I sit and hold a book or my iPad for long, the tips of my fingers go numb and then start to hurt. Over ten years ago, I had CTS in both hands and was given the choice of having the left or right hand fixed. I opted for the left as I am right-handed (and I use it for so many things, – tooth brushing, hair combing, stirring a pot of boiling soup, etc etc). The left hand in many cases is just not good enough to take over, even for a week or two. The consultant told me, at the time, that if I had one operated on, some people found that both were cured! It happened to me and that weird effect lasted for a good eight years or so. I will be excited to have my right hand working correctly again!

As you can see from all the above, this old lady doesn’t need to go mountain climbing or solo sailing round the world for excitement. Just waking up in the morning and not feeling bad is exciting!

As a person whose vacations* are few and far between, I find many of my holidays* to be memorable!

When I was young (up to 16 years old) my family’s holidays were usually spent at home or at my Grandmother Ethel’s house, in a town less than a hundred miles from where we lived. It is true that I went to summer camp once but otherwise, until I was 15 and came to England, holidays away from Ohio didn’t happen.

My first ‘real’ holiday happened when I was sixteen. We had an au pair called Francine whose family lived in Paris but had a summer home in Le Touquet (France). Francine’s parents invited me to come to Le Touquet for the summer in 1959. Francine stayed behind in London to look after Judy and Jennie and her own brother, Jean Louis, who spent a month in London with my family.

That summer holiday was so wonderful! I was free to do what I wanted during the days and, what I wanted to do was go to the beach and soak up sun, sitting in the sand, watching the waves. Aside from that I rode a bike all round the town; hired a ‘little red bug’ – a small red-painted vehicle which one could drive around the town (not sure what powered it!); walked the very short distance to the shopping street where there was a wonderful shop that sold 2” squares of chocolate caramels; ate and drank gorgeous French food and drink. I met a young man called Jean Emile who drove around on a motor scooter and lived in the same road as I did. We spent a lot of time together and had fun – no hanky panky though – I was only 16!

The most memorable evening of the two months was the time Jean and I went on a ‘Ralley’. A ralley in Le Touquet was rather like a treasure hunt. Groups of people would drive around the area picking up clues and end up at a certain place where they might carry out a task of some sort. I can’t remember whether we were in a car or on the scooter but we ended up at some sort of municipal building which had a small pool outside it, filled with little fish. Jean and I had to step into the pool and catch as many little fish as possible in a certain length of time. In the photo below you will see me holding the torch while Jean collected the fish. (I look a little bandy-legged there but I wasn’t in reality!) I don’t remember how many we caught or whether we won the ralley but it was so much fun! Also in the photo is m. Prin, Francine’s dad. He’s the man just above my head in the dark shirt.

That summer I also went to the cinema and saw several French films in French with no subtitles! I learned to speak in French to the people around me and make myself understood. And, I got tipsy for the first time in my life!

When I went back to London and real life, I found out, quite quickly, the difference between speaking French in every-day conversations and really understanding the language. (That’s for another time!)

Another very memorable holiday was also in France but that time I was 40 and ever-so-slightly more grown up. That holiday was for two weeks. We (Veronica, Betty, Julian, Harley and I) drove from Calais to St Tropez, taking a week to do so and thus seeing some sights along the way. We were travelling in Harley’s car, which was a red Ford Granada. (Harley is one of Julian’s brothers.)

We spent the first night in the town of Sedan, spent a night in Switzerland, where I found I dislike cowbells (the sound kept waking me up!), and arrived in the south of France a week after leaving home. We were supposed to be staying in a caravan in a holiday park along the coast from St Tropez. When we arrived, there was the caravan which had sleeping room for four. The fifth person was supposed to put up a tent which was supposed to be in a storage space under the caravan – but it wasn’t there. (We later found out that the people who owned the caravan hadn’t known that the tent had just about disintegrated earlier that year and had been chucked away!)

Julian and I decided to stay in a hotel not far away, which we did except for one night when the hotel closed at 4 in the afternoon and no one had warned us! That night we all slept in the caravan except for Harley who slept in the car.

That holiday is memorable because it was, more or less, our honeymoon, as we had married in the June before, and it was the holiday when I went topless on the beach – not something I would do in England (much too shy) and, having been ‘flat-chested’ throughout my youth, my 20’s, my 30’s and well into my 40’s, it didn’t seem right. But, after seeing all the other women going topless that year in France, I thought ‘what the hell….’ and did it. No one seemed to laugh and life just went on, I wasn’t struck by lightning or hauled before a magistrate! There is a photo of me, topless and I have cropped it so that I can use it below. (Sadly, I can’t find that photo so you’ll have to use your imagination!)

There are several more holidays that are memorable – we went to the Isle of Man, the Isle of Wight, the Emerald Isle (Ireland); we’ve spent nights in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Herefordshire. Devon, Somerset, Kent and once at the Ritz in London. It was the night of my 50th birthday and we had been to a concert at the Barbican, had tea at the Ritz, and went out to eat at……McDonalds!

That whole day was unexpected. I knew we were going to London to meet Veronica and her first husband. In the taxi we took from Victoria, Julian made me close my eyes so I didn’t know where we were going. When the taxi stopped and we got out, I was allowed to open my eyes – it was The Ritz! We walked up the steps, opened the door and somewhere there was a harp playing Happy Birthday! I said, “Oooh, it’s someone else’s birthday!” Julian said, “ No, that’s for you!”. Then we walked into the restaurant(?) and had a wonderful tea!

I had no idea that we were spending the night in London, let alone the Ritz! I had not brought a nightie, a toothbrush, clean underwear! When we went out to the Barbican I stopped at a chemist somewhere to buy a toothbrush and tooth paste and made-do with everything else. At the Barbican we sat in the front row and watched and listened to Jack Brymer playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet. It was superb! When it was over, we took the tube back to Piccadilly, stopped at a McDonalds (money was tight in those days and Julian had already spent quite a bit!) and went back to sleep in the Ritz!

Of course, that wasn’t a holiday but I just had to get it in there!

The next day we went back to our shop in Kent.

*vacation – the same as *holiday

Veronica, the nom de plume of my daughter, Betty, the nom de plume of her best friend at the time.