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Well, we seem to be back to the topic of hair again: it never seems to be far away!  Could that be because we have a fair bit of it, unlike most of the adult males in our lives, and don’t relish the idea of being filthy on Kilimanjaro?  I absolutely love the story in yesterday’s guest post about Rachael’s dreads.

I mentioned in the blog of 28^th March about how Christine at Catching Lives was told as a child that washing her hair more than fortnightly could damage it.  Christine told me a bit more about this recently.  It seems that she was also advised that washing her hair during a period could be positively hazardous to her health. Better remember that girls!!!??!  Christine’s hair is a glorious deep reddish colour, and she says her aunt had similarly beautiful hair.  As her aunt got into her sixties, she became more and more concerned about the dangers of washing her hair: it seems that the family considered it a very risky undertaking.  So for the last twenty or so years of her life, her aunt never washed her hair at all, but just used dry shampoo.  Christine says that her aunt’s hair stayed the same wonderful reddish colour till the day she died – so maybe there is something in it.

When I was a teenager, hot water wasn’t always easily available, and we did something called a dry shampoo, but what we used was talcum powder. We would simply sprinkle the talc out of the tin on to our hair, rub it around a bit and then brush it out.  It seemed to do the job.  However, Jae tells me that she has thought of a much better solution for when we are on the 3G climb – we’ll find out all about it tomorrow!

I first met Sheila nearly twenty years ago, but we both had different names then!  Sheila was my solicitor, and has always been known professionally as Kate.  My name was Dawn: I only became known as Rachael some years after we first met. Our relationship was purely professional at first, but we liked each other, and once the legal proceedings we were involved in were completed, we became friends.  It was only then, that I found out that we were also actually neighbours, living in the same road!  It was on Jae and David’s wedding day in August 1997 that I saw the whole family all dressed up getting into cars that I realised that we lived only about two hundred yards apart.  Our families have become very close over the years since then.  We have a lot in common and both love being grandmothers.  My daughter, known as Plop, and Jae each have three beautiful boys now.

When we first met, I had dreadlocks.  Sheila/Kate texted me recently to ask me about how I had kept my hair clean, because that is likely to be relevant on the 3G Kilimanjaro climb.  She remembered that I had rarely washed my hair, because when I did, I had to stay at home for three days until my hair dried!

My dreadlocks: I grew them for thirteen years. The longest one was thirty six inches long.  I had loads of little beads and bells sewn in to them, which were given to me by my kids and friends. My son Kane and Plop loved the bells. That’s why I still wear them on my Doc Martens.  Kane also had dreads when he first started school, but he was such a pretty boy that a lot of the other kids thought that he was a girlie.  This upset him, so we cut them off and I sewed them in to my hair too, which made him happy again!  In order to have the ‘best’ dreads, they can’t be washed!  I would use a Jif lemon, twice a week and rub that in to my scalp.  To keep the dreads matted, involves constant ‘twisting’ of them – and that’s what I did! I would also wrap pretty coloured string round them.  They were very heavy. When at home, I would have to roll them up in to some kind of bun and have them balanced on top of my head. (It’s not easy for us women!)

When I had to have my Chemo, the time was right to cut them off. Another reason was that they were part of ‘Dawn’: my life had moved on and I had become Rachael! They weighed a mighty 3lbs 7oz!! That was twice the size of Kane, when I gave birth to him!  I have kept my dreads.  I tried a few times to throw them away, but can’t bring myself to…x x

We will be existing in fairly primitive conditions on Kilimanjaro, and I remember living before in pretty basic conditions – certainly as far as bathroom facilities are concerned – when I was on holiday as a child.  My mother and her sister-in-law, my Auntie Elsie – one of my father’s seven sisters – would rent a cottage in Northern Ireland for a month in the summer and stay there with us children.  Their husbands stayed at home, presumably at work.  Neither family had any spare money, and what they rented was rough and ready – probably a nightmare for the adults having to cook and wash dishes, bedding and clothes – but for the children, it was heaven.

The most memorable was a wooden cottage, known as Caernathana, Tullybrannigan Road, Newcastle, County Down.  Just the name of it seems exotic!  There was no indoor plumbing at all – though there was a chemical toilet, which the children were banned from using: we didn’t want to anyway!  We had the massive garden with adjoining woods, which served better, in our opinion.  Leaves were our loo roll, and I can’t remember feeling unhappy about that.  There was a pump in the yard, which we loved taking turns at, to fill the buckets with water for dish washing etc.

Our days were spent climbing trees in the woods, putting on musical performances for the adults, and lazing about doing nothing much.  However, as we had no washing facilities in the house, we were expected to go down to the sea or the open air unheated sea water Newcastle Rock Pool for the odd swim, in the interests of hygiene.  Auntie Elsie was a determined swimmer in the coldest of weather; she was always the first in, egging on any lackadaisical child to get themselves in.

Auntie Elsie had an interesting career.  She went to Northern Ireland during the Second World War to work for the government as a censor.  It was her job to read soldiers’ mail and if she regarded any words to be a security risk, she would physically cut these words out of the letter with scissors before it was posted on.  She went on to become a highly respected and pioneering teacher of the deaf and subsequently received the MBE for voluntary work in the area of mental health.  She was the sort of person who is always open to anything new.

I remember wingeing to her in the late 1980s about the stress of working for exams and writing essays to qualify as a solicitor, while at the same time doing a job, keeping the house going and looking after two lively teenage girls.  Her response was sharp: what else would you be doing?  More knitting?  Of course, she was right.  She had been there, done that and knew that the rewards would be more than commensurate to the effort.

In her early sixties,  having been widowed for some years, she remarried and visited us on her honeymoon with her new husband.  I told my rather unworldly mother-in-law about the impending visit and she said, “I can understand her getting married again for the company”.  When the newly weds arrived, Auntie Elsie looked amazing.  With a wicked glint in her eye, she told me that she felt like she was sixteen again.  It was quite clear that “company” was not all that was on the agenda!

When she was in her late seventies and early eighties, Auntie Elsie, again widowed, came with us on girls’ holidays on a few occasions.  I remember one particular occasion when a free yoga class was advertised to take place in the gym of the all-inclusive hotel in which we were staying.  The whole group of us and a few other odd bods turned up in the gym, but no teacher.  Upon enquiry at reception, we were told the class had been cancelled.  Auntie Elsie, however, was quite unphased.  She stepped up to the front, told us to settle down, and proceeded to take us through quite a strenuous yoga class for the entire hour!

She was a great advocate of education, and loved going to classes to learn something new.  I recall visiting her in Manchester, where she moved to be near her daughter (my lovely cousin) Catherine.  She was well into her eighties by this time, and talked excitedly about attending a history of art class at the university on the other side of the city. I asked her how she got there: you could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me that her friend – also in her late eighties – picked her up in her car and the two of them drove together across the centre of Manchester!  In her book, there was a solution to every problem.   Doing nothing, or giving up was not in her vocabulary – nor it would seem, in that of her friend.

Auntie Elsie said it was important to keep active in mind and body. She loved doing crosswords and did one every day, being particularly fond of the one in the Saturday Telegraph.  She could work out all the cryptic clue answers and was happy to give anyone interested a quick tutorial in the necessary skills for solving them.  In addition, she made sure she did a yoga session every day to keep her body fit – and indeed she pretty much succeeded in that almost until the day she died.  On that day, she phoned Catherine in the morning and said she thought she was going to die that day.  Catherine was straight over there in time to spend some time with her mother, until she did indeed die, later that same day, at the grand old age of ninety one.

If we told Auntie Elsie about our proposed 3G climb up Kilimanjaro, she would be backing us all the way – possibly even asking to join us on the trip!  She would have relished the challenge, and if I had expressed any doubts about it, would have brushed them aside in the same way as she did when I was a skinny child, hesitant about going into the cold North Sea.

 

When I first heard that Sheila, Jae and Oscar were planning a climb up Kilimanjaro, I was not a bit surprised.  I have known Sheila for nearly forty years,  thirty-six of them living next door.  I  have heard many a story and even been a part of some,  but nothing as mad as planning the 3G climb!

Sheila is one of the best people to have as a friend and a wonder when you are trying to cope with family traumas.

On a lighter side of things,  I have been lucky enough to have been included on many girly holidays. Well,  you might think that a girly holiday would be sitting in the shade with a long drink.  A long drink did often play a part in things,  but not until a bit of adventure had been achieved, with Sheila being one of the ring leaders.

But I have to take Sheila’s memory to task.  In one of the earlier blogs, it was written that she has never done a mountain climb, but the truth is that two years running we had our girly holiday in Morocco and on both of those trips, we spent a day climbing and walking the High Atlas Mountains. I know that this by no means compares with the planned 3G climb, but at times the terrain was challenging.  On the way to the mountains, we were very amused by the sight of goats climbing trees to get at the argan nuts that were growing there.  We suspected that at various coach stops the locals cashed in on the spectacle by placing the goats in the trees.

One of the funniest thing that I ever saw was on one of these trips: I think it was the first time that we walked on the mountain.  Our group was dressed in walking boots with back packs etc. (When going on holiday with Sheila, we all know to take everything from beach wear to walking boots).  There was a couple: I think that they were from Italy.  The lady was wearing a very colourful designer  tracksuit weighed down with gold and wearing make up that stayed in place all day. The husband was carrying a wicker and gingham bag.   After a very taxing climb we came to a stop for lunch. The said wicker bag was then placed on the ground,  and by some amazing feat of manipulation,  the bag became a basket for the tiny designer dog that it contained.  Until then, the rest of the group had no idea that there was a dog along with us on the trip.  We were served  a very pleasant lunch of local flat bread and a paste made from the argan nuts, washed down with some delicious mint tea.

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I love your story Liz – it is one of the girls’ hols I wasn’t on, but it sounds like it was full of all the usual nuttiness! Remember we went back to the same hotel the next year? Here’s a photo of the 3GKiliClimbers and Gwen that time. Jx

We have the best friends and family in the world, I think!  They have to date donated £2,100 to the charities we are supporting. Isn’t that amazing, when we still have almost four months to go?

Not only that, but we have been the beneficiaries of several items from kind people to help us on our way.  As it was a sunny day, I thought I would try my donated kit out.

So here I am, kitted out from top to bottom in gifts to take up Kili.

On top is a cap kindly given by Baraka Community Partnerships.

Then there is a trendy pink T-shirt, provided by Catching Lives to assist in fund-raising.

Over that is a back pack, complete with a camel hydration pack gifted by walking buddy Anne S.

Below that is pair of purple thermal base layer pants – a present from Paula, the lovely nun I cook with at Catching Lives.

At the base is a pair of gaiters, provided by my handsome husband Stewart.

In my hands are the Nordic Walking Poles which Jae’s stalwart mother-in-law Pat can sadly no longer use, because she has Motor Neurone Disease.

And I know that I will soon have the gift of a cosy and pretty pair of cashmere socks from my Dutch friend Gerda: the first pair she ordered turned out to be too small.

And now – the icing on the cake.  I can hardly believe this.  This week an absolutely fantastic friend offered to match pound for pound however much money we raise before we set off for Kili – up to a maximum of £5,895!!!!!!  Our initial target was £5,895 representing a pound for every metre of Mount Kilimanjaro’s height.  So if we make anything like that, and our friend doubles it, we could end up with a total of over 10K.  We might have a pound for every metre we have to climb up and another pound for every metre we climb down too.  What a difference this would make to our charities: it could really change some lives and “catch” some others.

So with the amazing news that our lovely friend will match all donations, it means that if you donate before we go (or if you already have – thanks lots!) your donation will be worth much, much more. If you donate £50 and use Gift Aid, the real value of your donation to our charities will now be £125!!! The projects we are supporting are all relatively small so it’s a great opportunity to make a difference. If you would like to donate please just pop over to our VirginMoneyGiving page – it’s really easy.

Thanks so much! Sheila, Jae & Oscar xxx

 

 

I feel so lucky to have had such an open, liberal up-bringing. I think it’s why the three generation Kili challenge is a possibility – we were always made to believe anything was possible, and that a different country was a new and exciting thing to discover.

Ma and Pa were both pretty surprised when I declared at 16 that I was leaving school and leaving home, and I knew that they weren’t terribly keen, but they never made me feel like that would define me. In fact I remember them laughing (possibly through gritted teeth in retrospect!) when I told them that an influential figure – who I won’t bother to name – had said, “Miss Miller, if you leave school now you’ll be a failure for the rest of your life”. And they always told me my bedroom was available to come back to whenever I liked, which I have continued to do for between a night and 3 months for the last 26 years.

Whoever I’ve turned up with, and for however long, I’ve never felt anything other than totally welcome.

Their home is a very welcoming place; when I was small we always had a lodger in “the back bedroom”. I can see now that this must have been a way of subsidising their income to enable us to have holidays and brilliant birthday parties etc, but at the time it felt like a way of ensuring our home was always more exotic than our friends’! Over the years we had male and female lodgers from all over the world, of different races, religions and sexualities, and all were welcome in our home. Amongst the others there was an American girl who made amazing cheesecake; a man called Pete who always used the mug with the orange and yellow flowers for his tea; and Katsohiko Fukushima who could somehow source blood oranges the size of grapefruits in 1980s Canterbury, who prayed at an altar in his room that Gwen and I thought was a “Sindy wardrobe” – the Sindy factory was in Canterbury so we were aficionados!

When Katsohiko left to go back to his family in Japan after a year living with us, he had noticed that I liked Sindy dolls (I hope he hadn’t realised that we felt her clothes ought to be hung in his alter!), and he gave me a beautiful doll that I always remembered as Kate Greenaway-themed; she came in a box saying so. I had called her Nell, and my cousin Louise (whom I have always been very close to – but more of that another time) and I had spent many happy hours over the years playing “hospital”, where Nell was the matron managing all the care of various pandas, bears, golliwogs and more. She was a capable, inspirational woman doll and Lou and I loved her.

Gwen recently told Ma that her daughter Onnie – the only girl in five grandchildren – loves hard, old-fashioned dolls, rather than modern ones. Ma immediately thought of the doll Katsohiko had given me, and dug her out from the back of a cupboard full of old school books and hideous 1980s jewelry. Apparently she came out without her hat, and with rather musty clothes, but Ma washed her up, made a new shawl and headscarf, and yesterday sent the following email to Gwen with me CCed.

This whole episode has had me looking for my well-loved doll on the internet. I Googled “Kate Greenaway dolls” and up popped the follwing pic. Look! – it turns out I didn’t name her Nell at all!!! #CrushedMemories

 

Off you go to Australia Nell – I’m glad you’ve been rediscovered – I hope you find a new, exciting life with Onnie; you’ve got a whole new country to discover!

Well – it is official! I have been certified “as fit as a flea” by my Doctor’s Practice! i didn’t know that was an official category, but that’s what the practice nurse said to me when I went for another vaccination, in readiness for Kilimanjaro. She remarked that I looked rather sun tanned, and I said that was because I was out walking much of the time. I told her I had walked from Seasalter (where our caravan is) to keep my appointment – probably about eight miles or so – and she was clearly quite gobsmacked by that. I suppose many of the people approaching seventy coming into the surgery are not striding in, in quite the same way!

I have now had injections for polio, diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus and hepatitis A, all free of charge on the National Health Service. I did say to the nurse that it seems to me that people needing jabs for exotic holidays should pay for them – it seems wrong that they are subsidised by the cash strapped state. So between us, she and I managed to come up with two more, which I would have to pay for, which seems to me only right.

She was very keen for me to have a series of hepatitis B injections. That is the one that is conveyed by bodily fluids, so at first I was quite indignant – there is no way I have any plans at all to be exchanging bodily fluids with anyone on Kilimanjaro! However, when she flagged up the possibility of someone cutting them self and other potential accidents, I could see the sense of that. So I have now had two hep B jags – it is a course of three. When I mentioned this to Jae, she remembered that she had had hepatitis as a child and wondered whether she was now immune to it. We had no idea what sort of hepatitis she had had – A,B or C – so I asked the nurse. I told her that there had been an outbreak of hepatitis at Jae’s primary school in the early 1980s. Children and parents were turning yellow and collapsing like flies and Jae was one of the unlucky ones. I remember her taking to her bed in a very weak condition, and I expended a lot of effort in persuading her to drink liquids. She couldn’t eat solids at all, save, if I remember right, for peeled grapes. It is the only time in my life I have peeled grapes. At some point we were told by the primary school that the outbreak had been spread by the use of the cardboard insides of toilet rolls in craft activities. Blue Peter has a lot to answer for. When I told this to the practice nurse, she was fairly certain that Jae must have had hepatitis A. She was clearly quite appalled to hear that there had been such an outbreak at all in a nice place like Canterbury. Unfortunately, having the illness once does not mean that you are immune, so Jae will still have to have the injections.

I was keen to have a yellow fever vaccination. At first the nurse was very against it, telling me of the increased risk to the over sixties and the possible side effects. I know that strictly speaking, the injection is not necessary for people travelling from Europe. However, I have read a lot on line about jobsworth officials at Tanzanian airports insisting on seeing yellow fever certificates – and if you can’t produce one, they insist on you going into a room in the airport and paying to have an injection there and then. There is no way I am going to risk some dodgy guy in an airport sticking a needle into me! Then when I heard that we will be changing planes in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, I was absolutely determined I was having the jab in advance. Yellow fever is endemic there, and although if you are there for under twelve hours, it is not strictly speaking needed for Tanzania, it seems to me to be common sense just to sort it before we go. I just hope that the nurse is right and I am as fit as a flea, and don’t get any of the possible complications she insisted on telling me about.

She says next time I go for another injection, we will talk about malaria. I am not too keen on taking malaria tablets, because I remember daughter Gwen phoning me from some exotic Asian location about twenty years ago telling me that her hair was falling out. She wondered if it was a possible side effect of the malaria tablets she was taking. I did the research, and yes, it was indeed possible. I seem to remember Gwen saying she just stopped taking the tablets, despite the risk, and her hair stopped falling out. Happily, she didn’t come back with malaria, though she did come back with giardia – for which there is no vaccination. Giardia is a parasite, which lives in your intestine, and Gwen even gave her parasite a name: he was called Jeremy. At first we thought the symptoms were just Gwen being Gwen! The main symptom is excessive gas. Gwen specialises in flatulence – see the blog of 25th February. However, she really did have the infection, and it took quite some time to clear, much to the detriment of the atmosphere in our home. I hope to retain both my hair and my dignity on this trip!

 

One of the things I have increasingly been thinking about is how I am going to get down Kilimanjaro – that is supposing I actually make it up!

We are meant to get to the top at dawn on the seventh day, having commenced the final assault – taking about seven hours – before midnight.  The reason for the timing is that the scree on top freezes overnight, making it easier to climb up, so they say.  By the time we have spent twenty minutes at the top taking selfies, the scree has started to defrost and slides about as we start to go down.

I actually found myself in Tesco recently looking at a pile of tiny sledges reduced to £1 each, wondering if I should pick one up to pop in my back pack, so I could try sitting on it to slide back down.  Have I lost it entirely?

Then when guest blogger Clare Ungerson mentioned Yaktrax in a recent blog  I started to wonder if that might be an answer for coming down.  The thing is, you have to come down quickly: having spent the best part of a week getting up, you are expected to get down in a day and a half.  I read about one guy who started to make his way down and was considered to be progressing too slowly.  One of the guides and another climber each took one of his arms and ran him down, making sure he didn’t fall over.  You can see where I am coming from, with the little sledge and the Yaktrax now!

One factor in having enough energy to do anything at all by this stage seems to be the amount of calories consumed.  Apparently being at high altitude takes away your appetite and you have to force yourself to eat – you can burn up to 4000 calories a day walking on the mountain.  Given that none of that can be alcohol, that is a lot of food!  I can’t say that eating food has ever been a problem for me: I have always quite envied people who can’t eat because of flu or a tummy bug.  However unwell I might have been in my life, I have always been ready to eat my dinner. Now for the first time, that might be a real benefit.  By that time I will definitely not be thinking about losing weight. I will be able to and should eat absolutely everything that is going and then, with a bit of luck, I will be running down the mountain when I come!

 

As you may know, we think that if we make it to the top of Kili, Ma will be the first Grandma to do it in a team with her child and grandchild. We’re not sure whether we will be allowed to apply for a Guinness World Record as the criteria now seem to say that they only authenticate records that can be broken; obviously a “first to…” is not a breakable record. We are pretty confident that we’ll be the youngest three generation climb too (we can only find two previous successful three generation climbs – all male apart from one granddaughter, and older than us in both cases)., so maybe we’ll be allowed that record instead. I’ll be contacting them soon to find out whether either is possible!

Bizarrely I already have a Guinness World Record certificate from when I was part of “the most number of people simultaneously bird calling” at a Twitter conference (see what they did there?!) about 4 years ago. It seem to have been broken many times since, so I need to regain my crown!!!

In order to put forward a confident proposal to the folk at GWR I’ve been doing quite a lot of Googling to see whether I can find any other evidence of three generational climbs / grannies climbing Kili. On a recent investigation I found the following article and just thought it was suitably mad to be part of our blog! Can you believe that this wonderful old lady sat down to write a marvelously fabricated obituary, thought, “What is the most daft thing I could do”, and decided it was to pretend she’d been climbing Mt Kilimanjaro? With her daughter no less!! She also purported to have taken her dog and cat with her – rather than her grandson – but you get the picture.

And the very best thing? The paper printed it; she pulled off her subterfuge right at the last. Well done Norma – we salute you!

Here’s link to the obituary that was printed it The Connecticut Post.

And here is the debunking article from the next week!

Sheila’s posts make fascinating reading and I have happily been reliving many of our shared experiences as rather naïve flat sharers fifty years ago.  No matter how oddball Sheila’s anecdotes are, somehow I am never that surprised – well, yes, I am really taken by her creative talents; apart from a few rather large sweaters she knitted for Stewart, I can’t remember her showing needlecraft skills.

She certainly showed her scrounging-cum-scrumping skills at an early stage of independent living.  We were consistently hard up as students and we had to be creative with food.  One of Sheila’s methods was never to visit anybody or any place without a large plastic bag in her handbag.  She had a list of motherly ladies that she would visit at weekends – especially the ones who were good bakers.  That was most of them, as most Scottish housewives of that era baked.  Sheila would return to our flat after a foray with a wondrous mixture of baked goods.  Mmmm – I can still taste the cherry cake.  We once returned to her family home, where her father and stepmother had laid on a splendid party, I think it was to celebrate Sheila’s sister Leslie’s twenty-first birthday.  Sheila and I did not revere stepmothers then but we both agreed that her stepmother knew how to lay on a feast that couldn’t be missed.   At that time, parties we went to were classed as well catered if there were cubes of cheese on cocktail sticks, and possibly some sausage rolls.  At this party a two tier array of roast chicken, baked ham, cheeses galore and salads of all sorts met our eyes – as well as innumerable French sticks, deemed quite exotic in 1960s Glasgow.

Sheila had a plan.  We had to wait until the dishes had been cleared to the kitchen and just before we were leaving  make a raid.  With bulging bags, we retreated to get our coats for the journey back to the flat.  And then, an after thought; we just had to have some of the French sticks – after all, they would be stale soon.  My coat had wide sleeves, as did Sheila’s and she had the brainwave of pushing a French stick up each arm so we could exit with our bounty unnoticed.  Unfortunately, the elders were waiting at the door to shake hands; it was rather difficult to do this with arms effectively in splints.  I suspect one end did pop out.  Nothing was said and with hindsight, I suspect we, and possibly some of the other flat dwelling guests, were expected to do a bit of salvage.

Sheila’s food gathering went as far as America where two of Sheila’s Scottish aunts had settled.  At least one was roped in to send food parcels, and they always contained at least a couple of Betty Crocker cake mixes.  Devil’s Food Cake was our favourite, especially if the appropriate frosting had been included.  Now, I think it must have been about the time of Stew’s twentieth birthday and Sheila had hoarded a Devil’s Food Cake Mix to make him a birthday cake.  Sod’s law said that something would go wrong – like the gas meter running out towards the end of cooking and Sheila having no shillings to feed it with.  The centre was soggy, the rest fine, so Sheila used an upturned glass to cut out a neat circle of soggy cake.  Sadly, Auntie hadn’t included the frosting mix so Sheila improvised.  She thought pink icing would be nice.  (This was before pink was associated with a sexual preference and I think it was more a reference to Stewart’s politics being a paler shade of red).  I don’t know what she used but she ended up with a huge lump the colour of pink bubble gum, and of a similar texture.  The ‘frosting’ was ‘spread’ in stringy pink swirls over the scrumptious dark brown cake; we all ate and enjoyed Sheila’s improvisation.  Sheila’s more recent improvisation in Brown and Pink (chocolate cake with pink blancmange – check out this post if you didn’t see it) reminded me of this incident.

Recently Sheila was wondering what she would eat on Kilimanjaro.  A few months ago I was in Southern Africa, doing the ‘Baby Boomers’ Bucket List Safari Holiday’.  There I came across a fascinating menu board; the raw materials would have set Sheila’s heart beating with anticipation at ‘Catching Lives’.  The ingredients may have been exotic, but the outcome was sadly mundane.  However, I imagine that the Wednesday cooks at ‘Catching Lives’ would have produced something that would have been much more enjoyable.

 

 

I went to Folkestone again this week for  a walk with Frances.  The last time I did so – see blog of 3^rd February – we walked in snow and sleet.  This time, it would have seemed like summer had arrived, were it not for the daffodils in the parks and gardens, and wonderful primroses and violets in the woods.

Frances walks faster than anyone else I know, which is why it is really good for me to walk with her.  If I can speed up walking on the flat, there might be a chance of me being able to walk slowly uphill at altitude on Kilimanjaro – at least that’s the theory.  She had planned an uphill route for me too and raced ahead of me!  Despite gradually discarding most of my outer garments en route, sweat was pouring off me by the time I got to the top, and she was as fresh as a daisy.

The return trip was somewhat easier: we went down to the coast somewhere near Hythe and walked along the sea front, which was absolutely lovely.  We were both quite intrigued to see a man stripping off to go in swimming, as we are both sea swimmers, but not in April!  What was interesting was that he was stuffing his clothes into a sort of orange float, which he then attached to himself.  He set off parallel to the coast in the same direction as us, and swam at about the same speed as we walked for about half a mile, before climbing out and getting dressed. That is certainly a good way of stopping anyone nicking your clothes off the beach.

I started to think about other good swimming gadgets, and remembered about Mungo, one of my sister-in-law Mary’s much loved dogs. He has to have hydrotherapy for a poorly leg and hates getting his ears wet, so has a special doggy ear thing to protect his ears.  The ingenuity of inventors never ceases to amaze me.

It would be wonderful if someone could invent something that would magic all the equipment necessary up Kilimanjaro. Perhaps an orange balloon that would float above us, carrying our equipment, and maybe helping us along too, like the orange float.

The reality is that there are likely to be about a dozen of us travelling up the mountain with Exodus and for each one of us, there will be at least three porters!  That makes me feel slightly guilty somehow, that these people have to carry my stuff, my sleeping bag, my food, my water etc – as well as their own things.  I hate the idea of having other people doing the hard work for me, but I know that as a sea level dweller, I couldn’t possibly climb up otherwise.  I am told that the local economy is much improved because of the work produced by groups such as ours, so I suppose I should look at it as a positive.  Exodus pays them well and they are glad to have the work.  I look forward to meeting them.

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Thanks lots, Sheila, Jae & Oscar

My paternal grandmother was a very proud woman, and I suppose in a way she had every right to be.  She, like my grandfather, had been born into a very large poor family living in a tenement building.  The streets where they were born were later demolished in slum clearances.  However my grandfather had worked hard and had the “gift of the gab”.  His was a true rags to riches story, rising from being the son of a stocking maker to being the managing director of a knitwear mill, when I was born.

By that time my grandparents lived in a very grand house, which was on top of a hill and had a garden, which would do credit to a stately home nowadays.

My grandmother always emphasised that her name was Elizabeth, and was not happy with any members of the family who referred to her as Liz or Lizzie, although many disrespectfully did.  She told us that before marriage, she had been Elizabeth Taylor, the same as the famous actress.  Actually mostly she was referred to as “the mother”, as in, “Tell the mother that the postman has been”.  I knew that that referred to my grandmother.  My grandparents had seven intelligent feisty daughters, as well as my rather weak and spoilt father.  All of them would refer to their mother behind her back as “Lizzie”, but she would be “the mother” when she was in earshot.

I remember Lizzie clearly when she was about the age I am now.  She was almost always decked out in a pale blue twinset (see the blog of February 28 for more info on this) and pearls.  She wore a tweed skirt – never trousers of any description – and patterned flesh coloured lisle stockings. She had quite a large bosom, which was not ever encased in a brassiere!

By her sixties Lizzie had pure white hair, something I am lucky enough to be well on the way to inheriting from her. She considered herself to be extremely fit.  She would demonstrate this quite frequently by telling us children to watch while she touched her toes – an incredible feat for someone of her advanced years, she gave us to believe.

She considered exercise important.  She would march us about two hundred yards along the drive from the house to stand at the top of the steps overlooking the town and tell us to “breathe deeply”.  She would watch to make sure we took in some deep breaths, while her unencumbered wobbly bosoms rose up and down too.  We would then walk gently back to the house, exercise done for the day.

I often think of her in Pilates classes.  As I turn myself upside down on a giant ball or do “the plank”, I imagine how absolutely appalled she would be at any female getting themselves into such a position.  Dignity was everything for Lizzie.

She would not have been overly impressed by the idea of Jae and me accompanying Oscar up Kilimanjaro. She would have thought it rather unladylike and unsavoury to be sleeping out on a mountain – a more suitable thing for men to do.

One of the things she used to say to the many females in the family was that “you must keep yourself right”.  I remember being told this from a young age and not understanding quite what was meant, but knew from the accompanying facial expression that I should not ask.  The few boys in the family did not get this puzzling advice.

I raised this recently with my one remaining aunt, asking her what it had been about.  She recollected being told frequently as a girl and young woman to keep herself right.  She says that she and her sisters regarded it as the entirety of their sex education, and that what was meant was that females must not have sex before marriage!  I had suspected it meant something of the sort, so it was nice to be sure at last.

During her marriage to my grandfather, we were told to address envelopes to my grandmother to “Mrs Robert Wilson”.  That was the proper mode of address.  However after his death, we were told that all correspondence was to be sent to “Mrs Elizabeth Wilson”.  She seemed to be quite pleased to have things in her own name – “Elizabeth” being a name she had always been inordinately proud of.

It was only about a decade ago – many years after her death – that I discovered that Elizabeth had not really been her name at all!  My friend, occasional guest blogger Jean, did some research into my family tree and uncovered the details of my grandmother’s birth certificate. She was registered in the name of Lizzie!  No doubt she felt this diminutive form of the name was quite unsuitable for her position in life and that was why she was so adamant that her name was Elizabeth.  I can’t recall anyone ever calling her that, however.

I am still enjoying getting lots of advice from all sorts of people about how best to prepare for the Kilimanjaro climb.  A good friend recently suggested that I should take advantage of the nearest “mountain” to my home, which is the Dane John mound in Canterbury. It is an old burial mound, built during the Roman occupation, certainly nothing volcanic.  My friend said a quick walk up and down ten times a day should prepare us well, and I am sure it would.  Jae, Oscar and I headed over there during the recent Easter hols, to give it a try out.  I think I might have to build up to ten times a bit gradually: it is quite steep!

Someone else I met on a recent walk, who had had a career as a very senior manager in mental health, told me that he had been to Machu Picchu, where coca tea made from coca leaves had helped everyone overcome the difficulties connected with high altitude. I am not sure whether these leaves grow in Tanzania or not.  It does seem logical that something available locally might do the job, in the same way in which dock leaves usually grow near stinging nettles, and work well to ease the sting.  But isn’t cocaine a derivative of coca leaves?  We are planning to get high, but hadn’t quite planned on it happening in that way!

I told my friend Anne about the day during our recent training exercise in Italy, when we walked downhill through gorges virtually all day, including down two thousand stone steps.  I was hard pushed to shuffle out of bed the next morning, but did eventually get myself moving.

She reminded me that we had done something not dissimilar but much more scary before, with the same crippling pain the next day, and she is right.

There were perhaps eight or nine of us together on a “Girls Holiday” in Tenerife, most of us in our fifties.  I am not sure why we had no youngsters along with us: our plans might have been better researched had we had some daughters present.  We decided it would be fun to explore one of the less populated parts of Tenerife and signed up for a hike organised by a local company.  It was advertised as a trek through amazing scenery, which could not be seen from the road.  It would take a few hours and would end up with a swim in crystal clear sea and a boat trip back along the coast.  It sounded like a lovely relaxing day: our whole group signed up for it.

We were pleased to be collected from our hotel in a minibus and taken to the starting point.  It was in a lovely old village called Masca, which we were told had been cut off from road access until relatively recently.  Some of us started to feel a bit uneasy when the guide said that our footwear was unsuitable, and we would have to pay to borrow walking boots.  Those with hand and shoulder bags were told they would have to transfer their possessions into proper back packs.

My sister Leslie immediately said that she had never done anything in her life involving walking boots and did not intend to start now: she was out of it. She was assured that the tour company would put her on an alternative more relaxing boat trip.

Alarm only started to set in when we met with the other proposed walkers: they were mostly super fit young Germans wearing mountaineering gear.  We were told to start walking downhill and that consideration would be given to whether we were fit to do the trek after we had gone down about a hundred meters.  After about ten minutes of climbing over rocks downwards into a ravine, my sister in law, Mary and one or two others decided it wasn’t for them.  They turned round and went back, leaving only four of our group still going downwards.

We thought that we were doing alright, but the guide in charge thought otherwise.  Much to their indignation, two more were told by him to go back: they had being enjoying themselves and were not well pleased – it seemed a rather arbitrary decision.  That left only Anne and me, along with the young Germans.

Anne and I continued downwards.  There is a drop of six hundred and fifty metres during the six kilometre climb down to sea level.  The walk is recommended only for those with experience of walking down gorges without proper paths and sheer drops in places. But the scenery was indeed spectacular. Mountain springs ran down most of the way, often making it slippery under foot, but adding to the beauty of this verdant route.  We were told that some of the plants were unique to the Masca Gorge and the birdsong, in the surrounding silence, was memorable.

Anne and I got down to the bottom absolutely thrilled to have made it.  I was straight into the sea for a swim and Anne for a paddle.  We got into the boat and were taken back to the port, where all the rest of the group were waiting to greet us.

My sister burst into tears as soon as she saw me!  It seems that they had been told how dangerous the gorge is, and that two women had fallen and been killed the year before.  She had spent the day envisaging Anne and me falling over an edge and crashing to the bottom.  Apart from that, they had been well looked after.  They had been taken on a cruise around the area and had seen lots of dolphins, which was an unexpected treat.

Well Leslie probably won’t need to worry about me falling over an edge on Kili.  Altitude sickness is what we need to worry about, though I know we are in Exodus’ expert hands.

 

 

 

Why is it that whenever I think of Sheila’s Kili adventure the picture that unfolds is of Sheila in a long cotton skirt dancing over a green pastoral hillside, singing at the top of her voice and throwing her arms in the air.  At first I thought I was just thinking about the old film ‘The Sound of Music’, which has been getting some publicity in the run up to its fiftieth anniversary.  However, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I was seeing Sheila as a latter day Maria von Trapp!  My case is as follows.

Sheila was always a bit harum scarum, seeming more so when judged against the perfect behaviour of her elder sister Leslie.  Sheila was in the year following Leslie at school, where she was friendly with my younger cousin Lucille.  A few years ago Lou and I were reminiscing about Sheila and she told me how all the teachers, including many older ladies of the strict and proper ‘old school of teacher’ type, regularly reprimanded Sheila for not matching up to the high standards of her sister.  Can you imagine a gathering in the Lady Teachers Common Room, with the odd chorus of ‘What are we going to do about Sheila’?

As Sheila matured she still had the ability to see things through rose tinted glasses and just get on with what was necessary.  And as we have read in her blogs, she has ‘Plenty of Favourite Things’.  And many times in her private and professional life she has fought for the rights and freedoms of friends or family – and her ability to transform objects would stand her in great stead when it came to making outfits for all comers from any spare pair of floral curtains.  My case rests.

What is of greater interest to me now is how Sheila’s trip to Kilimanjaro will pan out.  It is a certainty that she will adopt the porters and guides and any of their families who are round about.  She’ll spend time in between climbing by knitting them warm sweaters and bobble hats while explaining the Bill of Human Rights.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to stay on, setting up a café and gift shop at base camp.  There her skills learned cooking at Catching Lives would be very useful and, to provide the stock for the gift shop, she would teach all the women and children to knit and crochet or to make pebble jewellery and candle light holders from jam jars.

And to entertain all the customers who are bound to flock to such an attraction, Sheila would teach her helpers Line Dancing.  And thus Sheila would rise to great fame as she and her troupe, the Miller Family Line Dancers, travelled the world, winning first prizes at international Line Dancing Competitions.   My goodness, they might even make a film about her.

I think I should go and lie down.

Note from Sheila:  In 1966, when I spent a summer working in Jersey in a children’s home, another worker and I did actually make an outfit for each of the twelve children in the home from a length of chintzy material we found in a cupboard. I hadn’t seen The Sound of Music at the time but, given that it came out in 1965, I guess Julie Andrews just beat me to it!