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In advance of the holiday with my friends in Charmouth (you can read about that holiday here), we worked out a rota of who would cook the evening meal each night.  Four of us volunteered to cook on the Saturday night, and as three of the four are Scottish born, we decided to have haggis, as Scottish dancing was planned for later that evening.  I therefore called into the butcher in Wincheap, Canterbury, near where I live, to order up the haggis some time before the planned holiday.

When I asked if they would order me a couple of extra large haggis in “natural skins” (stuffed into the stomach of a sheep) I was told that the shop planned to close and they would not be putting in any more orders.  I expressed my surprise: the shop has been there for decades – thirty-four years they told me – but isn’t getting enough trade now.  I feel really sorry that one of the two real butchers in Canterbury is being forced to close, but can understand why.  There is a very successful Aldi just round the corner, where perfectly passable meat is sold at a fraction of the price of the old fashioned butcher.  However the butcher said to me he would take a look in his freezer in case there was any haggis lurking there: he thought there might be a couple of small ones.

When the butcher returned, I could hardly believe my luck. He could barely carry what he had found! There were two massive creatures and half a dozen smaller ones, all in natural skins, rather than the ubiquitous polythene bags.  He put them on the scales and discovered they weighed a total of twenty-one pounds.  Did I want them all for £15? My money was out like a shot of course – it was the bargain of the week!   They went straight out of his freezer and into mine.  We did a trial run with some friends the week before we left with two of the smaller ones to check their provenance, and with the knowledge that they were top class, were happy to take the two giant haggis off on holiday with us.

So on the Saturday we carefully cooked them up to go with mashed potatoes and neeps (what the Scots call turnip and the English, for some strange reason, swede).  One of the creatures was carried in, in the traditional manner and was formally addressed by Stewart and Ken, who jointly performed a vigorous and entertaining rendition of Burns’ “Address to a Haggis”. Amazingly nineteen out of the twenty round the table love haggis, so we made short shrift of what must have been twelve or thirteen pounds in weight of it.

And then it was on with the main event – the dancing.  Ken-the-kilt and his lovely wife Anne (read more about them in the blog post of 5th April) had the carpet rolled back, the music switched on and were ready to guide those with little knowledge of Scottish whirling.  We all did our best and loved every moment.  During a break in the dancing someone asked if I thought we would be dancing up Kilimanjaro.  I said I had not heard of dancing there, but that singing round the campfire might be a possibility:  I know that the African porters and guides are keen to teach others their local songs.  In the sober light of day I realise that of course there is no dancing!  We will be struggling to walk slowly at altitude, let alone flinging ourselves around dancing – that might be fatal!  The porters and guides will be saying “Pole, pole” to us all the way – slowly, slowly – and taking off into an Eightsome Reel or an Orcadian Strip the Willow will not be part of the plan.

Today’s blog post comes from Paula – the lovely nun that Sheila has mentioned before, and talks about in this post. Thanks Paula!

I am a friend of Sheila’s and work with her at Catching Lives.  What an adventurous lady she is.  I enjoy her blogs and her keen and appreciative eye for nature and recycling.

Her recent blog post about finding a wee bird’s egg and holding it in her hand and her granddad’s canaries reawakened memories of my own childhood.

My uncle Tom was a thrifty man and lived with his wife and four children in a place called Thornley just outside Durham. He had a strong Geordie accent.  He was a big man – rather a gentle giant as evidenced by the flowers he always brought Mam from his garden.  He kept goats, hens and ducks and grew all his own vegetables and flowers in three allotments near his home.  We loved visiting and especially watching eggs hatch in an incubator, which he kept in their small back bedroom.  We would spend hours both with the goats and hens and especially in the small back bedroom.

He also had hedgehogs, tortoises and tame birds. When I think of it now, I imagine he must have driven my aunt Ada mad as she loved to keep her home just so. Not a chance – my uncle also brewed the hens’ feed in the boiler in the scullery so their home always had an earthy perfume about it.

I imagine that Sheila’s keen eye will be on the look out for treasures as she does her climb on Kilimanjaro. I can imagine her picking up feathers, stones, small flowers for pressing – and who knows, by the time she descends she will have a wealth of small hand made gifts and may even open a small stall to sell her gifts for the charities that are so close to her heart.

Now every time I see a small bird’s egg I shall think of Sheila and my uncle Tom.

Last year in June, Stew and I went on a cruise on the Rhine for a week with my cousin Catherine and her husband Jim.  We had never been on any sort of cruise before, so thought it would be best to do one during which we were never out of sight of land.  We all thoroughly enjoyed it, but were subjected to pretty unusual weather.  It was well over 30 degrees centigrade for the first half of the week, and it reached 35 degrees on one particular day, when we were in Strasbourg.  We walked round the city in the morning, and returned to the boat pretty exhausted at lunch time.  Catherine and I had decided that nothing else would do, but to go for a swim in the afternoon to cool ourselves down.  We found out where the nearest outdoor pool was – it was at the European Parliament buildings – and made our way there.

We were pretty downhearted when we got there and discovered an enormous crowd of other people also hoping for a swim, standing outside.  We decided to wait for a while to see how quickly the queue moved.  After a while, some “bouncers” at the front called people with small children forward, and they all moved through the gates into the pool. We were not too optimistic.  Then suddenly, I looked up, and one of the bouncers seemed to be pointing over the heads of dozens of people, right at me!  I pointed at myself and said “Moi?”, and he eagerly nodded.  He waved his arms, indicating that the crowd should move to one side or the other, and immediately there was a path cleared between him and me.  I grabbed Catherine, and gingerly, together, we headed forward through the crowd.  We got right up to the front and were ushered through to the pay desk and thence to the pool.  We were in, before dozens, if not hundreds of people who had been in the queue in front of us.

The only possible reason I can think of why I was picked out is because I have white hair.  No-one else in that crowd did – after all, what self respecting elderly French woman would let her hair be its natural colour?  I was really chuffed to find that stopping dyeing my hair had been a positive advantage.  The bouncers must have thought I was really old to have let myself go to such an extent.

I don’t want to seek out favours when I am on Kili, but if push comes to shove, I might be quite pleased to play the white hair card!  If I am struggling to carry my backpack on that last all important day, or need just that little extra bit of encouragement, maybe I won’t mind too much if I get that extra bit of help.

Here’s the post I’d written for yesterday before the amazing video appeared! 

So one hundred days from today – if everything goes according to plan – we will be standing on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. What an extraordinary thing. It feels in equal parts totally dream-like, and absolutely part of my every day life now. Ma wrote a post about the similarities and differences between having a baby and climbing a mountain some time ago, and one of the points was that “it’s in your head all the time in the build up”. That’s so true – I feel like it is part of what defines me at the moment, and the first thing I think of almost every morning. I’m so grateful for the support we’re getting from friends and family. It’s easy to worry that we could be driving people mad with our “obsession” but, instead, it feels like everyone is happy to embrace it. And even join in! What a treat that friends and family have helped out with the posts – giving Ma a rest, and the blog a fresh perspective, every so often. Do let me know if you’d like to join in too.

When I was at Ma’s recently she said she doesn’t like to get out of bed until she’s seen that that day’s post is safely up online (I do the posting). My lovely friend at work, Kate Gordon, says that she likes to “race” the blog up in the morning; Cousin Lou says reading it on the train to work is part of her ritual now; and friends everywhere I go mention something that, in some cases, I only learnt about my family and history a few hours or days before them, as they’ve read it on the blog. It’s wonderful, and a real privilege, to be part of people’s daily routine. Thanks so much to all of you who have taken the time to comment – either on the blog pages, or on the Facebook posts. I know Ma loves that feedback too – it’s a surprisingly collegial way to connect, and to know that she’s making people think, remember, giggle or smile.

How extraordinarily lucky we are to have so many donations to the causes we’re supporting. Catching Lives, where Ma cooks for the homeless, will benefit from 50% of what we raise; the Tanzania Porter Education Project (via Friends of Conservation) will get 25% of the funds to enable porters – both male and female – to safely make a living from the mountain; and the other 25% will go to small community projects that Baraka helps Exodus Travels run around the globe.

A huge thank you to everyone who has donated via our Virgin Money Giving page, and particularly to the donor who has offered to match fund every donation we receive before we set off – up to our target. It means each donation will go a very long way. If you haven’t had a chance to donate yet, but plan to, please do it before we head off!

Talking of fundraising, you may remember that “The Cornrow Five” (some of my colleagues in the Marketing Team at work) offered to sponsor me if I got my hair braided for the climb. That story has now escalated and the Product Team have turned their challenge on it’s head (appropriately enough!) by offering to donate even more if “The Cornrow Five” have their hair plaited for the same length of time as me. That could make for some very interesting photos on my last day at work before the climb!

So with 100 days to go, I looked back 100 days to see what we were up to and found this short post, with no pictures(!), about Ma starting to do her packing. She mentions, for the first time, her “Kili drawer”. How brilliantly organised she is. It’s a drawer that I know she’s been adding to regularly – with items she will need on the mountain, and with gifts she can give to the porters we meet there. It’s very typical of her to have both in there! And, unsurprisingly, she’s also been buying bits and pieces for Osc and me, to ensure we’re safe and warm on our adventure.

I think it’s a useful strategy in life to count your blessings, and I feel like this project has thrown a whole load of new ones into my world. One of those is the knowledge that Ma, Osc and I are surrounded by friends and relatives who will donate, click, read, write, braid, train with, and even go naked (thanks Jean!) in their backing of our madcap adventure. The Exodus “Kili Infographic” says that around two thirds of those who attempt Kili actually make it. We’ve been told countless times now that altitude sickness is a arbitrary master, and there’s no way of knowing how it’ll affect us, but if love and support could get us to the top, I feel like we’d be flying up. What a lucky bunch we are. Roll on those hundred days!

Gosh! Gwen just emailed this to me. I can’t believe she roped so many of you in – and you all kept it quiet from us! How in the world (literally!) did she do it?

How brilliantly appropriate that it arrived today, as the 19th of May marks a pretty important moment in the 3G Kili Climb adventure; it’s exactly 100 days before we hope to get to that summit. I had a post all prepared and ready to go but we’re just going to have to do “99 days to go” tomorrow, because you’ve all totally trumped that post.

We could not feel more supported. Thank you so much folks.

We love you all! Sheila, Jae & Oscar xxx

PS It runs straight into the lovely video Samson made for us previously – worth a watch too if you haven’t already seen it! Jx

There are so many benefits in being old!  I was quite frightened on entering my sixties about how I would face retirement and the loss of identity I felt that might entail.  How wrong I was. I really do think that on a day by day basis, my life is better and happier now than at any time before. Don’t get me wrong – I had great highs before both in family and career terms. But on a daily basis, the freedom that I now have to do and say pretty much anything I want is amazing.

I am lucky – I think it is all about the balance of good health, available time and sufficient money – and at the moment I have all three.  Not all my friends are so fortunate.  All three rarely come together earlier in life, unless you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth.

I love having the freedom to say what I want now, as I have been doing in our blog in the last few weeks.  If what I write is totally mad, people just laugh and say I am a batty old woman: I wouldn’t have got away with it before.  I always felt I had to “watch my back” before as far as work and colleagues were concerned – but now there is no reason not to say whatever I like.  The same goes for my “elders and betters”.  That generation no longer exists: I could not have been as forthright and disrespectful as I have been of them in the blogs, had they still been alive!

What I want to say to Jae’s many lovely friends and the great bunch of younger people, who are racing around doing a balancing act taking care of their families, working hard, counting their pennies and are mad enough to find time to be reading this is: enjoy every good moment that comes your way – you really deserve it.  Never feel guilty about anything: guilt is the biggest sapper of energy there is.  Know that you are absolutely doing your best, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! Look forward with anticipation and smile. I have learned that these are the most important things in life.

Where did all that come from?  Quite the philosopher today. This 3GKiliClimb thing seems to be turning my brain: woo hoo – I am loving it!

Just adding this poem I’ve always loved for fun! Jae x

I have just got back from a great week in Charmouth, where a group of twenty of us rented an enormous house – Stonebarrow Manor – which has eighteen bedrooms.  I have been part of the group for nearly twenty years.  Some people have left us and others have come – and we have stayed in lots of different houses, mostly in the West country.  On the very first such week, we rented a whole youth hostel.  However, although we loved going out walking every day and cooking for ourselves and arranging evening entertainments, we decided bunk bed rooms and two showers between us all, was not what we wanted.  Nowadays every person/couple has a room and most also an en suite bath/shower.  We still walk every day, with other activities too.  On offer this year we had painting lessons, a book group, Scottish dancing and a poetry evening.

Our first day was just fabulous.  We walked up the lane beside the house and over lovely footpaths, taking in masses of blue bells, primroses, pink campion, wild garlic and other such delights on the way.  At the top of the lane we looked across to Golden Cap, and girded our loins ready for the assault on it.  All fifteen who set out made it, and were rewarded with a picnic lunch at the top.

On our way down, a rather elderly lady suddenly appeared out of a hedge, and told us that if we went back the way she had just come, it would avoid walking on the road.  So through the hedge we went, and across a couple of fields.  We were rather aghast when we hit the third field to discover that not only was it full of cows, but also almost perpendicular!  I doubt if even Kilimanjaro is as steep!  We made it to the top and collapsed on the grass.  It was rather pleasant, as the sun was out, so we lay there for a while.  I was next to Anne S. who said that lying there reminded her of lying beside the road on an Easter weekend in the 1960s after walking for many miles on an Aldermaston March.

Wikipedia says that: “The Aldermaston marches were anti-nuclear weapons demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s, taking place on Easter weekend between the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, England, and London, over a distance of fifty-two miles, or roughly 83 km. At their height in the early 1960s they attracted tens of thousands of people and were the highlight of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) calendar”.

She said that she remembers lying beside someone who told her that if your feet are completely done in by walking, what you need to do is lie on your back with your feet in the air for a while and they will soon feel better.  It seemed to help at the time, she thought.  So she and I, lying in a field in Dorset half a century later, decided to give it another try.  I am not too sure whether it helped my feet or not, but it seemed to give my stomach muscles quite a good work out and caused general hilarity among the group.

We can give it another try during the Kilimanjaro challenge.  I am sure we will be looking for things to entertain ourselves with in the evenings, others than card games, so a bit of leg up might be just the ticket!

One of the greatest treats we looked forward to, when visiting our grandparents as children, was going for a “run in the car”.  When I was very small, my parents did not have a car, although occasionally my father would be allowed to borrow the small Austin 7, which lurked in my grandfather’s large garage.

However, when we went out for a run with my grandparents, we didn’t go out in anything so basic!  We went out in the chauffeur driven Triumph!  The chauffeur-cum-gardener would put on his peaked hat and sit in the front, while everyone else piled into the back.   I think that we could sit four abreast quite comfortably and I recollect a couple of flap down seats too. It was quite an undertaking, and there would be some preparation before we set out.  Hot water bottles would be filled to put on to our knees and then warm rugs would be tucked in all around us, to ensure we were cosy.  I particularly remember one of these rugs, which seemed to be made of fur: I think this was before the days of fake fur, but it seems hard to believe that they might actually have had a soft cuddly rug made of real fur!  Maybe they did.  Flasks of warm drinks would be prepared: cocoa for children and coffee for the adults.

If it was winter, there would be chains over the tyres of the Triumph, so that it didn’t slip in the ice and snow.  I can remember the snow being piled up so high on either side of the road on occasions, that it was impossible to see anything else.  If it was at all chilly or windy – most of the time, really – we wouldn’t get out of the car at all.  The car would be parked up in a “beauty spot” overlooking some of the truly beautiful rolling Scottish Border country, while we enjoyed the view and sipped our warm drinks, before driving back to the house in stately fashion.

However, if the weather was clement, there would be a purpose to the outing.  I remember walking through burns (Scottish streams) to gather watercress, which would be a delicious addition to our afternoon tea that day.  On other occasions, we would be collecting field mushrooms.  We were warned to be very careful about what fungi we picked: my grandfather would examine each one carefully to make sure it wasn’t something poisonous. Often we would be searching for a particular delicacy for my grandfather’s prize winning canaries.  Dandelions, just before the clocks opened, were one delicacy, as were chickweed and “rats’ tails”.  We would follow my grandfather over fences and fields to gather whatever was required and place the chosen items carefully in baskets, but the adult women would rarely stray far from the comfort of the car.

Our journey up Kilimanjaro will be a far cry from such an outing: I love to think about the different ways in which I have travelled in my lifetime.  The one thing an outing in the Triumph had in common with our proposed trip up Kili was that it was a family undertaking, which generally spanned three generations – and that is something quite special!

 

I have mentioned Katie a few times in this blog.  We treat Katie as a daughter, and Jae and her sister Gwen treat her as a sister, but she was actually born in Australia.  How we first came to meet her is a bit special.

In early 1987 I was phoned by a colleague of Stewart’s at the university.  He said that an academic and her daughter had just arrived in Canterbury from Australia and had rented a house in the next street to us, but couldn’t work the central heating.  Could I go and trouble shoot?  I  popped up the road, quickly switched it on and invited them back to our house for a cuppa, while their house warmed up.  Jo and her daughter, Jerusha, walked into our house that day and we were all immediately friends. Gwen and Jerusha were much the same age: it was like we had known them all our lives.

The three girls were into sewing, and when I saw a cute sewing box in the form of a haberdashery shop, I bought one for each of them. Jo and Jerusha stayed for about six months – and have stayed in close contact ever since.  Jerusha took her sewing kit back to Oz with her when she returned home.

When twelve year old Jerusha returned to Oz, she started at a new school and made a new friend, Katie.  Roll on another twelve years and Jo got in touch to say that Jerusha’s friend, Katie, was arriving from Australia to work here in August 1997, and could she stay with us for a few days before starting work?  Her arrival was scheduled for four days before Jae’s wedding and our house was absolutely full of people already.  However, we decided that we would fit her in for one night, then try and get her into the local youth hostel, so that she could stay there until she started her live-in job.

When Katie arrived in our house, we were in the middle of trying to get Jae’s wedding dress to fit: it clearly needed alteration.  I was busy making a meal for all the people milling around.  Katie and Jae were left alone with the wedding dress.  Katie spotted something she recognised on the shelf in Jae’s room – it was the little haberdashery shop sewing box – the same as she had seen in Jerusha’s bedroom in Australia.  It seems that in the blink of an eye, Katie had got the box down, opened it, and started the necessary alterations.  We were all absolutely amazed that this girl, straight off the plane, could find the right equipment to do the job and actually make real progress in doing it so quickly.  Katie made herself so useful in the next few days that there was no way she was moving out to a youth hostel: she was one of us!  She has spent lots of holidays and nearly every Christmas in our house since then.

I think the lesson from this is that you can make real friends from all sorts of different places when you least expect it.  People say that doing a climb like the one Jae, Oscar and I will be doing up Kilimanjaro is a real bonding experience.  You spend more than a week living in very close proximity to a group of other people and together probably share “blood, toil, tears and sweat” as you climb to the roof of Africa.  I think it is a near certainty that we will make new friends with at least one or two people in the group.  Wouldn’t it be nice if Oscar made friends with one of the other young teens who will be in the group, just like Jae and Gwen did when they met Jerusha all these years ago?

Hilarity about the 3G Kili climb is spreading to all parts of the British Isles – yes, thankfully we are still united in many things.  Last Friday, we were chatting with some friends – admittedly over some rather pleasant red wine.  I was telling them about Sheila, Jae and Oscar’s venture and it was obvious that they couldn’t quite get their minds round the purpose, especially why Sheila, Jae or assorted family and friends were producing daily postings in various social media.  I explained about collecting sponsorship – for three different charities, especially for Catching Lives, which is very close to Sheila’s heart.  That impressed everybody – that a retired lawyer was giving so much of her time to cook for the homeless.  So we started talking about ways to raise more sponsorship without really coming up with any ideas.

So we moved on to other topics of the day.  My hubby Jim produced that day’s edition of The Scotsman, the rather douce and proper morning paper serving Edinburgh and mainly the east coast.  One particular article had had him laughing, which is probably quite unusual for the Scotsman, catering as it does for a sensible, quite conservative (note the lower case ‘c’) section of the population.  It is very easy to offend people from Edinburgh – and people from the west coast have a hoard of anti-Edinburgh jokes – where the ladies ‘wear fur coats and nae knickers’, while living behind prim and proper ‘lace curtains while eating kippers’ (kippers having once been the cheapest form of protein).

The article causing such hilarity among us was about China, so coming from a neutral area, it passed the Edinburgh ‘good taste’ censors.  In China, it is vitally important to have a large gathering of mourners at any funeral; the deceased gains kudos in the afterlife proportional to the attendance.  Sadly, in China, respect for the dead in the here and now is diminishing and funeral attendances falling.  So families have taken to hiring strippers to appear at the funeral, or they arrange a lewd show – no explanation given by the Scotsman of what constitutes a lewd show for fear of angering readers.  These funerals are a total sell-out.  However, the Chinese officials do not approve – just as they WOULD NOT APPROVE in Edinburgh.  Hubby kept insisting that there must be an idea for Sheila and Jae’s drive for sponsorship in the article and said that we would throw in some more money if they came up with anything.

Now Sheila is a dear friend and I would never suggest that a respectable wife, mother, grandmother – and retired lawyer – did anything as ‘lewd’ as a striptease – but how about a ‘Calendar Girls’ moment? I’ve had a go at starting a calendar off for you!

Note from Jae: Wow Jean – that is quite some guest-blogger commitment! You look amazing.  We have had nakedness on the mountain mentioned in a blog post before, and the Calendar Girls appeared in reference to “Fishy Buns”, but this is the first naked photo I think! I’m seriously hoping they’ll be no striptease challenges though – the challenge to get cornrows is leaving me feeling quite uncomfortable enough about my appearance.

As I walked back from our caravan at the coast to Canterbury the other day, to keep up with my training regime for Kili, I found a beautiful little egg sitting in the middle of the path on the grass.  There were no trees anywhere near and it was clear that the egg was going to be trodden on pretty soon, so I picked it up.  It was a creamy colour and probably slightly more than an inch long.  It was stone cold, but I fantasised that maybe if I held it in my hand as I walked, it would warm up and hatch.

It put me in mind of my grandfather, who after retirement, became a “canary fancier”. He gradually built up quite an empire of wooden buildings for his canaries in the spacious grounds of his house.  He took over what had been a summer house, a hen house and a shed, one after the other, ending up with hundreds of birds in cages in them.  As a child, I was fascinated by the little plastic eggs he used to encourage the canaries to breed.  He would carefully fashion a felt lined nest and put it into a cage with a blue egg in it, to give the birds the idea, I suppose.

That’s what I was thinking about, as I walked along with my egg – then it all went horribly wrong!  I came to a litter bin and saw what looked like a couple of skate boards in it.  At first I walked past, but then I thought, wouldn’t Oscar and his brothers enjoy them, when they next visit?  So I walked back and fished them out of the bin.  Unfortunately, the egg in my hand smashed during the manoeuvre, resulting in a yolky mess.  Well – I suppose there was no hope of it hatching out anyway!  The skate boards looked in pretty good nick, however.  They were too heavy for me to carry for several miles, so I hid them in some bushes and I hope that they will still be there next time I pass with the car.  I will resist the temptation to try one out: an accident could end my prospects of climbing Kilimanjaro – and explaining an injury from skate boarding at the age of sixty seven would be very embarrassing at the hospital!

So as I walked on, I contented myself with thinking about these long ago canaries.  All of them were called Jock – males and females alike.  My grandfather, at that age, had trouble remembering people’s names, let alone birds’ ones.  He had seven daughters and a multitude of grand daughters, and gave up completely on getting their names right.  He ended up calling us all Irène, which was actually the name of his seventh much loved daughter.

As a canary fancier, my grandfather would enter his birds for shows, which involved a lot of special treatment.  The chosen Jocks would be fed up on a special diet involving egg yolks.  That smacks a bit like cannibaism, now I think about it!  He would boil up hens eggs – give the whites to us children, who were very happy to eat them – and feed the yolks, mixed with special weeds we were sent to find in the hedgerows to the lucky birds.

Next came the really exciting bit – the beauty parlour!  He would carefully hold Jock in his hand and wash him/her all over with a special flannel and warm water.  The wet bird would then be placed on to a narrow piece of fabric and be rolled up like a sausage roll to dry.  The rolls of birds would be set on the tiles in front of the gas fire to dry off.  Sometimes more than a dozen birds would get this treatment at once and there would be neat rows of them all lying there together in the dining room fireplace.

When I got home, I looked up on the internet to see whether this had all been a flight of my imagination, and at first I could see nothing at all to suggest that this had ever been a proper way of caring for birds.  In fact quite the contrary: the advice nowadays seem to be to give canaries water for bathing and they will make use of it themselves on a daily basis.  However, at last I did track down the “Encyclopaedia of Caged Birds” 1928 revised edition, and there was a rather grainy picture of “Hand Washing a Canary”!  Exactly as I remember.

Once the birds had been completely prepared, they would be driven to the station in special show cages, to go by train to wherever the show was.  My grandfather lived in Hawick on the main line between Edinburgh and London, so they could have been going pretty much anywhere in the country.  The line was a victim to the Beeching cuts in 1971, but I am pleased to know that it is to be at least partially reopened later this year.  Quite how the birds made it at the other end to the show and then back on to a return train afterwards, I have no idea, but I do remember birds arriving back, the successful Jocks proudly bearing red or blue rosettes affixed to their cages.

I rather fancifully googled “Kilimanjaro birds”, when I was thinking of writing this, wondering what sort of egg might be dropped in my path there, and I am slightly horrified by what I found! I found a picture of a bird with the following description: “White necked ravens are big birds with large strong scary looking beaks.  They hang around the campsites and huts on Kilimanjaro scavenging and looking for scraps”.  So not only do we now have to deal with the prospect of leopards and rats – see blog of 10th of March – but now also big scary birds!  Bring back the canaries!

I was really touched recently by one of Stewart’s friends, Rob Veltman, going to the trouble of providing us with some helpful phrases in Swahili, for when we are on Kilimanjaro.  Isn’t it great that somebody would go to the trouble of doing that?

During the last few years, Stew has been out walking on Thursdays with a few fellow ex-academics.  They have had some adventures during these walks.  They have come back with their clothes ripped, spectacles missing, soaked through and, unfortunately, on one occasion with a broken leg.  But they have persevered!  I love the fact that these guys – all the others are older than Stewart – have continued to traverse the Kentish countryside and, no doubt, put the world to rights while doing so. It seems, quite often, they end up in a pub, but it is great that they do it at all.  Women seem to me to be eminently clubbable: we are always meeting up and arranging to do something together.  But for men, that is something a bit special.

And recently, Stewart returned from his Thursday walk with two tightly written pages from Rob, one of the walkers and a linguistician, providing us with useful phrases for the Kili trip.  Rob has clearly prepared phrases especially for us, and I am really grateful for his foresight.  I will be all set if someone asks me halfway up Kilimanjaro which branch of law I used to specialise in, and I am sure Oscar will be happy to explain that he is not married yet.

I am particularly pleased that he has included essential “toilet” phrases: so long as that is sorted, I am fairly sure we will manage all the rest.  Thank you very much indeed Rob!

Sheila and Stewart’s arrival in Canterbury in 1973 came at a very opportune time for me. I was fed up with working as a social worker and, at the ripe age of 27, was thinking it was time to start a family. Sheila already had a little girl of almost two, Janey, as she was then known, and was therefore in a position to offer advice and friendship. Some time afterwards, when we were visiting Sheila and Stewart and there were several other people present, Martin (my husband) announced: “Well, Pat’s up the spout!” This was a bit of a shock as I had only had the pregnancy confirmed that day and he had just heard the news himself.

Once I had given up my job – that’s what we did in those days and I had no intention of ever going back – Sheila and I began to see a lot of each other. Sheila by this time was also pregnant so we knew our babies would become friends too. Just before my daughter, Nicola, was born, Sheila and I went on an expedition to the nearest Mothercare store, which was in Margate, to get the basic kit. I think this really amounted to a baby bath, some terry nappies and toiletries. I tried to follow Sheila’s example with thrifty handicrafts and lined a Moses basket (romantic but wildly impractical) and made myself a couple of maternity smocks. When Gwen was born, four months after Nicola, I tried to make a patchwork cot bumper for her out of scraps of old dresses but, in truth, I have always been hopeless at handicrafts and my mother had to help me get it finished.  Thirty years later, this work of art featured as a backing for the quilt Sheila made for our first grandchild, Alfie.  It was good to see the remnants of my old 1960s mini dresses given yet another new life!

When our girls were older – I had gone back to the dreaded Social Services and Sheila was also busy with various part-time jobs – it was harder to make time to see friends.  However, the first Canterbury Fun Run was to take place in May 1981 and I persuaded Sheila to buy a pair of trainers and start training with me. I clearly remember the time we first managed to run for twenty minutes without stopping and we realised we had cracked it.  So we triumphantly completed the five-mile fun run, with our friend Mary, and thereafter regularly ran together and with other friends.  Somehow we also fitted in yoga classes and then aerobics. We both became pretty fit at that time and I think this changed our conception of ourselves.  Neither of us was at all sporty but at least we could run and it was an excellent way of keeping in touch with friends. I ran for the next 18 years, when my knees started to give me trouble, and Sheila carried on for a couple more years after that. Nowadays we meet up with other friends from our jogging period at the excellent Pilates classes run by Lindsay in a local church hall.

I think the feeling of being strong, healthy people remained with both of us long after we stopped jogging.  Even though she claims never to have walked up a hill, Sheila knew she had the determination to get herself fit enough to climb up Kilimanjaro. Unlike me, she has no fear of heights and she has strong legs and ankles to keep her stable.  So I am quite sure she can do it. I have even offered, for old times sake, to accompany Sheila on some of her training walks, though she has a head start on me this time.

Going up Kilimanjaro will definitely be a contrast to my everyday life at home.  I will no longer be cocooned in a comfortable warm bed at night with a bathroom and all its facilities to hand, but will instead be spending eight nights sleeping in a tent and making use of wet wipes and small bowls of water for keeping clean.

In my earliest years, I lived a life of contrasts, and seemed to move quite naturally between the two.  My parents lived in a small two-up-two-down terraced house, which also had a small “box room” for my little brother to sleep in.  Our life there was pretty simple and probably quite hard work for my mother in the years before we had a fridge, washing machine or television.  I recollect that quite a common evening meal at home would be bread and dripping.  I looked up dripping on Wiki and it said:

“Dripping, also known usually as beef dripping or, more rarely, as pork dripping, is an animal fat produced from the fatty or otherwise unusable parts of cow or pig carcasses. It is similar to lard, tallow and schmaltz.”

That sounds rather nasty, but we really liked it, especially when there was a thin layer of jelly underneath.  After that, we might have “banana, milk and sugar” which was a banana sliced into a pudding plate, with a dash of milk and sprinkling of sugar added.

However, when we went to visit our paternal grandparents, who lived about twenty minutes walk away up the hill, it was a very different kind of life – into which, as children, we fitted equally well.  They lived in an extremely large and luxurious house, complete with a live-in maid and a chauffeur/gardener.  The usual scenario was that we would be invited for Saturday afternoon tea, which was a very splendid affair, served on a large table which easily seated twelve people and probably more with extra leaves let in. The first excitement would be the banging of the gong, which had to take place at four o’clock precisely.  There was great competition to be the grandchild to have the privilege of doing the banging: the gong was like a miniature version of the one that used to be shown at the beginning of Rank films, and could be heard throughout the house.  My grandmother would then open the dining room window and shout “Cooee!”

I googled that and was amazed to find it defined as:

Cooee! (IPA /ku:’i:/) is a shout used in Australia, usually in the Bush, to attract attention, find missing people, or indicate one’s own location. When done correctly – loudly and shrilly – a call of “cooee” can carry over a considerable distance ^[citation needed^]. The distance one’s cooee call travels can be a matter of competitive pride.

Quite why an Australian bush shout would be made out of the window of a posh house in the south of Scotland in the 1950s escapes me, but that is what my grandmother would shout and it resulted in anyone who might be outside – usually my grandfather in one of his several canary houses – coming indoors for afternoon tea.

Everyone would take their place at the table: grandmother at the door end, grandfather at the other end, great Auntie Annie (Yanos) in pole position in the middle of one side in front of the fire and the rest wherever they could fit in.  There would be delicate sandwiches, most memorably egg ones and meat paste ones.  Scones were piled high, to be eaten with two sorts of jam, served in crystal dishes with high stems and butter made into curls.  There would be cakes, though they were surprisingly plain – most usually a Madeira or cherry cake, and chocolate finger biscuits.  Children would be served milk to drink – there was no choice – and adults would have tea, served by my grandmother from two enormous silver pots, one for tea and one for hot water.  As children, we would wait for the tea or the water to run out for another exciting moment!  When it did, my grandmother would simply press her foot on to a lump in the carpet under the table near where she sat, and a bell would ring in the kitchen.  The maid – I remember Margaret and Jane – would appear at the hatch behind where my grandmother sat, and would be told to bring more hot water, or whatever was required.  That bell was a terrible temptation for me: the desire to put my foot on it was almost overwhelming – but strictly forbidden.  Surprisingly, I don’t think I ever committed what would have been regarded as a deadly sin.  The highlight of the afternoon tea would be the tart, made by Yanos.  She was famous for her tarts, made with apples, gooseberries or rhubarb – or whatever was in season in the large garden.  I was told that the first words which I ever uttered were “a tart”.  I can imagine myself sitting, as a chubby baby of perhaps fourteen months old, at a table full of people all talking at once, with one of Yanos’ wonderful tarts in front of me, wondering what I had to do to get a bit of it – and getting total attention from everyone around me by uttering my first all-important words.

As we got older, we were always told that we had to “talk up” because my grandmother had a deaf ear.  That sounded a bit special!  If we did not talk clearly enough, we would have to repeat ourselves, and if that was still unsatisfactory, we had to go and stand near her good left ear and repeat it again, so she could hear.  It is as a result of that training, I think, that I have always talked slightly too loudly: Stewart has on occasions told me off for it.

By the time we were at primary school, we were expected to provide entertainment after the meal.  We would be required to stand near my grandfather to sing a song, recite a poem or perhaps do a dance – whatever we chose. My grandfather was particularly keen on recitation, and actually wrote quite good poetry himself.  We would get bonus points if we were able to perform something original, that we had written or thought up for ourselves rather than learned at school.

After tea, we would take our leave.  Our mother had taught us carefully what we had to say on leaving: there were only two acceptable sentences.  These were: “Thank you very much for a lovely tea” and “Thank you very much for having me”.  My sister Leslie and I had to say our thanks one after the other, but because she was the elder, she got to make her thanks first.  I had to listen carefully to what she said, as I had to make sure I said the other sentence.  I would be in trouble when I got home if I said the same as her.

I hope my early training in chameleon-like behaviour comes in useful on Kili.