Being a granddad

I never thought about being a granddad. I never aspired to be one. One day Hester phoned me. I was in the piggery. I stepped outside to get a better signal. And was somewhat surprised when she asked me if I were alone. Could anyone hear or guess our conversation. I had no idea what she was about to say. When she dropped the bomb-shell that she was pregnant.........I was suddenly ridiculously so excited....and nervous as hell ......just fingers crossed and hoping that the pregnancy would go to term, as they say, and we would have a brand new family member. I can't explain the joy. Was it the selfish gene. Even thinking back I can't come up with a reason for my happiness for me as much as for Hester and Chris.So I became a granddad on the day that Chris phoned me with the magical news.
If you are or once were a teacher (other situations obviously apply) you know the feeling of being boring, being out-of-touch, not wanted, not liked, etc etc ......... but to be with a grandchild.....who calls you "granddad" and asks you to do a puzzle, or do ring-a-ring-a-roses, or play pretend under the sofa or............................................

Garden

If Hester invites me out, so magnificently, to enjoy her lifestyle and to be with her and my wonderful grand-daughters.....I have to go.....I won't say.... hey...but ....my garden needs me....who will pot up my seedlings.....who will weed between the veg rows and flower beds.... and mow the grass...and feed the chickens.......and and and

Singapore Haze

Two pictures of Singapore. Top one from my bedroom window in Hester's apt two weeks ago. Bottom picture taken 9 hours ago. Smoke from nearby Sumatran forest fires are the cause. When I was there I pointed out to Hester just how close Sumatra was. She was somewhat surprised and checked her i-pack. Now that's where the wind is blowing from. I've recently read three books by and about Alfred Russel Wallace, a British botanist and entomologist and evolutionist who traveled extensively throughout the Malayan Archipelago in the middle of the 19th century. He saw at first hand the way the Dutch and the British were encouraging the natives to grow crops which might be valuable to Europeans. Encouraged indeed to cultivate new areas which were considered to be pretty useless and unproductive forest. Crops like potatoes,sugar, coffee and tobacco. There's a huge area of Singapore around Bestier Road which was once huge sugar plantations. Bestier married Paul Robespeare's daughter and did very well for himself. So this has been going on for some hundreds of years. Huge areas of Borneo's rain-forest have been destroyed; except that there they are managing to exploit the trees for garden furniture.......rather than just burning them....like in Sumatra.....to get them out of the way as it were. Palm oil it seems might be the driving crop in Sumatra, though the administration is denying this. But it's slash and burn tactics to clear forestation that's behind the smokescreen. The Indonesians are not burning their crops!!! It's not fires started accidentally.
The locals want to cultivate. They want cars and TV's and package holidays.They want fridges full of cold beers like the rest of us; and the Orang-Utans and birds of paradise will just have to be sacrificed along with the polar bears ...........OK no polar bears here.......Oh but there is!!!! In Singapore Zoo......I'll blog about him soon. I haven't quite made up my mind how to address his and our predicament yet, but I'm working on it.

Margot Poppy

Margot carries around with her a magical radiance of happiness and acceptance. Obviously she will have her moments when she is uncomfortable and she will cry like babies do. But in the grand scheme of things she is the most untroubled, placid, smiley baby you could possibly imagine. She doesn't yet have any concept of sibling rivalry and, given her partner in this Singaporean high altitude nest, maybe that's probably just as well. At 10 months old she is a fast crawler. Energetic and clambering to her feet up anything available. Sadly not all things stable. I fear for the standard lamp. But that's Hester's lookout. She's apparently the opposite of Elodie. Blonde hair, blue eyes against Elodies brunette hair and brown eyes. It's amazing how Elodie is Chris, whilst Margot is Hester. Elodie seems rumbustuous and cantankerous, while Margot seems understanding and accepting of the vicissitudes that we face in this mortal coil. Methinks the Wayman genes are way out in front here. In boxing parlance we are definitely ahead on points. Chris and his DNA and his gene pool are slumped in the opposite corner. He should man up, and throw in the towel. What do you think?

Elodie Rose

2 yrs and 9 months old. The sound of Chris's voice phoning from HK is still fresh in my ear. The day she was born. He assured me that mother and baby were fine and that the new arrival had 10 little fingers and 10 little toes! Now look at her. This is the end of her post-prandial mid-day nap.

Flowers in the rain

You don't need to trek into the jungle to see flowers like these. They are all over the place.There seems to be a left-right pattern along a vertical column in almost all the exotic plants here. I would love to be given a hundred lifetimes to study the glorious biodiversity around here.

Pool, palms and plants

This is Hester's pool and the plants nearby. It's nice to visit foreign lands and these plants are exotic and wonderful in their own way. There's a fabulous place called Hort Park. I'll post some pictures soon of some amazing flowers there. But I was hankering after my own plants and flowers here in Leechpool. It was so nice to get back to my delphiniums, lupins and larkspurs; my cranesbills and English roses all the gentle subtlety of a more temperate climate The jagged, spikey aggressiveness of of these sharp edged palms grated rather on my European sensitivities. Give me rose thorns and hawthorns any day. It was great fun to visit but I am now quietly content to be back where I belong. It's going to take more than three weeks to knock my garden back into shape having abandoned it for three weeks. Everything is overgrown and the weeds have really taken over during my absence. Also nice to be surrounded by birds again. Singapore only offered the occasional pairs of minah birds, the odd pigeon, a crow and a solitary nectar feeder in the park. There's nothing much for birds to eat in Singapore. No agriculture and all the hard waxy leaved plants. It was quite amusing to see a pair of skinny sparrows eking out a living at the American Club poolside by scavenging crumbs from the members outside dining tables. If the club closed down they would probably starve in less than a week.

Responsibility

Click on image to enlarge.
Margot is just a dream child. So happy and smiley and accepting.......when I first saw pictures and vids of her....the comparison with Elodie was so stark that I wondered if  she might be, how can I say this.........well I won't say anything, I'll leave you to guess what I wondered. but you know.......what I mean...But having been out there and witnessed the little developing character......poor little thing.....a monarchy already established over her head by Queen Elodie. Not yet a year old but subservient to her sister........but there is love and acceptance between them .......not always evident....but it's there.......
and little Margot is getting ready............trust me here.........getting ready to strutt her stuff!!!
I can't wait to meet the walking, talking Margot next time I go out.

Airbus A380

This is the Airbus A380 that flew me from Singapore to Frankfurt. Hester was surprised that I couldn't
remember if I'd flown in one before. You arrive at the airport at night, you go through a tunnel into the aircraft without actually seeing it, then you exit through a tunnel. So it was nice this time to look through a window and see the glorious beast. Once you are inside them all modern jumbo jet interiors are the same.
you can only see the back of the seat in front of you and the overhead locker. So you don't think WOW! I'm in an Airbus!!! This is great!!
When we landed and waited for the plane to come to a complete stop everyone got out of their seats, retrieved their stuff from the overhead lockers and then proceeded to wait an eternity in near silence for the cabin crew to open the doors. While we were all standing there this obese Indian chap, who had sat fast asleep and snoring loudly next to me all flight, asked the stewardess if she had a toothbrush? She gave a polite smile and said "No, sorry". There was a moments silence and then this Australian bloke standing a little way away from us said "You're in Economy mate, you're lucky to get toilet paper!"

Singapore

There are lots of municipal sculptures all over downtown Singapore. I liked this one of boys jumping into the river. A curious thing you can't help noticing here is that Singapore has no farmland. It has apartment blocks, shopping malls, large roads, parks and rain forest but no fields, no cows, no sheep, no rice paddies, no market gardens. No-one grows vegetables in their gardens. Most people live in apartments anyway and the millionaires who do have gardens wouldn't be interested in growing vegetables. So when you go in the supermarket you notice that the milk is from Australia. The "freshly squeezed" orange juice is from Florida USA and with no direct flight from Florida we are talking serious carbon damage here. Potatoes from Oregon. Carrots USA and New Zealand. Apples from South Africa. Mangoes from Thailand. The only things I saw that were actually grown in Singapore was some herbs and some small lettuces. So there must be a greenhouse somewhere but I didn't spot it. Climate change is no secret anymore. The facts are there and it's well understood. The bronze boys jumping into the river will never hit the water and they won't ever grow up to witness what the climate will be like in 20, 30, 50 or 100 years time. The lovely little suspension bridge, by the way, was manufactured in and shipped out from Glasgow!!!

Elodie Rosie

When Elodie watches TV she goes into this little trance of concentration. Her little face a mask like she's being hypnotized. She watches Ceebeebees now. I didn't see her watching Peppa Pig this trip. Her hair has been prepared ready to go to school.

Growing up

The puppy fat is going. You can almost imagine the teenage face to come. It won't be long before she puts those toys away. She is still getting "TimeOut" for being naughty. But that's all part of being two years old. (2 yrs 9 mths now). I took a load of Peppa Pig toys with me this trip. There was a 12 piece puzzle and at first she could't do it. She didn't get the idea that the edge pieces can't go anywhere but round the edge. She kept trying them in the middle. So I had to nudge them round to help her. I think the joy of seeing the complete picture was enough to make her keep wanting to do it. Plus a dose of sheer bloody-minded determination. Don't know where she gets that from. We must have done it five or six times a day. Maybe more. Eventually she was doing it by herself in less than a minute.We had so much fun together. Ring a ring of roses was a hit. And we used to crawl under a chair and pretend it was our house. We would take a Peppa Pig fridge under there and she would open it and feed me chocolate cake from it and we would say that this was our house and nobody else was allowed in here. She liked me to sit in her bedroom on her little white chair and she would put sunglasses on me and brush my hair and put clips in it. Then she would prepare me a meal of toy food, a plastic fried egg, pepper, onion, pizza and chocolate. I was allowed one pretend glass of wine.

Love this photo

Just must blog this pic again. All the great artists did Mother and Child.
Michelangelo, Picasso, Henry Moore et al and here we go again.... ..........................

Family Photo's

Multi-tasking........
as women do...............
have done.......................
and always........................
will do......................................
Bless them