Somebody at the door.

This is the week the granddaughter comes to stay on her own, her parents deeming her old enough at the age of five to stay so fay away from them.  They may also consider me old enough to look after her, though personally I wonder if I’m a little irresponsible.

The only occurrence booked is a visit to The Children’s Play Village.  There is also Stopping In to get the phone call from the shower engineer on Wednesday about exactly when the shower engineer will be arriving on Thursday to fix the OH’s shower.  He tugged it in exasperation, frequently his default setting, thus breaking a safety doodah, which, having broken, causes the water to cascade down the back of the shower, testing the impermeability of the impermeable (hopefully) panels.

The rest of the time I have had a request for endless art and craft.

When I was a child my mother used to say that she wished they had shares in Sellotape, I got through so much of it.  At the time, in the early Fifties, you could get two types of sticky stuff.  There was clear sticky tape, Sellotape, which was quite expensive and came in a blue tin, in one width.  There was also cow gum of various sorts, which was basically boiled hooves.  It was opaque and came in a bottle with a rubber tip.  To access the glue you took a sharp knife, craft knives not having been invented, and cut along the depression on the angled tip.  When you pressed the tip on a surface, the cut opened slightly, a small amount of opaque glue flooded a little bit on to the surface and failed to adhere anything to anything, except dust.  It was not sufficiently sticky to stick a sheet of paper, with glue applied, facing glue side down, to the lino, even if you stood on it a lot.  I was bought a book, which I enjoyed, about making models with one piece of paper and no glue at all, just folding and creasing.  When I went to stay with my grandmother we stuck scraps in a scrap book with glue made from flour and water, in a saucer, if you’d added a lump of fat and a sprinkle of salt, you’d have had pastry.

My granddaughter has a box of things, bought for her and an entire room full of crafty stuff, bought for me.  Life has moved on.  But the glint in her eye, when she decides she’s going to make something, is me all over again.

Waiting 65 years for me all over again, is such a surprise for someone who came from an orphanage.  If you had parents who were like you and children who were like you, lucky you.  For me, it is a huge surprise.  The S&H is like me in temperament.  He is endlessly patient and can teach computing to dolts without even breathing heavily or changing his tone of voice and he always sees the funny side of everything. His creativity, however was always bound up with the computer; aged eleven, he wrote an entire computer game, called the Garden Game in which you got points for stamping on slugs.  He may well have been watching his mother in the garden.  He can draw and cartoon well but isn’t really interested.

The GDD and me, how will this be?

I’ll tell you next week,when I know myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This entry was posted in Things to make and do. and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *