Juvenile I know.....but funny

Back to reality

It's been back to the grindstone for me today after having a week off work. A whole ten days off, over in the bat of an eyelid. It's been good though. I wouldn't say I was ready to go back to work, but I was certainly feeling a little more relaxed and refreshed than I did.....until I saw the mound of paperwork on my desk this morning. Depressing.
So what did I do with my week? Lots of walking with Barney, I went fruit-picking with my mum and then made 28 jars of strawberry jam (I was a little bored of that one by the final batch, but it tastes fab), had some retail therapy in Manchester (bargains were found!), went to a 70th birthday party and ended it all in style in the company of Voley. We went to see Harry Potter in Birmingham followed by dinner...all most enjoyable. Harry Potter was excellent, though the individuals chomping on popcorn, rustling crisp packets and opening cans of pop all rather loudly for the first half an hour were somewhat annoying; I thought at one point that Voley was going to turn green and start bursting out of his clothes! He was not amused.
I'm now counting down the days till my next week off.......

Last night I dreamt....

I have really vivid dreams. I am sure that if I put as much imagination and effort into writing as I do dreaming, I would be a bestselling novelist!
What is preferable though, waking in a cold sweat from a nightmare but then feeling the relief that it was only a dream, or waking from the perfect dream to the realisation that it was little more than fantasy?
I am lucky that I don't have that many awful dreams these days, although I do dream a lot which probably means my mind finds it difficult to switch off. My dreams are quite often a bit jumbled with people from different times in my life all popping up together at places where they would never in reality meet. I think a dream analyst would have a field day with me...they would most likely deem me a little mad, and probably wouldn't be too far from the truth!
When I was young I went through a phase, as most children do, of having a lot of nightmares, it was horrible. I also used to have these other really weird experiences that were half-dream and half consciousness- in these semi-dreams I would have to perform some impossible task, a recurring one being having to make a fruitcake the size of the house and then eat it (I wonder if the fruitcake was some kind of symbol of my mental state?!). I usually was conscious enough to get to my parents and come out with some drivel like "I can't eat it, it's too big", at which point I usually woke up. All very strange.

Memories

It is five years today since my Grandad, my last surviving grandparent, died. He would have been 100 now and, were he still alive, would probably still be as fiercely independent as he always was. I still remember the morning I drove to work past my grandparents' house, only to see Grandad at the top of a set of 6-foot ladders that were placed at the edge of the road, cutting the back of his garden hedge...he was 90 at the time! Needless to say I didn't peep my horn as I went past.
My grandparents were always a huge part of my life as I grew up and for the last few years of my paternal grandparents' lives they lived nextdoor to us, so I saw them on a daily basis. Whenever our dog, Ben, went missing, we knew Grandad had stolen him and was secretly feeding him biscuits or toffees! He always swore blind that he hadn't, but Ben trying to get toffee unstuck from round his teeth usually gave the game away.
Before we moved more locally to our grandparents, we used to visit them at weekends. I have fond memories of staying with my paternal grandparents on Saturday nights and having Sunday lunch cooked by Nanny (we never let her forget the time she forgot to make the Yorkshire puddings), and then going a few miles up the road to see my maternal grandparents. My Nana used to spoil us rotten and I used to love rooting through a suitcase in which she stored lots of old toys and random bits and bobs from my Mum's and Auntie's childhood. Grandad often took us walking and in September we always went blackberry-picking with him.
Nanny used to babysit us a lot when we were young and my brother and I loved her reading stories to us at bedtime. We were mean though. We used to make her read the first chapter of Roald Dahl's 'George's Marvellous Medicine' just so she had to read the line, "She had pale brown teeth and a small, puckered-up mouth like a dog’s bottom"- we were children, we thought it was funny hearing that coming from our Nanny's mouth! She also hated the story of the Teeny Tiny Woman which appeared in my Richard Scarry Storybook so we used to get her to read that too. It was a really boring story that went on and on and on- again, we were children and we thought it was funny because Nanny hated it! Years later I got my comeuppance though when a child brought a book to me and asked me to read them a story...and guess what the story was?!
In recent years I have done some research with my parents into our family history and have managed to trace back quite a few generations on both sides of the family. I first started to chart our family tree whilst my paternal grandad was still alive; he developed dementia in the last few years of his life and whilst his short-term memory was pretty non-existent, his long-term memory was still fairly good and he would talk for hours about members of his family that I never knew...drawing up a family tree was the only way of keeping track of who he was talking about! It was fascinating learning about my ancestors, especially as both my Nanny and Grandad had unusual starts to their lives...my Nanny was orphaned at 8 years old and my Grandad was brought up by his grandparents from the age of 8 after his father died.

I loved spending time with my grandparents, though as I got older and life got busier I didn't see as much of them as I did as a child, and that I regret. I miss them very much and one thing that makes me sad is that were I ever to get married or have children (the likelihood of either is getting increasingly slim) they won't be there.

Nana and Grandad with my mum, 1948

Nanny and Grandad, c.1938