Life Lessons - Learned and Still to Learn

This past weekend I decided to spend much of a very dreary Saturday watching my favourite movies. Amongst those I chose to rewatch was "Shirley Valentine." I love Pauline Collins. I remember her from "No, Honestly" back in the day. And since then I have enjoyed seeing her in other offerings, most recently in the wonderful Dustin Hoffman directed film, "Quartet". There she shared the screen with two of my other favourite people - Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Billy Connolly. What a treasure.  I was struck by how differently I reacted to the film this time. Last time I watched it, the character of Shirley was 42; I was about that age, too. It is still poignant and sweet and lovely and speaks so much truth about what so many women feel as they reach the midpoint of their lives. But the first time I saw it, I bawled my eyes out when Shirley uttered these words: "I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it'...

I have spent most of my life in the company of cats. My parents had a female Siamese called Ophelia when I was born (and she hated me until the day she died at the ripe old age of 16). I got my first very own cat when I was 8 and many, many cats followed. My cats had full run of the outdoors until we moved when I was 17. After one of the cats had a fatal run-in with a car, we decided to have only house cats and I continued that tradition for most of my life. We took the dog plunge first in the late 60s with the purchase of a Cairn terrier puppy we named Sgt. Pepper. Unfortunately, he had a fatal run-in with a car and it wasn't until 1974 that another dog entered our lives. Wadleigh (as my father and I named him one evening after a few cocktails) lived for a good long time and we all loved him. But we always had cats in residence.  As an adult, I always had cats. As you may know from my former blog, my last cat in residence was Gracie - a beautiful British shorthair who had the unfo...

I had a blog for just over 10 years. It began as a blog to showcase my late husband's glorious landscape photography of Scotland. It was meant to chronicle our lives in the north of Scotland and our travels along the roads - both great and small - of this stunning country. But around year three of the blog, life started to become a bit challenging. Both Chris and I experienced losses of those close to us. A dear friend of mine, my mother and Chris' father (within four days of each other), a dear family friend to Chris and his parents, Chris' aunt, my uncle. And to add insult to injury, along that same time, Chris was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He fought it bravely and there was a period when we thought we had beaten it. But it returned, stronger and more invasive and, in the end, Chris did not survive. I had to say farewell to my darling husband on September 30, 2018. I was sitting beside him, holding his hand and telling him how much I loved him when he took his last bre...