I spent a lovely afternoon with my friend Anne this week. When people meet Anne and me, they assume that we are old friends, as we have similar Scottish accents – and to a certain extent, they are right. However, we met in Canterbury, not Scotland.
Stew and I arrived in Canterbury when Jae was eighteen months old. Stew had a job as a lecturer at the University of Kent. I knew absolutely nobody within a fifty mile radius. However, the University Wives Association sprang into action! These very virtuous ladies were determined that no new wife would remain friendless. I was telephoned and told that Jae and I would be collected – it would be another decade before we had a family car – and taken to a University Wives’ Coffee Morning. I know that many newcomers, especially those from abroad, would welcome this – but I hated the idea of being an adjunct to my husband. However, I was not so churlish as to say I would not come, so made up my mind that I would go once, sit beside whoever was next to me and try to make a friend of them, and then not go again.
Well I sat beside Anne. She was a total fraud: she was not even a University Wife, but had met one of the virtuous ladies elsewhere and somehow got brought along too.
When we started to talk to each other – our children playing alongside – we realised that not only had we both attended the same school – Rutherglen Acadeny – but we had also at different times lived in the same road in Rutherglen, just outside Glasgow. We knew several people in common. I had my friend and I was out of there!
We have been good buddies now for over forty years. So I arrived at her house this week for a catch up. Anne and husband Ken (aka Ken the Kilt) had just spent a week on a Scottish Dancing holiday. They do several such weeks every year, when kilts are donned and new dances practiced every day. It was a lovely sunny day, and it was great to see Ken’s kilt socks dancing on their own on the line: Anne had been delivering some special treatment to them.
We then came indoors and before we went out for our planned walk in the woods Anne got the tissues out. She wanted to show me a film featuring her granddaughter Maisie, and said that tissues were compulsory. Anne was right as usual. Maisie is a student of theatre studies and had participated in a film made by the students entitled “A Tribute to a Generation”. Anne said I only had to watch the first minute or so of the film, as Maisie is first up. And there is this lovely twenty year old girl talking about her grandparents, Anne and Ken, in the most wonderful terms ever. It could hardly fail to bring tears to anyone’s eyes.
How lucky are we have the opportunity to enjoy such great relationships with children and grandchildren, to have time and health sufficient to be part of their lives and to have it put into words while we are around to hear it too?
As I said to Anne, when our families are casting round for some kind words to say about us at our funerals, they will only need to show Maisie’s film or cull a few words from the 3GKiliClimb website, and the job will be done!