Notes from the Bothy
12 August 2013
Sunday, and after this one, there will only be two more Sundays, until the one where we leave to set out on our adventure. The last of our Sundays will be spent sailing Hearts of Oak around Walney Island on the annual round the Island race for all comers. The Sunday before that, I’m going to visit my Grandchildren, my son and his wife, in Portsmouth.
This particular Sunday we have Jackies’ daughter, Catriona, with her son Luca, who is 10 months old staying with us at Mill View Cottage. He’s a great young man who so far hasn’t cried once. The only sound he seems to make is a very high pitched short shriek which is always in glee than in sorrow. His mum is a vegan, and an evangelist to the cause. She gave up smoking and drinking the moment she discovered she was pregnant, and she’s studying social anthropology at Kent University. A late starter, she’s 28, and is a single mum who’s a very good single mum. As you can imagine she has her own take on bringing up baby, to the slight trepidation of her mother, now Nana J, but as she’s doing such a good job we stay schtum.
As you can imagine, a social anthropologist/ vegan mum is going to breast feed isn’t she, and so she does. She’s also an evangelist for this cause and as we sit down to lunch in whatever café we’ve been eating, out comes the breast, in an air of casualness, and at the same time I sense a whiff of power. That unspoken challenge to any one that dare come over and say, “ Do you mind”.
I find it’s best at these moments to carefully study my soup, just to perhaps make sure that it has the right texture, that I like, buttering a roll also seems to fulfill the same disinterested distraction. After all I’m a baby boomer and I was there when the girls claimed power, burning their bras, back in the 60s’ I’m a cool, liberated man, and very broadminded.
I know all this but the old fashioned man in me and my puritanical country of England makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but at the same time proud to see Jackie’s genes on the other side of the table pushing forward the march of civilised man, and towards an acceptance that breasts are for feeding babies, not page three, and it’s only natural isn't it.
You sort of forget, don’t you, how dreadfully messy babies can be. Lucas’ mum is starting to introduce him to solids (baby-led feeding I’m told), and so he joins in our meal times, and gets to sample bits of mums dinner, which is of course vegan. So he gets to have a go with a slice of tomato, which he grabs and shoves to his mouth. It goes in, he has a chew and it comes out, precariously grasped now as he plays helicopter arms and oh dear, it’s fallen on the floor, his mum doesn’t pick it up, and neither do we. By the end of the meal Lucas’ chair is surrounded by an island of red pepper, soggy bits of bread, one or two sprigs of broccoli, a rice cake,…. what is the point of rice cakes? A whole dinner is on the floor, but he just smiles, innocently, and perhaps gives one of his little squeeks, “it wasn’t me”.
I’m up in the bothy, today, in the ramshackle “conservatory that looks out onto the mountain of Black Coombe and the Duddon Estuary below watching heavily laden cumulous march in from the sea dumping some serious showers as each battalion of them pass by. I’m using this getaway as my smoking room, as it’s about 50yds from the house, it’s OK to smoke here, have a cup of tea and read.
I’ve had a relapse with the hearing thing this weekend, where I go temporarily deaf for a couple of days. Something to do with tubes being gunged up. Anyway it comes and goes but right now it’s reverted to the worse it seems to get. It means that I can’t join in with conversations, I can only just hear what people are saying if they talk to me directly, and they project. Of course the one person I have no difficulty with is Luca. His happy squeak comes through loud and clear, and he doesn’t say anything yet, well not words, but we get along just fine with facial expressions, we don’t need talk, although I talk to him, usually rubbish baby talk that I only hear through my skull, not my ears. It usually only lasts a couple of days like this so I’m hoping it will clear tomorrow. I tend to find that prior to it clearing, I get low level tinnitus that builds up through the recovery and then recedes as my hearing returns.
The skys are clearing from the horizon now so perhaps we’ll be in for another lovely sunset, and it must be getting near dinner time.
20 days till we escape.