It’s been ages since I last wrote about anything on my wee blog. I was going
to do a ‘this’s been happening and that’s been happening’ kind of spiel, but
too much’s been happening for that! So, I’ll just go back to basics and tell
you one of the things that made me feel good today.
I’ve been a bit down in the dumps over these past few days
and a bit weepy. Ocht, it’s just not like me and I’ve been trying so hard to
shake it off! There’s a reason for me feeling a bit upset, but it’s not
something I feel comfortable about sharing, so I'll just keep that part of the story to myself. I’ve not been a total misery guts and, as ever, I’ve been
finding plenty of things in my days to make me feel good: spending time with Gemma
while she was home over the weekend; learning interesting stuff at Uni yesterday
and getting the go-ahead to start my placement work with clients (woohoo!);
demolishing a bottle of wine on Monday night and enjoying lots of boozy
chit-chat with Alex (I’d been looking forward to a good ‘get-it-out-your-system-sing-song’
but choir practice was cancelled and I was left with no option but to hit the
bottle instead...!); enjoying a nice lunch with a good friend; watching Gordon
perform on stage with a fantastic vocal group made up of pupils from our local
schools; and finding out that I’m not the only middle aged wifey who suffers
from a freezing cold nose......
OK, so that last one sounds a bit weird – let me just
quickly explain! My nose gets really cold, and I mean really cold. Poor Alex’s had to put up with me going on about it,
and getting him to feel how cold my nose is, day in, day out, “Feel it! It’s
absolutely freezing, isn’t it?!” Even when the rest of my body is nice and
toasty, my nose can be sooo cold. And it gets sore too; it’s so cold sometimes
it’s actually quite painful. Stop laughing – it’s not funny! Gemma thought it
was funny too, but she humoured me by typing ‘freezing cold nose’ into Google
and, low and behold, came across one of these forum thingies with a thread full
of posts from women all over the world bemoaning the fact that their nose was
always freezing. Even better, they’re all in their 40’s or 50’s and they’re all
either menopausal or, like me, have had a hysterectomy in recent years! There’s
a whole community out there of wifeys with freezing cold noses! It’s a syndrome
waiting to be discovered! I didn’t go so far as joining the forum; these women
were taking it all a bit too serious for my liking (“it almost broke up my
marriage, my husband just doesn’t understand how debilitating it is...”) but I
did take some comfort from the fact that I wasn’t imagining the fact that my
nose was sometimes unnaturally cold!
Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been feeling a bit rubbishy
over the past few days but it’s definitely not all been bad and today was no
different. After spending the morning catching up on work work, Alex and I
headed off to the funeral of someone who’s been a close friend of Alex’s family
for many years. Jessie was 92 when she died and had only become more dependent
on others during the past couple of years. It was a ‘nice’ funeral, and we came
away with a real sense of Jessie having had a lovely, and fitting, send off. Much
of that was down to the minister who conducted the service. She was quite
theatrical and had a beautiful, operatic singing voice - which thankfully
drowned out the drones of those of us who aren’t at all religious and only know
the most popular hymns in the book! She clearly knew Jessie well and had
visited her many times in the nursing home – but she didn’t just go for a
blether; she used to take her guitar in during her visits so that she could sing
and play for all the residents. How lovely! I’ll bet the old ladies and gents
got so much out of that; I’ve witnessed, on so many occasions, the uplifting
effects of taking live music into the hospice and I don’t imagine it to be all
that different in a Nursing Home!
It was so fitting that my friend Paul sent me a message tonight to tell me that he'd had another successful visit to Strathcarron earlier on today. I usually try to be at the hospice when
folk come in to perform for - or play along with - the patients, but I was
otherwise engaged at Jessie’s funeral when Paul visited today. However, I just love the fact that all the while
that I was sitting listening to the minister telling us about the difference
she’d made to elderly people’s lives by singing and playing guitar for them in their Nursing Home, one
of my lovely Myriad of Music volunteers was actually making a difference to the lives of people who have life-limiting illness by singing and playing guitar for them in the hospice!
And that was just the ticket to make me feel really good today!
