Summer is a-cummin in

I didn't intend this to be a seasonal affair, but somehow the last months got eaten up by other activities and this blog was retired to the back burner. 

Spring past uneventfully except for quite a lot of hard slog, a trip to the UK lasting 12 days, which included a school reunion at which I hardly knew anyone! Embarrassing because lots remembered me, I having been singing for dear life from a very early age and thus being thrust into people's consciousness, presumably for ever and a day. I wasn't aware of my 'star quality' at the time! Probably just as well.

Of course, it might be a mistake to have so many different blogs. You have to be a dedicated metaphorical gardener in order to tend them all. Should I dig out some of the old weeds? Or just pad along....

This months my mother will have been dead for 20 years. That is really a milestone for both of us. For her because I believe dead was a status she had been looking forward to for many lonely years (lonely only for my deceased father, whom she outlived by 29 years). At her funeral her only surviving sister-in-law - who might be said to have come to triumph over death - informed me and my brother that my mum had never wanted children anyway. Although I had a difficult relationship with her, I really didn't know until then how much of a nuisance I must have been, all things considered. OK, I did leave the UK to live and work in Germany immediately after finishing university,  but at the time I didn't know I was still going to be here 44 years later.

I had resented that brother from the start because - and this is really true - he got most of the attention, whereas I had to work hard for any praise I got from my mother. My father was gentler and more generous and I was (and still am) devastated at his death, 49 years ago now.

Not that my mother didn't do her duty. She supported me financially through my studies while telling me what I should be doing instead - a bit like Noel Coward's "Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington". My mother often quoted that line. 

 The 20 years since her death have not been easy, either. But that's another story. I have now become more reconciled to what I did with my life (voluntarily and otherwise). That is probably the only advantage of getting older. I can't think of any others.

Would I go miles for a camel? Well, not the smoking kind, but this scraggy guy at Dortmund zoo looked me in the eye for just long enough to get this shot before he turned away in slow motion to go on some errand or other. It was one of those really hot days we get in early spring. The ones we remember with affection during the rainy season (summer). But I'm not complaining. I love the temperate clime of our part of Europe and today the sun is shining through the tall trees outside my window. What more could I wish?