A Dash to Devon

The OH's mother died on 10th August. It wasn't unexpected as she had been fading for some time; hence our previous uncharacteristic trips to Devon earlier in the year. Her funeral was on Tuesday and obviously we drove south to go to it. 

We picked up Son no 2 in Glasgow where we broke our journey on Saturday night and drove the rest of the way to Exeter on Sunday. It was a remarkably easy drive, enlivened by listening to Ben Stokes almost singlehandedly win the third test match at Headingley. Well done, that man. I'm not a betting woman but I could have wished that I'd found a bookie to put a fiver on an England win. 

We had a free day on Monday and I had arranged to meet good friends from University days, who had a GP practice near Exeter and still live there. It was a very long time since I had seen them and we had a lovely lunch and a very relaxed afternoon; the weather was warm and sunny and we spent time sitting out in their beautiful garden and reminiscing and generally comparing notes on the intervening years and agreeing that you bite your tongue hard when you become a parent-in-law and even harder when you become a grandparent. 

Most of Tuesday was taken up with the funeral; and I can say nothing about it except that it went without incident. It was a melancholy occasion but when are these things not? Lovely reception afterwards in the Exeter Golf and Country Club, and it was good to spend time with the OH's cousins, who we never see except at family funerals. The flowers, pictured above, were going to be taken back to the florists and broken up into smaller arrangements for the care home where my mother-in-law spent her last months; a much better idea than leaving them on display at the Crematorium until they rotted. 

Our trip back was sadly much less smooth than the trip south; a really bad accident closed one of the major roads we should have been on which added over an hour to the journey, and traffic was bad in other places too. That said we made it safely back to Glasgow on Wednesday evening, and back to Orkney on Thursday night. We almost didn't as the OH realised on Thursday morning that he had booked the ferry for the following day, but luckily, the tourist season being almost over he was able to switch the booking without a problem. 

He collected the cats from the cattery yesterday morning and they are duly disgusted with us for abandoning them and, it seems, for causing the rain to fall non-stop ever since. They re mostly sleeping, but when awake, very vocal in their dissatisfaction with the weather. Protestations that we are a) not responsible and b) don't like it either are apparently falling on very deaf cat ears!