Today has been a different sort of Wednesday, not at all my usual routine. No ride to the market for me this morning but a bus and tram ride to Manchester. The Zoom Italian class was meeting face to face for a Christmas lunch. Because we had a table booked for 12.30 I needed to be organised bright and early. My plan was to catch the 10.24 bus to Oldham Mumps Metrolink station and from there catch the tram into Manchester. I was meeting a class companion who did not know where the restaurant was situated and I was concerned that the later bus, at 10.58, might not let me make the connection with the tram in time to meet him as arranged.
All my travel plan worked quite perfectly - quite a miracle around here - and I was in Manchester before 11.30, giving me a little time to scuttle round and visit a few shops before meeting my companion. One thing I was looking for was a leather satchel for Granddaughter Number Two. I bought her one several years ago and it has been so well used that it is now on its last legs. Unsubtle hints have been dropped that a replacement could be a good Christmas present. Amazingly one of the Christmas market stalls provided just what I was looking for. The remaining errands I had set for myself had to wait until after lunch.
We were meeting at an Italian place in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Noi Quattro is its name. Last year my friend Barbara and I were very late for lunch and despairing of finding it as we walked up and down the street where it was supposedly located, asking passersby, who all proved to be tourists, of course, and nobody knew where it was. Finally we spotted it, set well back on a small side street. So this year I knew how to direct my other friend to the place.
I can recommend Noi Quattro … to those who can locate it. The service is friendly and efficient. The food is excellent. And, unlike the place I went to on Monday evening, the wine is not overpriced. Well, it’s more expensive that it would be in Italy or Spain or Portugal but this is England, after all.
Afterwards I visited a few more shops, buying odds and ends which have appeared on my list of “stuff people want for Christmas”. And finally I caught the tram homewards before the rush hour started. Despite lots of people working from home still the trams become very crowded at the end of the afternoon. And for once, I did not arrive at Mumps tram stop in time to see my bus departing. I had maybe five minutes to wait. Fortunately it was no longer than that as the weather has been very cold - bright and sunny by cold!
At home a couple more Christmas cards awaited me. We now have three on the mantelpiece. I have written about one third of the ones we usually send. I must complete this task before the postal workers’ strikes prevent me from doing so.
One of the cards was from my aged Uncle George. He must be the oldest living member of the family, at least the oldest that I am aware of. While we were in Portugal recently I received the message that his wife, my father’s youngest sister, had died, aged about 96. I have been meaning to find out whether he now still lives in the same house as ever, for he too must be 96, so that I could write to him. But being busy has prevented me from doing so. However, I now know that he does and that he is clearly still all there, for enclosed in the card was the news of my aunt’s death and some account of her last few years. I must compose a letter to him and to the cousins I barely know. He included a copy of the eulogy he gave at her funeral, which few from our end of the country could attend.
Along with stories of her time in the WRNS in the 1950s, and her meeting Prince Philip and the then Princess Elizabeth, her busy time in places like Malta and Oberammergau, was a story of motherly absentmindedness. When their first child was only days old, my aunt pushed her out in her pram to their local shop to do some shopping. She returned home with her purchases, quite forgetting the pram and the baby outside the shop!! A hasty return to collect her offspring was called for. It must be a family failing for there is a story in my family of my mother taking my older sister and me to the infant school with our baby brother in his pram. She returned to my grandmother’s house to be asked, “Where is the baby?” Oops! She had parked him outside one of the the classrooms, seen us into school and then walked away!
Neither my brother nor my cousin appeared to suffer unduly from having been left behind, I hasten to add. It was, after all, a time when babies were parked outside in the garden to sleep at various points in the day. And it was accepted that babies in prams were left outside shops while mothers did their shopping. Nobody even contemplated pushing a huge perambulator into a shop. Nowadays there would be an outcry and some people would be running to report such actions to social services. The 1950s were quieter than modern times.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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