Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 6

One late-August day, I receive a phone call from my Granny: she has recently had an operation to improve the feeble circulation in her leg and foot, and, although she is trying to sound upbeat about it, she is clearly very under the weather, in pain and unusually weak. I decide immediately that a spirit-lifting visit is required, so a week later I, my husband and our three children all pile into the car for a 480-mile drive to the highest inhabited village in the remote Scottish highlands, which Granny calls Home and I call Far Too Bloody Far Away.

As we squash our bottoms into cellulite pancakes all the way up the M6 and beyond, I am more anxious than ever to get there and with every passing motorway service station I have a growing regretful, guilty, wretched feeling that I should have spent more time visiting her in the past. Like most pissed twenty-somethings and self-obsessed thirty-somethings I have been too selfish to make time to visit her; to connect with someone who, suddenly in light of her illness, seems such a vital connection to my children: through her, through my dad and then through me.

As the car hugs the last few miles of mountainous road, my daughter vomits into a carrier bag for the third time and Granny’s village twinkles into view at the end of the final valley, I sense that this visit is going to make quite some impact on my life.

I just don’t know yet that it’s going to fundamentally change how I raise my children, and how I feel as a parent.