by Ann Jackson
Welcome to my blog about an ordinary life….
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Tea time in the Fields
This must have happened during the harvest of 1942 or 1943. At that time my parents were farming in central Scotland and I must have been five of six years old. It was a hot day for Scotland and my mother was taking the men’s tea out to the fields. She asked me to come…
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Teaching English in Cuba
When I finished the course in English as a Second Language in 2003, I looked around for somewhere to put my new found skill into practice. Previous to Algonquin College I had considered a much shorter course offered by T.E.S.OL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) This was a crash course in teaching abroad…
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The Development of White Privilege
I seem to have missed out on the discussion of white privilege over the last nearly twenty years. I have always been aware of racial discrimination and followed the black power movement and the fight against apartheid. However, I really saw these issues as completely out of my area of influence. I believed they had…
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The Challenge of Keeping Warm
Recently the weather here changed and I dialed up the temperature in my suite! Voila!, the radiators came on and the room warmed up! It made me remember life in Britain during the war years and after. To stay warm then required much more effort than now. As anyone who has lived in Britain can…
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The Edinburgh Festival
The first summer after I started at Edinburgh University I did not go home for the holidays. This was partly due to my feeling it might be rather boring, but also due to failing two of my subjects. At first I was rather devastated by this, but when I became aware that I could retry…
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The Fanny Hill…..(Any port in stormy weather)
We did not realize it, but our move to Peterborough in the fall of 1963 meant our joining a particularly unique type of Canadian culture. This was, ”We all go to the cottage in the summer,” and a hedonistic and happy time begins! On the whole, I found my fellow Canadians a remarkably law abiding…
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The Great Divide! Starting School
I remember very little about the first school I attended. St Margaret’s had been evacuated from Edinburgh to the country for the duration of the war. For various reasons it did not return to the city until sometime in the 1950”s. I think my parents saw it as bridge between home and the more rough…
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The Midnight Snack
When I was a little girl, probably about six or seven, I lived with my family in an old farm house .It was situated on the banks of the Tummel River a tributary of the river Tay in Central Scotland. We had come from Paisley to escape the intense bombing focused on the river Clyde…
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The Secret Garden A Favourite Book from my Childhood
The most important thing about this book is that it is a good story. It starts in an exotic locale. There is a lot of mystery, and many questions that need answers. In a children’s book like this one the central characters are a always children. They must be the main movers of the action.…
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The Shoestring
The Shoestring must have been one of the least appealing cafes in Edinburgh when I knew it in the 1950’s. I have since tried to find its location along the Royal Mile but that whole area has been so gentrified I have been totally unsuccessful. I was introduced to the Shoestring by a friend from…
Got any book recommendations?