And here’s mine – pictured last August with my sister’s two kids on the train from Greenock to Glasgow.  It was her birthday & we’d been to Port Glasgow in the pouring rain to try & find the street she was born in…needless to say it’s long gone, flattened by the savage bombings that part of Scotland got in WWII.

My mum tells a fabulous story about the breakout of the war.  Her own grandmother & her great aunt were visiting Scotland when the war broke out.  Someone had to be responsible for escorting them back to Donegal by ferry and then train.  They lived on top of a remote mountain, weren’t used to travel & neither of them could read.  There wasn’t anyone else to send so my mum was given the job.  She was 10 years old at the time.

She managed well although the train stopped at every hole in the hedge and at each one, the great aunt asked “Are we there yet?”  She says she was quite relieved when her uncle joined the train in Omagh & took over responsibility for the rest of the trip and getting the elderly pair delivered safely home.  Can anyone today imagine putting a 10 year old in charge of something like that!

That story sums my mum up.  She’s fiercely independent & incredibly resilient.  She’s always avoided allowing her life to slip into comfortable grooves and she claims “there’s no such word as can’t”.  And I guess some of that’s rubbed off because as we all know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – and for that I thank my lucky stars every day.  Thanks Mum J