That nasty old North wind has come back. For over a week I’ve been busy trying to get as much of the outdoors painting done as possible before the predicted change for the worse in the weather today. Our house is like the Forth Bridge, in that when you’ve finished all the maintenance works it’s time to begin again! In spite of the cold wind this morning it was quite warm in the sunshine on the sea-side of our house, where I took the paint and brushes to paint the railings by the back steps (our house is sort of back to front because the back is the architectural front and our main entrance from the roadside is really the back elevation); at the same time Chris was painting our gate on the other side – the cold side – so I had the preferable task.

I’m into philosophy at the moment and enjoy listening on YouTube to lectures on the great thinkers while I paint – of course, that’s usually painting of a different sort but if I can listen while I paint pictures then why not when there are less challenging railings to be painted? So I clicked onto a lecture – “Carl Jung’s “Synchronicity” Explained” – and began painting those seemingly endless railings. Wearing an old demoted sun-top and shorts I was surprisingly warm – even had to nip upstairs and put on sun screen – so long as the sun was out. Two huge grey clouds threatened rain and made me shiver but they they both passed over and shed their loads over the sea.

Soon Chris came down with the phone and I turned off “Synchronicity” (Synchronicity is a concept, first explained by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.)  It was my friend Rosie inviting my sister Mary and me to meet her tiny new granddaughter Senka; coincidentally, I am soon to become grandmother to a little girl (at present Penelope), and Mary became grandmother to her fifth granddaughter last year.

When our telephone conversation ended I resumed painting without feeling the need to continue listening to the lecture; I was happy just to think about the things Rosie had said to me. I smiled to myself as I considered our conversation. Rosie said I was a “young grandmother” – in attitude, if not years (Mary was thirty-eight when she first became Grandma) – and attributed her notion of youthfulness to my being from the flower power era in the late sixties and early seventies. And the more I thought about it, the more I agreed…

To Mary and I living in Australia at that time “flower power” meant wearing psychedelic flares, apple-seed necklaces and cheese-cloth tops, and we wrote words like, “Make love not war”, without really understanding that we were growing up in an age of greater freedom – because we were part of it, being too young to have actually brought about any changes. We made slave shoes out of raffia, not realising that the symbol of the flowers represented peaceful protest (at least, I didn’t think about that at twelve years old).

By happy coincidence at four o’clock, just when my “Forth Bridge railings” were finished at last, the north wind brought showers of sleet and hail. Tomorrow we’re promised more of the same so I’ll be back painting in my studio with Carl Jung or Jean-Paul Sartre in my ears. It’s so nice to be regarded a young grandmother – more aptly perhaps… a Jung grandmother.