Horns Road, again

It's still cold, and I've still got a horrible throat, so have hardly done anything today. Apart from listening to the radio and the audiobook, that is. If the throat trouble is tonsillitis, it should soon run its course.

A hilarious memory from childhood is of all six of us children, aged 2 to 14, taking turns to have something called 'septic tonsillitis' and sleeping in a dormitory of three or four beds. My youngest brother, clearly on the mend, was jumping up and down on the bed, whipping his 'donkey' aka my sister, with a skipping rope, and urging her on in a thick southern Irish accent,

'we've got to get there before the night!'

while my elder sister TML spun the discs on the Ferguson record player. Her somewhat anachronistic choices were Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren; Noel Coward; and Harry Secombe in comic mode.

We can't have been that ill if we had that much fun, but we were septic enough to be visited by the District Nurse (!) every day, and to miss a week or so of school. The perfect illness. No sick, just silliness. It was lambing time. Our first spring in the West Highlands, and the first time I was aware of there being a season for animal birth. Ralph McTell was in the charts with Streets of London, and my mother criticised him for being far too gloomy. We did not have a TV, but there was no signal...

Scotland had just been regionalised, and the boundaries had been wrongly drawn in the middle of our village. We were stranded in Strathclyde, but if we went to the shop for sweeties, we crossed the border into Highland. Of course we did not go to the shops, for we were septic, and would have had to carry a small bell to ring, to warn the sheep and daffodils of our imminent arrival.

I have never since heard of Septic tonsillitis, so perhaps it was abolished after that single outbreak of 1975. It cannot have been much fun for my mother.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with these Victorian terraced houses in Horns Road, but I did write about them a lot last week! So the above is merely the rambling memoirs of a madwoman.

Peter and Sophia

PS I know the photos are rubbish, but needs must.