Author Archives: marycane

The wise old owl sat in an oak The more she heard the less she spoke The less she spoke the more she heard Why can’t we be that wise old bird? This week on our walk down the path through the trees I saw a patterned caramel coloured wing feather lying on the ground.Continue reading “Wise Words from Grandma”

This Australian moth is called the Grannies Cloak (Speiredonia Spectans). From a purple patterned soft cloak shape, we can see a grandma stare. Is there such a thing as a metaphorical grandmother’s cloak I wonder? A cloak that a grandmother uses to keep her family safe from harm. We have heard about the menopause allowingContinue reading “Granny’s Cloak”

Gendered Language:  A review of past and current thinking. (The Long Read) Answering the questions: Why does grandma do so much of the family remembering? Why does grandma make such oblique requests? By asking my contributors about their grandmothers as well as their mothers and themselves, the timescale of my research spans the whole ofContinue reading “Grandma’s got her Green Skirt on”

Blog Post 11 Let’s talk about the Menopause. For most of us grandmas, it will be a dim and distant memory.  Our breeding phase is even longer ago, and some of us feel a little redundant now, especially when our families live independently far away. But in the paper this week, there was a headline:Continue reading “Riddle: Why is Grandma Faraway like a Killer Whale?”

Blog Post 10 In ‘Through the Looking Glass’ the gnat tells Alice about the bread-and-butterfly. With wings made from thin slices of bread and butter, its body is a crust and its head is made of a lump of sugar. It lives on weak tea with cream in it. Alice is perplexed at the difficulty.Continue reading “Grandma Finds Herself in a Double Bind”

Blog Post 9. Comics as they appeared in the 20th century newspapers, were cartoony and funny, hence the term Comic. (Comix are the underground version). They progressed into cartoon stories such as Tin-Tin, and Asterix. After the war there was a proliferation of weekly magazines in cartoon format. With the help of Google I can tellContinue reading “Comics for 1960s Girls”

Blog Post 4th July   Q: When is a woman like a butterfly? A: When she is a Gatekeeper? How do butterflies and gates come into the grandmother story? Let me explain.  To protect his sheep the shepherd lies across the entrance of the fold, the gateway, where he will be woken by anything that threatens hisContinue reading “A Grandmother Riddle”

Blog Post Seven. The beginning of the Research. At the Ethnology and Folklore Department (Elphinstone Institute) of Aberdeen University, I have been looking at the experience of grandmothers today, especially those who live far away from their grandchildren. The methodology I am using is empirical, through interviews, and their subsequent analysis. My subject group areContinue reading “New Pathways:”

Blog Post 6 I present to you the notion that each generation has a collective ambition. For ours, born after the war, it was the brave new world of empowerment for. A child in one hand, a career in the other. We had it all. Or maybe we had quite a lot.  It was theContinue reading “The 1970’s Alphabet of Ambition”

Blog post 5:  Surprising as a Slinky When I was looking for a subject for a research project aged sixty six, I knew I needed it to keep me amused for a long time and had to be based on my areas of interest and expertise. It needed to be as complicated as hopscotch, but simpleContinue reading “Surprising as a Slinky”