The Splendid Sampler …. starts

I have decided to take part in the SPLENDID SAMPLER quilt-along.

100 quilt blocks over the course of a whole year starting on Valentine’s Day 14 Feb 2016.

Block 1

Block 2

Block 3

Block 4

alternative Block 4

and a GIANT Block 4

Block 5

Block 6

I think this is a bit aggressive to go with the other blocks ..

Block 7

 

If you want to read more about the SPLENDID SAMPLER click HERE

 

Adios Alison, Vaya con Dios

Today my dear friend Alison and I spent a pleasant day retracing steps taken when our children were small and we saw each other every day. Since those days I have continued to live in the same house in the same place. She has been a bit of a vagabond, moving 4 times since we first met back in 1990. And now she is off again, this time completely out of the country to spend three years in the Dominican Republic to work amongst people who don’t worry about what to wear but rather if they have anything at all to wear, and don’t worry about what they fancy to eat but if they will eat. Food for thought!

On Top of the World

Godolphin Hill has always had a magical sound to it but so far we have never ventured up its slopes. This week we decided to go for it at the beginning of our week in Cornwall rather than risking being rained off towards the end of the week.

Once you reach the top you can see see both the north AND south coasts of Cornwall. And in case you are wondering, no we didn’t find a Cornish Pisky sitting on a stone on the summit, this is our daughter who is recuperating from a broken collarbone. The one-armed climb tired her out so much that we are having a lazy day today, or rather she is and I am doing some gardening which is more or less stationary but provided a bit of a work-out as I had to carry 3 big bags of compost from the car, across the car park and along the patio.

We popped into the local last night and shared a table with people from Newyln and Mousehole. They have recommended that our next Cornish ascent should be Trencrom

Muriel Spark Week continues ….

 

 

 

Muriel Spark Week – Day 2

 

I have just finished reading my first ever Muriel Spark, “The Only Problem”. I am still digesting it but felt sure that I must have at least one other Spark title lurking somewhere in the house. I was just about to give up but just as I was half-glancing at the foreign language and translated shelf near the door, my eye dropped down to a slim orange Penguin, originally sold for 3/6.

So I hope to at least get another Muriel under my belt this week.

The wonderful Penguin cover of my copy is by an illustrator called  Terence Greer. You can see more of his covers, many for Muriel Spark books here. Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

Muriel Spark Reading Week … is here

 

I have Muriel Spark’s “The Only Problem” (first published 1984) on my TBR mountain so this seems a good time to ascend this slim volume.

On the second page, a character with my name appears so I will take that as a good omen.

Character No.1, Harvey Gotham has a theory that I find somewhat disconcerting:

 

          … people have an effect on the natural greenery around them regardless of whether they lay their hands

          on it or not; some people, he would remark, induce fertility in their environment and some the desert,

          simply by psychic force.

 

 

Others joining in with Muriel Spark Week are:

 

Simon (the instigator)

Harriet

Thomas

 

Annuzza A Girl of Rumania

 

My grandmother gave me a book called “Annuzza, a girl of Romania” by Hertha Seuberlich

(later published as “Candle in the Wind”)

She lives on a farm and is supposed to take care of the precious chickens but instead she prefers to read. She wins a scholarship to a (boarding) school in the city and has a tough time because everyone is so rich so she invents a rich family for herself.The book had line drawings to accompany the text that helped to set the scene. I think the fascination with the book was my inability to imagine what it would be like if I wasn’t encouraged to read.

Quad Time by The Joy of Box

Enjoy!

and if you think it’s great – vote for it at    http://vimeo.com/awards/vote/captured

 

 

 

ISLAND TRAIN

Tuesday 03 April 2012

the train pulls around a curve

parked cars on one side

“the island” on the other

set apart from the real world

evening primrose and ragged robin

take hold of the apex

and on the eastern side

where the sun rises

“the trains go to bed”

we never deviate

from our prescribed route

we only glimpse the track

that leads to Strawberry Hill

with promises of fruit-filled days

in pastoral peace

our way is more mundane

with gabions enforcing boundaries

impelling all to stay on track

TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Monday 02 April 2012

glancing through the gap

between the seats

I see the highlighted words in the book

“what is your experience of clinical governance?”

across the aisle

another girl tests her feet

where someone else will sit

she splits her time

between applying copious layers of lipbalm

and communication with unseen friends

by strange repetitive movements

of her thumbs

the tight-lipped female announcer

alerts us to approaching danger

“please mind the gap

between the train and the platform edge”

one schoolgirl holds a mirror

for another to review her Monday coiffure

while the guard, like a gaoler

jangles his keys

as he walks the length of the train

a double-buggy

one child slung below another

vies for space with two expensive cycles

and business men with retro-fitted rucksacks

hide behind financial news

what do they see

when they glance at my face, my clothes

and watch me scribble indecipherable words

in a small black notebook?

TO THE AIRPORT

Monday 02 April 2012

 

early in the morning

the roads are bare

the swarming march of ants

has ceased in the darkness

we move like

a speeding drop of water

on a windowpane

only a fox

sees us pass

an indignant look upon his face

EXPEDITIONARY FORCES / LIFE IN THE CITY

Mon 26 March 2012

when setting out

on an expedition

it is necessary

to be well prepared

a drinking vessel

is essential for survival

though bottled water

or cafe latte

are a personal choice

ear protection

is also advised

to surround the aura

with a bubble of pre-selected sound

occupation for the hands

will soon be compulsory

to ensure

that manual dexterity

is maintained

Public Transport

may be utilised

for tasks that formerly

remained behind closed doors

RAPUNZEL

Mon 26 March 2012

 

There is a time and place

for everything

My grandmother

would not approve

of the girl

who brushes her golden locks

on the 8.21 to Waterloo

 

Dust revealed

by spring sunlight

eddies and floats

from tresses to train

and selfish Rapunzel

removes fallen gold

from the brush

and deposits it

at our feet

STATIONARY

 

Mon 26 Mar 2012

 

not all the station personnel

are friendly and welcoming

the passenger

who falls foul of the machine

receives no sympathy

from the man at the window

 

meanwhile on the platform

the station assistant

who we all suspect

is on the autistic scale

 

realeases his stream

of knowledge regarding

relief trains running

from Kings Cross

via Newark

on an unsuspecting newcomer

MAGNOLIA GAME

It’s that time of year

when blossom sprouts

from barest branch

 
bigger than blossom

substantial as a cup

the waxy magnolia

filters the spring light

we made a game

to spot a tree

scoring a point

for each

and should we

come upon

the one named Stellata

we’d give ourselves a four

ON THE WAY

a stream of golden daffodils

where once the filter beds

were clad in concrete walls

 

i watch the moving spaces

between the chestnut trees

GOING HOME

it’s light now

when I leave

and make my way to home

 

I can see further

than my hands

across the street

and on beyond

 

and yet the air

stays chill

we clasp our scarves and jackets

round our necks

 

and wish we had

more layers

wrapping round

TRANSLATED

“Our deathline is”

the foreign client writes

the word so close to one

we use and do not notice

 

deadline is one letter less

and dead and death

are closely intertwined

 

yet changing our more usual word

for their translated one

prompts me to look more closely

at the words I use each day

WORKING CRUNCH

the crunch-mobile is here.

she sits across the desk from me

and cannot go for long

without a bite

I thought that I was bad

but if I have to eat

I am discreet

and carefully avoid a noise

She is more bold

and proudly rustles paper bags

and glugs her juice

and all of this is magnified

because the screens and files

that lie upon the desk

create a frame

for her eternal reaching hand

A Bridge Too far?

Some years ago

the bridge was not so high

the steps reached up

but not too far,

halfway, then turned

and crossed the tracks.

Each flight achievable.

And when we reached the top

we could look over

at empty tracks

or passing train

But now a “standard bridge”

is in its stead

built for trains

that need the extra height

We are not standard folk.

We miss our crooked bridge

and when on top

we cannot see the track

we have to travel on.

Foxholes in the Garden

Whose garden is it anyway?

You were born

and need a place to roam and hunt and sleep.

I need the space

to look and sit and grow.

And just because

I pay a price

to “own” this place,

do I deserve

dominion over you?

Ministry of Time

To be more healthy

why not walk to work?

Simple enough.

But if I take that time,

and exercise my heart,

who will remain

to hang the washing out to dry?

How to Spend It: bags v books?

French designer, Olympia Le-Tan, makes clutch bags that look like books!

Take your pick   at   http://www.olympialetan.com/

A week in Cornwall

Hurrah! In Porthleven for a week. Even though my persistent cough doesn’t allow to get out much as the change in temperature sets me off, I can still enjoy the view and the sound of the sea, wind and seagulls.

 

Diamond Jubilee portrait of HRH Queen Elizabeth II

Diamond Jubillee Royal Portrait of Queen by Charlotte & Ruth Marler

Charlotte was asked to draw a picture of a famous person. I loved her portrait of the Queen with her corgis so much that I decided it had to be immortalised in stitch.

Here’s her original

Charlotte's original drawing

Too many words?

In the interview that I linked to in my last post, Rumer Godden said that she wrote by hand. She didn’t use a typewriter or word processor because every word should be chosen very carefully.  This morning I read a post by the writer Anne Holloway about a session she lead with a group of young writers and would-be writers. She asked them to communicate one word at a time, in the manner of someone who has a disability and has to use means other than speech to get their message across to others. I’m sure that Rumer Godden would have approved.

Treasure Trove

I’ve just spent a wonderfully calm evening with the author Rumer Godden.

I’ve just started reading the first volume of her autobiography and after my evening with Rumer I think I should read her children’s books.

One of them is called “Holly and Ivy” and the film “The Wish that Changed Christmas” is based on her book.

Steeper than it looks

The coastal path from Porthleven to Rinsey. That zig-zag part is    m u c h  steeper than it looks.

Yes, that’s where we’re going.

Whose fault?

Who needs to visit Easter Island – it’s all here.

the butterfly has landed

and so has this one

watch the birdie

message on the beach

the final   e a s i e r  stretch

almost there

cooling off in the sandbar at Praa Sandsbus ride for the return journey

back to base before sunset

Hornbeam Avenue in the afternoon

One of my favourite views in Bushy Park is this Hornbeam (Carpinus  Betulus) Avenue in the Waterhouse Woodland Garden

JAMMDI (Jane Austen Made Me Do It)

Just spotted over on janeaustensworld.wordpress.com a review of Jane Austen Made Me Do It

This looks like a suitable Christmas present for a few people.

the alchemy of smell

 the alchemy of smell
 an old powder compact
 breathe in
 and conjure up
 her handbag brimful
 her dressing table
 topped with tight ecru swirls

mouse droppings

what looked like
mouse droppings in the sink
turn out to be
grains
dropped from a plate
of granary toast

How many days to Christmas?

I know that I’m not the first person to mention Christmas. The local garden centre is already unpacking Christmas decorations which seems a little premature but it probably isn’t too soon to start gathering ideas for books to buy for family and friends.

Grubson Pug’s Christmas Voyage by Jane Anne Hodgson, published by Whistling Cat looks like it may well be an ideal Christmas present that could become a family favourite to be re-read every year as the Christmas anticipation builds.

Whistling Cat Books is a new publisher, based in Oxfordshire, that “believes in nourishing children’s imaginations through amusing, engaging, original stories which are traditionally illustrated (hand-drawn rather than computer generated) and produced with care and attention to detail.”

He is swimming again …

“He is swimming again, dropping his head underwater and pulling with his arms. Once fully immersed he lets himself drift, feet paddling gently, using hands to steer this way and that. The water is clear and sounds of the world outside are muffled. They cannot touch him. Bright vegetation sways with the current, golden and soft, lit by sunlight filtering through from above. Far off he hears a voice, singing a familiar song, the voice of a girl. She stops singing and laughs. He pushes his hands out, then pulls them down, to propel himself forward. He kicks hard with his feet, catching silt at the bottom and it clouds around him. He cannot tell which direction her voice came from. He opens his mouth to call her, but it fills with water. Above him, maybe below, he hears a siren, its rhythms the same as the song she was singing. The water is dark, visibility restricted, his legs will not move and his arms are rigid by his side. The siren again, this time much louder. “

to find out more about the writer see here

The Lady

I stumbled across this today and couldn’t resist sharing it

 

Bronte Sisters Rule the World

The Scenic Route (2)

We left the coastline for a while after Marske-by-the-Sea and headed towards Sandsend. It’s countryside like this that makes you realise why people go on walking or cycling tours. You want to savour the views for longer rather than just drive through in a car. We compromised by stopping a couple of times in laybys.

The Scenic Route (1)

I’m ashamedly southern-centric and although we have now driven quickly through Yorkshire several times when ferrying our middle child up and down to Uni, I’ve never really seen anything of the county. As we left Durham for London at 0735 on Saturday morning we decided that we would allow ourselves a detour into Yorkshire proper and not just base our knowledge of this part of the UK on our view from the M1 & A1. So instead of driving due south at top speed, we started our journey in a more easterly direction.

This is Redcar before most people were up and out of their homes, save for a few faithful dog-walkers. A simple picture of subtly-toned stripes of sky, sea and sand.

Just by turning slightly to the left, Steve had a wonderful view of the Wilton Chemical Works where he worked for a few months in the late 1990s.

The whole place exuded sadness, especially the hotel across the road from where we parked the car briefly to set foot on Redcar soil and gaze across the North Sea.

The building called to me, almost as if it wanted to start a conversation but couldn’t remember the etiquette for such an interaction. Had we met before somewhere, in a past life, or in a dream? As we drove away it was like leaving an old friend that I knew I would probably never see again. Was it the time of day and lack of people or the knowledge that we had slipped away from our prescribed route that lent the sense that we were coasting in some parallel existence?

My feelings were not entirely fanciful. Today, searching for a Redcar link to discover more about this this town, I  learnt that the film of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” had used this beach for the French beach scenes.

Durham Congregation

The rain held off, thanks to flat shoes and despite Durham cobbles – the feet held up and we were privileged  to attend Congregation (graduation) in a place that has been a site of education since a time when “Oxford was a bog and Cambridge a wasteland” – or was that the other way around?

Greg and his head of department are as happy as we are about his BSc Computer Studies (International Studies). Well done Greg.

Stars and Strips

I had a spare cushion inner and so decided to use up some strips of fabric from previous projects.

So here is the result a strippy front and a stars and strips back.

Anatomy of a Shirt / Shirt Seas

I’ve been saving old shirts to make into a quilt. The first stage is unpick or “fillet” them into their constituent pieces. I was having a rummage in the bag the other day and I thought what a shame it is to cut all the parts into regimented rectangular pieces.What about just using the parts of the shirts as they are? How about starting with a central panel of upper back pieces, as above? And then I thought that they looked like waves on the sea, so I could spread them around and make a very rough sea with maybe a boat of two being tossed around. I think I need to play with idea some more.

Organising the bookcase

Verbascum-in-waiting

A favourite combination . . . blue and orange

Once upon a time . . .

Into the blue …

Blue and Black & White

grass snake

Father & Son

Black & White

Treading the Bluebell Path

One girl went to sea

Water Witch

Complementary Seeds?

Too hot today to do much gardening but I managed bits and pieces in between lurking in the shade. My last task was to plant two lots of seeds together and hope that they will grow well and bloom in the garden as well as they already do in my imagination.

When the sun shines it’s great to paddle

Bushy Park at approx midday  Sat 16 April 2011

Netloft, Porthleven

I could stay here forever

Nettles are good for you

Discovered this hidden-away treasure in Helston, Cornwall. A great fish and chip shop with eat-in ambience that I have not seen to date in such an establishment. Luckily we arrived only 30 mins after opening or we might not have found a table. A favourite haunt of the intelligent retirees of Helston who know a good thing when they find it. Varied portion sizes for varied appetites allowing purchase of a satisfying two-course meal whilst retaining the ability to walk stand up and walk afterwards and without breaking the bank. Oh yes and they bake their own bread on the premises as well. Wish there were more places like this around.

Bushy Park

 

So We’ll Walk up the Avenue

I can’t believe that living so close to London that I also have this about a twenty minute walk from my house.

Wasn’t Saturday a glorious day?

I watch you. I know your every move, your thoughts.

“There is no going back from this point. I watch you. I know your every move, your thoughts. I know that you are tiring of me and want to leave. Well I’ll tell you this now! You shall not leave! You have nowhere to go. Stay with me and I will make you happy. I will give you everything. Leave and I will send my people to find you and I will bring you back. I will always bring you back.”

His hands tighten around my hips, fingers digging into me. His eyes are small and hard. As I look down at him his face becomes sharp and his features change. I don’t understand the words. His face is dark and repugnant. He pulls himself upright, still grasping me tightly. He towers above me now and all I can see is the blackness of his chest and smell that earthy odour. He pulls me in to him, enfolds me in blackness and still I can feel his grip.

“You’re hurting me!” I cry out and try to pull away. “You’re scaring me! Let go!”

He recoils from himself. His face softens, his hands fall to his sides and I step back but find myself trapped between him and the table. I sit back on it, try and relax. I feel the wood, solid and real, a table. I look at him but I don’t know what he is anymore. How stupid I am. I’m here alone and know nothing about him. He runs his hand across his face as if wiping it clean and then through his thick black hair. As he does, something falls from his hand and I watch as it drifts to the table. Carefully I put my hand over it because I know he did not see it fall. I close my fingers around it and bring both hands up to my chest and rest my chin on them. I feel his hand rest for a moment on top of my head before he leaves the room. I keep my eyes closed. I hear a chicken squawk, some flapping, then those damn birds in the trees beyond the courtyard. I open my eyes to see where he is, but he’s gone. I open my hand and see a greenish black feather pressed against my palm

from: Korakas by Anne Holloway – a novel about control

I burned the coffee this morning. He hates that. He didn’t speak but his face said it all. He was out late last night and he’s gone to meet someone today about ‘business’. I’m so nervous. Ally is playing outside in the yard and I’m trying to leave everything as if we have just walked down the road to the village.

I put Ally’s favourite toy on the floor by the television, a cup of milk half drunk, a biscuit on  a plate. I hear the chickens squawking and footsteps outside. The birds scatter as Karen thunders into the courtyard, leaping the ones which get in her way.

“I’ve left the car round the back, where’s the luggage?” She is breathless and distracted.

“In the apothiki,” I point to the door of the storehouse on my right.

Duncan arrives from the flower farm where he works.

“Alright Anna?” he grins showing an array of broken teeth. He seems sober enough today. He helps Karen carry our cases to her car down a track behind the house. She turns and waves. I wish we could travel with her, but she says we would be too conspicuous driving away in her tiny car  with suitcases in the back.

…a rush of wind comes up the alley

…a rush of wind comes up the alley and almost pushes me over, the noise is like the sea crashing onto rocks. I steady myself against the damp wall and turn to see Korakas. He stands tall, blocking the feeble light from the houses on the street. He has his arms raised, as I had done and he is screeching at them. His eyes are alight, his hair is flying in the strange wind and his features seem angular. Suddenly he is beside me and holds me close to him, snatching me away from the two men in front of me. He sweeps his other arm in front of his face and sends one of the men sprawling to the floor, where he lies limp, blood trickling from a cut on his head. The other man drops to his knees and crawls towards his friend, sobbing and begging. The others are crossing themselves and half run half crawl to aid their friends at our feet. Korakas sweeps his coat across in front of my face and moves towards the American. The men scrabble to get out of his way. He holds me around my waist. I can feel my legs weaken and I am glad of his support. . . . . . . . . . .

from: Korakas by Anne Holloway –   a novel about control

These Boots are Made for Nordic Walking

Today (Saturday) is my third time with the Nordic Walking group that I have just joined. I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, telling yourself it is something that would be a good idea and then you don’t actually do anything. Finally I dropped an email to one of the instructors and that was it, I was on the end of his line and somehow there was no way I could wriggle off.

Nordic walking was developed by cross-country skiers who wanted to keep up training through the summer months to maintain their fitness.  You walk with specially designed poles which take some of the weight of your body off your knees and legs. Your upper body gets a cardio-vascular workout as you walk. Can’t be bad.

The group walks in Bushy Park, the second largest Royal Park. The park is right beside Hampton Court and was a hunting ground for Henry VIII although allegedly there was a settlement there as long ago as 4,000 years. As well as the herds of deer and other various wildlife a large proportion of the local population seems to be out there running, walking the dog or just ambling around the woodland gardens with small lively children or elderly relatives.

So, a walk in the open air, a chat with new people and healthy exercise all combined in one activity.

 

 

People Planning

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. How can I preserve MLD’s cartoony drawings that she was always scribbling on bits of paper. I had at least scanned a few so they wouldn’t disappear into recycle heaven.

By chance one found itself snuggled up against an old brown and white gingham curtain and I decided what I would do. I would stitch the characters in brown embroidery thread onto calico and make a quilt of squares alternating between the calico people and the gingham squares.

So far Iihave stitched the people but I need to decide whether to surround the calico squares with dark bown sashing, or not. I can’t quite make my mind up.

A vast net

The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.

…………… Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”.

South Riding

Yorkshire TV 1974           Virago 2011                     BBC TV 2011

Dorothy Tutin                                                       Anna Maxwell Martin

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of South Riding with this lovely cover (middle above) from Virago and just about managed to finish reading it in time for the series that began at 9pm on Sunday.  I have memories of seeing the 1974 Yorkshire TV version with Dorothy Tutin as Sarah Burton and Lesley Dunlop as the clever but under-privileged Lydia Holly.

Maybe it is my nostalgia for the life of my family in the 1960s and 1970s that so far has me wondering if this new series will be as memorable as the old. If I had a bath, washed my hair and made sure my homework was finished before the titles rolled would I be able to recreate that warm glow that comes from enjoying watching a good TV series in good company?

No need for words

Breage from Porthleven, Cornwall

Not Twin quilts

Another baby enters the world and so another quilt or “cuddly” must be made. This baby has a sister who isn’t yet two and who didn’t receive a “being born” present from me so I decided that it was only fair to make them each a quilt.

My inspiration came from the new baby’s name. She is called Rahel which is the Hebrew for ewe or female sheep. Way back when we first took TLM (the Loom Monkey) up to Durham to start his education, I purchased some sheep fabric at Durham market so it seemed appropriate to take the scissors to it for the reverse of baby Rahel’s “cuddly”.  Big sister is Esther, which in Hebrew means star and a lunchtime outing to my nearest to work fabric emporium found me the happy purchaser of a metre of red material scattered with white stars. 

The fronts of the quilts are almost identical.  Towards the upper edge of each I have inserted a narrow strip of fabric covered with tiny sketched animals. The strips are from the two different colourways of a fabric. One is white and one is black. The binding on each quilt is tiny black and white gingham, a favourite binding fabric of mine and as a final touch I embroidered each of the girls’ names on that narrow animal strip. My reasoning behing all this is that each cuddly is similar enough so that there are no arguments about which belongs to which but the girls will be able to know that it is their own quilt from both the back and the front.

Their father is not due back from paternity leave for quite a while so I had to squidge both quilts into a parcel and run off to the post office in my lunch break.

What are you going to do when you leave school?

“What are you going to do when you leave school”. When I was seventeen that seemed to be the only thing that anyone could ask me. There was no other topic of conversation. Rather than being a slow drip drip drip of water torture it became like a piece of road-making machinery, manned by everyone I knew and even those I didn’t, pounding away into my head. every waking moment. I had to make it stop. The moment I uttered the words “I’m going to be an au pair”, that persistent pain in my head came to a halt. The pressure was off and rather than being an immature and indecisive teenager I had been transformed into a young woman of adventure. The only problem was that then I had to start this period of my life which these days would, of course, be called a gap year.

Those around me bought copies of NME to keep up on musical events and releases. I picked up “The Lady” every week. In amongst the adverts for live-in chauffeurs and housekeepers would be the brief details of parents looking for someone to keep their home clean and mind their children. Amongst several that I applied for, one caught my eye. “Young Indian Muslim family in Geneva ……”  I don’t remember the rest but to a young girl living in 1975, in a provincial town, things weren’t going to get more exotic.

My Mother Was a Bag Lady

No,  *my*  mother wasn’t a bag lady. I’m talking about the book by Josiane Behmoiras that I have just finished reading. What a difference a title makes. This was first published with the title “Dora B: A Memoir of My Mother” and I doubt if I would have given it a second glance. The original cover was quite garish, unlike this monochromatic, muted 1950s snap of a mother and young child on a beach. It’s no good telling me not to judge a book by its cover because that’s exactly what i will do. And I’m sucker for an intriguing title.

The book is deceptively simple, moving day by day through the life of a single Jewish mother and her child. It is no surprise to learn that the author has been a documentary maker; she chronicles the life of her and her mother well. But this is no sensationalist reportage of the horrors of living a life of poverty and alienation, rather the warmth of the mother-daughter relationship emerges despite our realisation that Behmoiras’ mother has probably suffered from mental illness throughout her whole life, a mental illness  which at times has brought them both into danger.

As we reach the end of her mothers life she writes, “I kneel on the floor by Dora’s bed I hold her hand and start singing to her the lullaby she used to sing to me in Paris, a long time ago: ‘Do do, l’enfant, do’ … Sleep, sleep, child, sleep. My mother joins me, and we sing in two voices: ‘L’enfant dormira bientot.’ The child will soon be asleep.

I have not experienced anything like the life of Josiane and her mother, Dora but I have been present at my own dying mother’s bedside, singing to her the soothing Taize chant, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” The two halves of a relationship have swapped places and the younger is fervently wishing for an end to the life of the person with whom she has the strongest bond.

Sanctuary knocker, Durham Cathedral

Durham riverside

Looking across the river, I half expected to see Maggie Tulliver emerge from the house, tossing her bonnet aside.

Hallgarth House, Durham (Department of English Studies Building)

Sitting right beside Durham Cathedral, this handsome Georgian houses is one of the three buildings of the Department of English Studies at Durham University. Can you imagine studying the novels of Jane Austen in this setting? The sky was rather washed out by the time we were coming to the end of our walk, consequently it had all but “disappeared” when I took this photo, leaving Hallgarth House looking like a rather upmarket Dolls House.

Ceresalia

The Roman feast Ceresalia was named in honour of the goddess Ceres, from where we get the word cereal.  The Anglo Saxon Lammas (loaf mass) celebrates the same stage in the agricultural calendar – the first harvest. Although the means of harvesting has changed, I’m sure this landscape would not be too alien to our Anglo Saxon or Roman ancestors.

As I was doing the driving to and from Durham on the 7th and 8th August, I can’t be sure where this photo was taken although I do know it was somewhere on the A1. It’s on viewing such landscapes that I really wish that I could paint.

Green grows the grass O!

It’s taken me almost two years from when our rather strange neighbours, who appear to have a dislike for anything natural, climbed over our fence when they knew we were away for a week, and chopped down all our climbers. They left the flower beds in a nasty mess and it took me many months before I could clear up the piles of murdered plants, let alone start remedial work.

In the interest of lower maintenance, I decided to completely redo the bed and have a straight border rather than a curved outline. This then meant that the edge of the lawn was in need of a rebuild also. Put together with the realisation that our lawn was more weed, moss and couch grass than actual lawn, it seemed an ideal tme to ‘redo” the lawn as well.Of course the thought is easier than than the execution. The hard physical labour of completely redoing the bed is over but as a result of a period of almost a year without gainful employment of the other half, funds for restocking the bed were non-existent. What you see is more re location than restock.

As for the re-greening of the lawn, my role has been almost wholly supervisory. The good old Loom Monkey (No. 2 son) couldn’t resist and took this task on. He’s almost half done but has been away for the last two weeks and will only be in residence for two days before he sets off for a final year at Durham Uni. I know it’s not finished but in a strange way I am enjoying that juxtaposition of new grass against half-prepared ground, against totally unprepared ground. This way I can fully appreciate that a lawn isn’t just there. Someone has had to create it, nurture it and maintain it.

Good work Greg. Oh, and in case you wondered, no I don’t speak to my neighbours any more. I take care not to go in or out of the house at the same time as them. That way I will do them no harm.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Summer is for having fun!

Watching the air

Maybe this should be titled “watching the heir”? Today’s the day that No.2 son arrives back in the UK from his time studying at UBC in Vancouver, Canada.

We last heard from him via Twitter seconds before he boarded his plane at Vancouver. He’s now 4 hours 44 mins into his Toronto to London flight with 2 hours left to go. The Flight Aware map doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with the data displayed.

Look what I found

I can’t believe it is really me. Celebrating our first wedding anniversary by taking our 6 week-old son for a walk in Richmond Park.

That same son, now much taller is only a few weeks away from his own wedding. Doesn’t time fly and why oh why oh why did I think I was large way back then.

Still Weaving

I decided that the bright fuschia yarn of unknown composition was tough enough to be used as a warp for my next weaving attempt. After the steady “ping ping ping” of my handspun warp I wanted to be sure that I could concentrate on weaving and not have to constantly worry about the integrity of my warp.

Now what to use as weft? I had a cone of a lilacy fne ribbony yarn and thought I’d give it a try but it didn’y look right. Across the room, I caught sight of some greyish/mauvey stuff that may have been a ghastly yarn that I dunked in the remains of a dyepot a year or two again. Suddenly it seemed to be the right moment to use it. So I wove quite a bit of it. The the lilacy stuff began to look better and I decided that they would work well together. Next I added some thin blue, possibly  mercerised cotton and some of the same fuschia that I used for the warp.

Panic set in when I realised that I had probably already used half the darker  (dyed) stuff and so i had to start rationing it urgently.  Currently I am weaving mainly the lilacy ribbon with intermittent and random thin stripes of mainly combined pink and blue, breakin git up now and agian with a plan blue or pink and just very very occasionaly some of the heavily rationed darker (dyed) yarn.

So far I have woven just over 120cm . I think my fuschia warp is about 2.5 metres long. The work in progress is 42.5 cm wide.

Mastercraft Weaving

I’ve just finished watching MASTERCRAFT on BBC2. This week the participants were three people who were given just six weeks to learn the craft of weaving that normally takes someone about five years to learn.

In true TV fashion the pressure was piled on and despite the participants themselves not being competitive it was all still about competition. My heart went out to Momtaz Begum-Hossain who approaches craft in an intuitive way. The other two were off the starting blocks and away. Had they been skaters then I suspect they would have received 5.9 from most judges for technical skill but I’m not so sure about artistic interpretation. Perfect is not always preferable. The comment from someone who suggested that Tref’s work was so perfect that it could have been done by a machine summed it all up for me. I like to see the hand of the maker.

I hope we will see more of Momtaz’s weaving. I will keep an eye on her website/blog. Now that the TV programme has been broadcast the secret is out. Come on Momtaaz, post us some pics.

Twisted Fringe

So here is the mini-rug with the twisted fringe. The warp is my own handspun. I gave it the tug test to see if it would be strong enough to be used as the warp. It was strong but quite  a sticky warp which proved its undoing – literally. So as I wove, the 100 warp ends reduced down to 84. You can see that by looking at the twisted fringe on the left where I began to weave. By the time I had woven to the other end, shown on the right, I had lost 16 warp ends. Amazingly this hasn’t made a huge difference to this primitive rug as the weft, mainly more handspun with the odd pick of of unplyed coloured rug yarn, is hairy enough to tolerate such discrepancies. I really only had enough of the darker handspun for the warp so most of the darker weft is short lengths which were short enough to be legitimately labelled thrums. Perhaps it is these very short overlapped lengths that add to the width of the rug at the beginning.

Earning my stripes

Whatever the result of my incarceration with the loom, I had a great time watching a range of DVDS. As well as my dash through the decades (see my previous blogpost), I also watched the Comic Strip “Five Go Mad in Dorset” whilst slurping a mug of tea or tea in the absence of “lashings of ginger beer”. What spiffing fun.

This stripey rug which is about 110cm long started with the mid blue on the left and progressed through a series of random stripes mainly dictated  by odds and ends of yarn. I didn’t want to use anything “proper” in case I wasted it. More or less my only design criteria was that I felt i should have “dark” every now and then so that the tones didn’t all blend into one another. I had fun experimenting with the odd vertical stripe now and again. Confusingly above these vertical stripes will show as horizontal. You may notice the green & white just right of the centre, followed by the dark blue & light blue and brown & white whichis hiding in between a navy and a maroon stripe.

I became rather grandiose suggesting that each of my children have a section that represents them. Son “J” supports Aston Villa so there is a light blue & claret section for him. Son “G” usually has green objects allocated to him and so the green and white vertically-striped section is his. My Little Darling, no longer so little, has a deep pink section shot through with a more vibrant shiny pink.  it doesn’t show on the photo but I know it’s there.

The fringe of the rug is just knotted but I think I will try a twisted fringe next.

Dashing through the Decades

As well as being a lapsed reader, I’ve become a lapsed blogger and a very lapsed weaver. Not that I ever have been a weaver, just the very lucky owner of a sturdy Harris floor loom. I decided that my neglect of this wonderful piece of apparatus was shameful and set to dressing the loom with a very inexpert warp that was gathering dust in the same room as the loom. Warping / dressing a loom is a time-consuming activity so I gathered up the laptop and some DVDs for company and clocked-on for my two day warping shift.

It was quite by accident, and not by well-planned programme, that I selected DVDS that started me off in the late 1940s, led me through the 1960s and propelled me forward only as far as the 197os the decade in which I spent the majority of my secondary school education.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in imagining that once the Second World War was over in 1945 that everything hurried back “to normal”. Yes, I knew that rationing  continued after the war, but being born in 1957, ten years after the setting of the film “A Private Function” and the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, I grew up in comparative luxury. The film is written by Alan Bennet and has Maggie Smith and Michael Palin as the two main protagonists. That alone should be enough to guarantee a delightful yet sometimes painful mix of comedy and social commentary but the film is also blessed with the appearance of Denholm Elliott, Liz Smith, Richard Griffiths, Bill Paterson and Alison Steadman. The forthcoming royal nuptials are to be celebrated with a “private function” arranged by the top people in the town. Post-war meat rationing means that provisioning such an event has to be done by circumventing annoying regulations which in this town are upheld by Bill Paterson in the role of Mr Wormold, the meat inspector. The lowly chiropodist, played by Michael Palin is forced by his overpowering and snobby wife (Maggie Smith) to enter into some uncharacteristic activity that pits him against the class-conscious “elite” of the town.

Although set in 1947, A Private Function was filmed in colour in 1984. By stark contrast, Saturday Night Sunday Morning was made in contrasty, moody, black and white in 1960. There are no attempts at social climbing here. Arthur, played by Albert Finney is only concerned with having a good time and not ending up like his parents. He works hard and plays hard including “carrying on” with a married woman whilst at the same time chatting up and “seeing” a girl of his own age. Rationing may be over but life in an industrial town is tough and basic with overcrowded housing and little let-up from a nose to grindstone existence apart from an occasional drink at the pub. In “A Private Function”, the doctor bemoans the imminent National Health Service when he will be forced to treat any ill person who turns up on his doorstep. In “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” medical concerns are more about unwanted pregnancy with no legal solution. Moral transgressions in this monochrome world are dealt with in a literally “hands-on” way.

Fast forward thirteen years to 1973 and, in the three plays that together are “The Norman Conquests”, the stage is narrowed to two rooms and the garden of a middle class home within a short driving distance of London, somewhere on the south coast of England. There has been some progress in women’s rights. Ruth has a high-powered career while more or less supporting her liberal lascivious librarian husband, Norman. However, Annie, the daughter of the house is left single-handed to care for “mother” who has permanently taken to her bed. With the day to day problems of earning a living and eating of little concern we are treated to three plays in which Norman makes his conquests.

Austerity Britain

Amongst the usual  junk mail this week was a lovely fat package. I am  the lucky recipient of a book from DoveGreyReader’s  Twelve days of Christmas draw. Thank you Lynne. We’re experiencing our own little piece of Austerity Britain  at the moment so a wonderfully fat juicy book is most welcome. I promise we won’t follow the example of some OAPs in Wales who have been rumoured to be burning books to keep warm.

So far I am only far as VE day but that has worn me out:

Queued for a bus but none came – contingents of marchers – officers, men, girls, lads               in rough marching order. Walked back to Piccadilly  but couldn’t negotiate the Circus.   Solid mass of people (St John’s Ambulance men and nurses behind Swan and edgar’s).  A policeman advised me to work my way along the wall – but I couldn’t get near the wall. Followed a tall American soldier and made my way to Wardour St. but Leicester Sq. was impassable. Dodged thro’ Soho side streets and finally reached Tottenham Court Rd – a 19 bus and home.

I’ve peeked at the pictures of queues and bombites and  it suddenly stuck me why my mother would always refere to a piece of waste ground or an empty building plot as a bombsite. In her teens and early twenties any such ground was highly lucky to be in that state because of a bomb.

I just can’t imagine what life must have been like. The closest I can come to anything like that was the 3-day week in the 1970s. Electricity was zoned and certain areas would be cut off for hours at a time. Luckily my grandmother lived in the same town and had a gas fire so we would congregate there and keep warm. We were sent home from school, just after lunch, every Wednesday when the power was turned off. I’m not sure if we planned what happened next but if we did we were definitely genius material. A group of us decided to go to the cinema. However, the cinema was in the same zone as school and so just when the film was at about the 70% mark , the power would go off, patrons would be asked to leave and were given vouchers to see another film some time. The next Wednesday exactlt the same thing would happen and although we hadn’t actually paid to get in this time, we would still be given a voucher for another free entry. The sad part of this escapade is that I can barely remember one of the films. It was “The Seven Deadly Sins” and I think we experienced five of the seven.

In those years we always had a good supply of Price’s candles under the kitchen sink and I know that when we were first married I dutifully stashed some of my own there should I ever have the need to stick a candle to an old saucer with melted wax. Are they still there? Maybe I will investigate when spring comes around.

Reading about HAITI

I know that everyone’s thoughts are with Haiti at the moment and so I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of books that might help us to understand something about the place.

HAITIAN BOOK ONE is one that I read at the beginning of 2008

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

“We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen. Your mother wants to
see you now.Sophie. She does not want you to forget who your real mother is. When she left you
with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She
left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances with you.”

The narrator, Sophie has been raised by Tante Atie, her mother’s illiterate elder sister. All she knows of her real mother she has learnt from this mother substitute. She only knows her mother’s voice from the spoken cassettes that are sent several times a year. Then one day the inevitable happens, a ticket is sent and Sophie must join her mother in New York.

“My angel, she said, I would like to know that by word or by example I have taught you love. I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. that is why I could never fight her about keeping you here. I do not want you to go and fight her either. In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children.”

And so it is that Sophie moves from the simple traditional way of living in Haiti to the life of an immigrant in New York, looked down on and called names by classmates. In her luggage she carries not only her few belongings but the weight of the past.

In her mother’s apartment she discovers a photo,

“I moved closer to get a better look at the baby in Tante Atie’s arms. I had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother’s but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that I noticed that I looked like no one in my family. Not my mother. Not my Tantee Atie. I did not look like them when I was a baby and I did not look like them now.”

Though Sophie, her mother and other Haitian friends now live in New York tradition casts a long shadow. The old ways are not easy to leave behind.

“Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.

According to Aunt Tatie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn’t her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.

The strength of women holds the generations together despite what is done in the name of tradition and inheritance. My reading of this book was at a very superficial level, concentrating on the relationships between the generations of women. There is much more to be excavated but first I would need to understand something of the social and political history of Haiti a place where the indigenous population was wiped out, replaced by African slaves under French rule. Subsequent interference by a variety of nations followed by a long period of dictatorship in which African roots were emphasied and used against the people by bringing to life the Tonton Macoute or bogeyman of traditional tales.

Don’t be put off by that last paragraph of mine. The book is told through the eyes of the child, Sophie, as she progresses from childhood to womanhood. The warmth of affection between Sophie & Tante Atie manages to keep out the underlying chills.

I suspect that any book by Edwidge Danticat will provide fruitful reading for anyone wishing to taste the flavour of Haiti.

————

HAITIAN BOOK  TWO  is The Comedians by Graham Greene.

I read ths years ago and I know that it is in the house somewhere so I will need to go on a bookhunt.

————

.. and finally … I will leave you with a link to an article in THE NEW YORK REVIEW of BOOKS that provides you with a list of books.

Too many books?

One of Tom Bendtsen’s “Arguments”      see more here

Just a Rumour

 

I’ve finally done it – set up an online shop for some of my crafty stuff

 

There’s not much there at the moment but instead of mucking around with stuff I think I should be productive and actually achieve something.

Phew! It’s hard work

Non-invasive decs ….. Frame cosies

So here are the real, felt versions of the non-invasive Christmas decorations, otherwise referred to as “frame cosies”.

I’m not quite sure whether this was an inspired idea or a very silly one.

Letters of note

I wonder how many people still correspond my letter these days? Once a computer dies and and backups have been overwritten all those emails will disappear, unlike a good old-fashioned piece of paper that can lurk in a drawer or languish in an old show box.

However, the wonders of the web allow us to view this website and read letter from the past. I think I will be adding it to my bookmarks.

 

Developing an idea …. non-invasive Christmas decoration

What if you were going to be away from home for Christmas? What could you take with you to ensure that your home-from-home would not seem bare in the festive season?

Voila – a  non-invasive Christmas decoration!

This is the prototype. Materials used here were a tatty old red paper napkin, a piece of scrap paper (for the leaves of unidentified species) and a large berry cut from a piece of sky in a magazine picture. As you can see, in the prototype, the side of the folded large triangle has been stapled, as were the leaves and berry.

I will now try a version made from red and green felt, with the side sewn closed and the leaves and berries sewn on with a couple of stitches. Or what about using  4 red fabric triangles with quilt batting/wadding sandwiched in between?

If my pictures and words don’t make sense then think about a photo held in an album by those triangular photo-corners.

Primitive hooked Teapot Mat

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should see if I can make and sell items on a site like Etsy, Dawanda, Folksy or Misi.

It needs to be something where I don’t have to go out and buy any materials so I came up with the idea of primitive hooked items. Whole rugs would take longer to make, weigh heavier in the post and have a higher price tag but many people who drink tea like to use a teapot and enjoy the look of the tea as much as the taste.

I have seen this sort of item described as “upcycled” because you add value to what is a somewhat mundane material. My teapot mat is made from a base of hessian which had been used as packagaing and strips of old t-shirt to make the design.

 

 

 

Ready, Steady, Bake

You are only allowed to use ingredients that you already have …. and you haven’t done a proper weekly shop for months…

if you can bear to use some of your cheese ration you can make …

CHEESE STRAWS

but you need to ensure that they don’t all get eaten while they are cooling

there’s an old tin of cocoa here – what can I do with that?

you could substitute it for some of the flour in fairy cakes.

ooh ooh! – I’ve found some flaked almonds

well bung those in as well

chocolate and almonds – nothing weird about that

18 chocolate almond fairy cakes

that’s 9 each

shall we have one now to see if they are OK?

maybe we need another notice?

Love Poem?

I guess tonight’s
dinner
is going
to
be
a disappointment
compared with last night.

We didn’t decide
before you
went to work.

Beans on toast?

This is a poem (under your rules) but I don’t know it.
xxxxx

My other half has been in the role of househusband for quite a few months. Almost 28 years after our wedding and with no domicile children  we  now spend more time with just the two of us than at any time previously. We have just been on holiday together, and realised when we came back, that other than a few minutes in the bathroom, we spent the whole week practically joined at the hip.

Recent topics of conversation have included “what is poetry” and, mainly due to lack of funds, “what shall we have for dinner tonight?”

Yesterday at work, I received an email from my beloved that combined both those subjects. To those of you who regularly receive huge bouquets of red roses and flagons of scented substances those few words may not seem like much but coming from my outwardly unromantic old man those same few words were worth waiting for!

Advice Noted – Timoloen Vieta has been allowed to stay

Following Harriet‘s advice to persevere with the, on the whole, delightful book Timoleon Vieta Come Home I find that I can’t put it down. To start with the book is a joy to hold. My version is a paperback, published by Canongate. The cover is enchanting, the paper ever-so slightly rough and faintly yellowed. The typeface and spacing of the letter and lines are so gentle on the eyes  and the margins all round are of ample proportions. There is the added delight of a hand-scribbled portrait of Timoleon Vieta.

I have just passed the halfway mark and am into Part Two,which for a lover of short stories, which I most certainly am, is an unexpected bonus. Our hero, Timoleon Vieta, briefly touches the lives of those he meets, and about who we read, and then moves on.

So more than just persevering I am thoroughly enjoying this book but will reiterate my caveat about some of the content so please do not think it is a delightful doggy story for children! So sweeping my prudery aside I shall recommend Timoleon Vieta Come Home to all and sundry – well as long as they are over eighteen.

Should I tell Timoleon Vieta to go away?

The cover of this book and the intriguing title,  ‘Timoleon Vieta Come Home A Sentimental Journey”,  caused me to pick it up and bring it home with me in the first place. The shape and taste of the words and the feel of the paper enticed me to choose it as my “on the train to work” reading. And so I began ……

On Monday I was lucky as my usual morning travelling companion was absent and so I had a good 15 minutes to make a respectable start. So far so good.

I really like this book. I love the deceptive simplicity of the way it is written. The words don’t get in the way of the experience. But… can you feel the “but” worming its way to the surface? Here’s the part where I confess to being more than a lapsed reader. I am also a certified prude. I don’t enjoy explicit sex in books, which is one of the reasons that  what is  often disparagingly referred to as “middlebrow fiction” has been such a safe area for me in the past and was instrumental in introducing me to some of my favourite bloggers in the days before they actually had blogs.

In theory I could skip over the explicit parts of the book. That’s difficult to do. Like watching a scary film, you hav eto keep peeping through your fingers to see if it is all over so that you can get on with the main part of the story. And I do want to carry on, if only to find out why the dog is called ‘Timeoleon Vieta”.

Is there anyone out there who wants to share their thoughts with me on whether or not they would continue to read a book that contained large passages of descripion they they found distasteful?

The Artist’s Widow by Shena Mackay

I’m still not sure what to make of this book. Apart from the main protagonist, the artist’s widow I just didn’t really believe in any of the characters. The book was published in 1998 and set in the preceding year. there can be no doubt about that as the final few pages fit the events of the story around the death of Princess Diana on 31 August 1997. It just didn’t come across as a rounded portrayal of that decade.

As far as I’m aware, I haven’t read anything by Shena Mackay but her name is very familiar and I don’t know why. I wanted to abandon this back but I couldn’t. Now I’m trying to work out exactly why I couldn’t put it down. The story wasn’t compelling. Nothing really happened. A woman’s artist husband has died and she is still alive and misses him. Apart from a few glimpses of their life together this is not the story of a marriage, rather the tenuous connecting thread of the widow allows us to be introduced to a range of stereotypical characters. So perhaps that was the point? But if that was the point it didn’t sit well with the more rounded portrayal of Lyris Crane, herself an artist but now seemingly existing only to others as ‘the artist’s widow’.

Though the book was not a page-turner I had to read to the end and I will certainly pick up other Shena Mackay titles if I stumble across them. And as an aside I wonder if anyone, anywhere has compiled a list of books that refer to iconic moments in popular history such as the death of prominent people or momentous events?

Doh!

Since the other half spent some time working in Texas, he has harboured the ambition to recreate the frankfurter-filled bread rolls that he was served up for breakfast. He insisted that he needed to find the right baking apparatus for this culinary delight and when we were away in Cornwall recently, he discovered the miniature loaf tins of his dreams.

He is not a natural cook and had to prepare himself mentally as well as assemble his batterie de cuisine. Somehow today proved to be the day and, in spite of a literally sticky moment, when I had to come to the rescue with copious amounts of extra flour, his long-held ambition was achieved.

They turned out to be amazingly tasty.

Time-travelling wife?

After a fantastic week in Porthleven the time to return to reality came.

We left just before 0800 and consequently had a really good journey with no hold-ups or slow sections of the journey at all.

The journey from start to finiah works out at about 270 miles so is just a bit too far to travel without a break.So it came to pass that somewhere well past the halfway mark I was in need of an interval to keep me awake and in one piece. Somewhere on the A303, just past Brigadoon we pulled in to THE JOLLY DINER.

The place was stuck in a time-warp or had we stumbled onto the film set of “Last of the Summer Wine” or “Carry On Something or other…”?

Sometimes the time must pass very slowly as the staff or management had obviously spent hours or even days creating the multifarious notices scattered around ….

“Our toilets are for customer use only – please use toilets at the bottom of the steps – Thank You”

“Please do not put hands on glass – these are folding doors”

“Only food/drinks purchased on these premises may be consumed here anyone found not complying with our request will be asked to leave. Thank You.”

“Would you please keep your children under control while on these premises. thank You”

….and my absolute favourite which I will now share with you:

No comment!

Dirty Dog?

Don’t worry. Your beautifully clean bathroom will not need to suffer a bit.

Just head westwards down the foot of England to the Gables Filling Station, Trevenan on the A394, north of Helston, Cornwall.

As you can see from the sign inside the garage there is a choice of washes for your four-legged friend: short, medium or long.

I’d be interested to see how this works. How is it any different from standing your dog on a garden table and hosing him down?

I suppose that the water is heated, is it? Is the water in a carwash heated?  Does the shampoo come out automatically rather than you having to squirt some from a bottle onto your canine companion?

A Date with Dovegreyreader

As I was heading west for a week in Cornwall I alerted Dovegreyreader. Not a lot of people know this, but she is an unofficial guardian for the west country and monitors the movements of grockles and emmets. An immigration interview was duly arranged in the fair town of Fowey with an initial rendezvous “in the top car park” under the shade of the trees growing in the grounds of Fowey Hall, author Kenneth Grahame’s inspiration for Toad Hall in his children’s classic “Toad of Toad Hall.

On the corner of South Street, by the  Parish Church, Dovegreyreader waved to Ann Willmore of Bookends and then of course we ran inside and I was introduced to her. If you have never been to Fowey, but are a fan of Daphne du Maurier, may I suggest you pay Bookends and Ann a visit. Be sure to take your sleeping bag with you because the place is stuffed with books by and about DdM. Bookends is definitely fingers over eyes and “la la la, I’m not looking” territory for those with a serious book-buying habit.

With not a single book purchased and the need for sustenance we found ourselves ensconced in a cafe with a pot of Earl Grey Tea and carrot cake. I glanced momentarily away from my cake and saw something hovering above DGR’s head. No, it wasn’t a halo though I’m sure many of you will join me in thinking that it would be fitting for St DGR, patron saint of readers to sport such an accessory, but a dove on the “Noah’s Ark Dental Practice” sign on the building across the road from our teashop. How fitting and surely a sign that I was in hallowed company.

I have now had the pleasure of meeting Dovegreyreader on several occasions. Wouldn’t it be exciting if there was a membership card and you could collect a DGR point everytime you had a sighting of thhis delightful species? I’m not sure if I have 5 or 6 points now. Only 4 ( or is it 5) more and I reach 10. Will I be able to convert 10 ordinary points into one gold one? How many gold points do I need before I am allowed to take my sandwiches to work in a DGR lunchbox? Now I’m getting carried away and I must remember that I am a grownup or more or less an OAP because the driver of the Fowey Town Bus, who ferries clapped-out old crones back up to the “top car park”,  asked DGR and me if we had bus passes! Must dash as I need to pop out and buy a bottle of Grecian 2000 “because I’m worth it”.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

….and I love your covers!!!!

I love the movement, the vitality, the cleanliness…

and I’d love to feel you in my hands….

and see you on my shelves.

The Case in Question

So twenty-four hours after the bookcase came into the house and a lot of stripping and sanding, not to mention the sweeping up and wiping down, we now have a very useful small bookcase.

I was going to paint it but I decided that I like it as it is, with someof its battle scars showing.

A Case for books

Altogether we spent a grand total of £4 at the jumble sale. The books  (see yesterday’s blogpost for details) accounted for half that outlay. Another £1 was splurged on a bin bag of various bits and pieces and the final little gold coin was spent on a small bookcase that showed potential.

Left: A few minutes after a bit of an investigatory scrape                   Right: After about 4 hours with a hot air gun & a paint scraper

Oh yes, and I decided that the back of the bookcase was a later addition and should be removed.

His and Hers Books

Our local scout group has a jumble sale twice a year, once in March and once in October. As there is only the church standing between our house and the scout hut we have no reason to stay away. Unlike the supermarket the scout jumble always has the same layout. Bric-a brac on the right, men’s “special” clothes to on rails to the left and women’s to the right. Tables in the middle have the usual heaps of clothes divided into men, women and children. And… in one of the side rooms… there are the books.

We didn’t go to the sale till almost the end , so our two bags of books came to the princley sum of £2. The other half did slightly better than me, as you can see because his two Ian Rankins have crept onto my pile. Not a bad haul is it?

I’ve read this book ….. will I enjoy ….Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul

How do you choose which books to read? I know what the answer should be. Cast a glance around at loaded shelves, pick out those that bear the TBR label and read. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? We need to be tempted and lured into reading a book.

Sometimes the cover does the trick or in my case it works the other way around. I can’t really choose to read a book if I don’t like the cover. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t usually read the same books that my other half  dips into. His reading matter would fit into the bookcase called “Airport Books”. You know the ones  I mean, don’t you? They have a tendency to be foiled, embossed and probably sporting a silhouette  if one can be squeezed onto the cover.

A title can be tantalising. A word, a quotation, or words that sound like a quotation, can be as successful as dangling a fishhook in a stream. OK, I know nothing about fishing so I’d better stop that analogy before I even pack my ..um.. what do you call that fishing basket thingy?  So, this lapsed reader was doing her usual wandering around the web instead of ironing, polishing bathroom mirrors, re-upholstering the doormat or even reading a book, and came across references to a book called, “Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul” by Shamini Flint. Immediately I recalled a book that I read many years ago after stumbling across it when I wasn’t looking for anything to read.

So what do I do now? Do I go on a book hunt and look for the H R F Keating book that pleased me so many years ago or do I succomb to buying just one more book?

Buy books here – listbooks.co.uk a great website

Maybe I haven’t been desperate enough before but I can’t imagine why  haven’t heard about this website.  It’s called LIST BOOKS and that’s just what it does. The amazing thing is that there is NO CHARGE for listing the books that you want to sell. It was set up by Lee Penney who couldn’t find somewhere to sell his books without having to hand over a hefty commission to the listing website. Normally that would make a website/service extremely clunky and you would probably have to do a lot of work to get your item to appear in a list for sale. The opposite seems true of Lee Penney’s bookselling website. Just type in the ISBN of the book that you want to sell and “hey presto” all the details will appear as if by magic. As well as the basic information, there is a field for DESCRIPTION. This should be used to describe the book, the subject matter or blurb and will be added to any copy that is listed by anyone so should NOT be used to discuss the condition of the book because there is a separate NOTES field for that.

I intend to go on a safari around my house and list books that should be passed onto others. In an ideal world I would generously hand these on to others but in the current economic climate I have to find ways of propping up family finances. This endeavour by an individual may just be a small step to help me on my way.

VCP

This post should be considered a VCP (virtual care package) to UBC (University of British Columbia). TLM (The Loom Monkey, alias our middle child, is currently studying in Vancouver, Canada. Hints were made that he had been neglected. He spoke about a fellow student who had received a care package containing curly wurlies and battenburg cake.

The current economic situation has infiltrated into the household and after much thought we made the decision that postage to Canada of vital substances or the online ordering of a commercial student care package was not essential. Consequently we have decided to share, only virtually, our baking session of yesterday. On Friday a vast quantity of bananas was purchased in Kingston market for the sum of £1. A bunch was given to a woman in the same marketplace who expressed an interest but didn’t want a whole bucket-load. Quite a few were also consumed over the last few days by me, seven were mashed up to be included in these loaves of banana bread and three remain. The butter, eggs, flour, baking powder and salt were already in the house and the oven was shared with potatoes baking for Sunday supper.

So apologies, dear son, for not sending some real tuck in your direction but belts are being tightened madly and the head must rule the heart. If you are lucky there may be at least one loaf still lurking in the freezer when you return to Blighty in May, but no guarantees can be given.

There hasn’t been much baking in this house for quite a while. Our trusty cast iron scales became not so trusty and didn’t weight true. Yesterday the resident engineer tackled the problem by deciding to attach a coin to the lighter half of the scales. A 10p coin was exactly the right weight but due to the current economic climate it was decided not to waste good money and an old pre-euro foreign coin was found as a replacement.

So what’s next on the menu? Flapjacks maybe.

I Believe ….

i n

b o o k  s   !!!!

An old Dominican church in Maastricht has been converted into a bookshop.

Pop over here and read all about it.

Stripey Sunday

The light level was low and I had to zoom in to get the camera to register those amazing stripes but this is the amazing sky that we saw as we glanced out of our window last night!

Strange World

the world
is full
of strange things

perambulating socks
unable to remain in their fixed abode

and
ambient fruit

an exotic substance
dwelling in aisle 29
at my sister’s supermarket

more commonly known
as
tins of fruit

should we
consider the sign
a warning

“ambient fruit spreads”

Rare Citing

How exCITING! I’ve been cited!!!

If you happen to flick through “Creative Careers in Crafts” by Susan Joy Sager on page 17 you will see my name and the title of my one published book. Of course, she adds nonchanantly, it’s not the first time I’ve been cited in print. The internationally respected textile historian, Lesley Jackson, referred to my dissertation “Something Fresher – An Introduction to the 1950s Textiles of Mary White ” in an endnote on page 218 of her book, “Twentieth Century Pattern Design”.

Makes me feel almost grown-up!

‘Write Way Up’

Seven poets perform new work, inspired by museum artifacts

I’m off to see the above in Leicester tonight. Why? Because my baby sister is one of those seven poets!!

She’s the smallest, I’m the tallest in this photo taken c 1967
(and I’ve just realised that she is clasping something that looks like either a notebook or a pencilcase)

One ordinary box…seven objects inside…and seven specially commissioned poets to take them out and bring them to life. Prepared to be wowed as live literature collides with music and visuals – and new voices make old things come alive. Handle with care and be sure to hold the ‘Write Way Up’ in this multimedia extravaganza. Directed and mentored by Kevin Fegan. Produced by Pam Thompson for WORD! This night is in partnership with Leicestershire Museums and will explore both artifacts and Olympic values.

I’ll report back when I get back from staying with one of my two sisters (see pic above) who both now live in Nottingham.

Where do babies come from?

or what I really mean is where do all these Summer 2009 babies come from? Everyone that MLD (My Little Darling)knows seems to be having one.     I made the mistake of making a pinky quilt for a baby girl and so in the interest of gender equality I had to make this red green and black one for a boy.

Just Hanging Around

Patch Things Up

My Reading Odyssey

I’m really enjoying the stream of consciousness of this book. The thoughts of the protagonists wander in much the same way that mine do. However, I’ve not yet mastered the trick of keeping my mouth shut and many of my thoughts just come flowing out out my me sweeping unwary bystanders in their path. Those who know me just switch off but the ininitiated have been known to feel faint at the torrent of seemingly disconnected woords and ideas rushiing in their direction.

Having been educated in a convent there is much that i recognise in the images that James joyce puts before my eyes and ears but the distance of time and full-on Dublin culture means that here is also much that passes me by. I really should have a notebook on hand to jot down things that need a later explanation.

“chintz curtains with lilies of the valley all over them”

but I couldn’t leave three lily of the Valley cushion covers behind when they called out to me at the Scouts Jumble Sale. Cornflower posted a quote from “Henrietta’s War” by Joyce Denny  in which the decor of a very upmarket bathing hut is described as having “chintz curtains with lilies of the valley all over them”.  Well, I  have some posh cushion covers now all I need is the bathing hut.

Offcuts and offshoots

27 cm x 20 cm  overstitched interwoven scraps of hand-dyed cotton

Bib Bib Hooray

Also completed (except for velcro fastenings) – a set of 6 bibs for the same baby.

The reverse of each is towelling/terry cloth.

Maybe I should make another one so there is one for each day of the week?

After Two Nights in Labour

A quilt is born

In Gestation

How time flies. The first of my daughter’s old school friends has just given birth to a little girl named FREYA DAISY MAY, so it was decided to make a not-too babyish quilt that demonstrated traces of her name.

The lime green is for freshness – the “Fr” at the beginning of Freya and the rather grown-up white daisies on a black ground are of course for Daisy. I think the binding will be daisies also. Now what about the back? Should it be all one fabric or maybe I will cut large deep random stripes of all fabrics.

How to Choose a Husband

Once upon a time an old woman lived with her beautiful daughter in a cottage by a wood.
One morning she threw open the windows to let in the sun, pulled the covers from her sleeping daughter and bade her dress herself for today she would meet her future husband.

“Who is he?” the girl asked. “You shall see”, replied the old woman. “Once you have eaten your bread and milk and chopped logs for the fire we will watch for him.” So the girl washed her face, braided her hair, ate her breakfast and chopped the logs. In her dreams her husband was tall and strong and dressed in fine garments. She waited for him to walk towards her home.

Quite soon a young man from the village strolled by. The girl had seen him nearly every day of her life and knew that he was considered to be simple. She could not contain her amazement when her mother called out to him, “Young fellow, come here. I have a task for you. When it is completed I may let you marry my daughter.”

The young man approached the two women. His face was kind, the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled and when he spoke his voice was soft and caring, “How may I help you dear Madam?”

“I am not as young as I once was”, exclaimed the mother. “Take these coins, go to the market for me and bring back a fine green cabbage”. “Certainly, said the young man, paying equal attention to the old grey-haired woman and the beautiful girl.

He was absent for most of the day but, as the shadows of the trees in the wood stretched almost to the cottage door, he appeared with the last rays of the sun surrounding his head with a comforting glow. With a low bow to the waiting pair, he placed a knotted kerchief by the hearth and bade them goodnight.

As the beautiful young untied the knots she let out a peel of laughter. “Why he is as stupid as he looks. He can’t even fetch a cabbage, this is a lettuce.” The old woman did not laugh. She nodded wisely and bade the girl run off to bed, “for tomorrow you will marry. He has passed my test. A wife should always be be of sharper mind than her spouse”.

The longest day

Farmer on a Bicycle (1935) by Alexander Deneika

Cream Tea

Rushing Past Yellow

Loe Bar Beach

Loe Bar

Bibliotheque Nationale de Texas?

I’m at home today and turned Radio 4 on just in time to hear a 30 minute programme about the purchase of  writer’s archives.

It seems that Texas, the only state in the USA that at any time has  governed itself as an independent country (the Republic of Texas 1836-1845) has been amassing what is in effect the Bibliotheque Nationale de Texas. [CORRECTION from K-eM: Texas is not the only state which was an independent country before becoming a state. Hawaii was a sovereign nation with an internationally recognized monarchy until the U.S. government generated some political unrest that allowed them to take over in 1898. You can visit the I’olani Palace in Honolulu (right across from the state capital building) if you ever visit. Hawaii was a U.S. Territory until 1959 when they were finally given statehood.] You can watch  a short video in which the director explains the importance of collecting such archives.

It sounds marvellous. The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas has been striding around Europe throwing money at writers, widows and anyone who has a suitable archive. Yet I can’t help siding with our retiring Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who has been advocating that Britain gives tax breaks to living authors who commit to keeping their archives available for the nation in which they were created. It must be a difficult decision for an author to make. Once a writer can make a living outof writing, they become in effect self-employed and don’t have access to a company pension etc. The HRC sees the selling of an archive as a way of ensuring that living writers will not starve in a garret in their old age.

The latest archive to leave our shores is that of Jim Crace. He expressed his surprise that HRC was not only interested in early drafts of works. They have also acquired a considerable amount of juvenilia, including letters from his parents. I immediately phoned my sister, Anne Holloway, who has almost got her foot on the first rung of the literary world.  “Don’t throw any of your rubbish out”, I  implored her. “They will want it when you are famous. She assured me that all her teenage angst had been reduced to cinders years ago so that it could not embarass our parents.  So what ephemera will she be creating these days? With computers, operating systems and applications that become obsolete almost as soon as they are installed, will anthing remain?  I have heard that the Brtish Library is archiving selected blogs but that isn’t the same as being able to get your hands on the contents of someone’s desk or bedside drawer. Digital media doesn’t turn yellow, curl up at the edges or smell or come in strange shapes and sizes. As long as the modern world doesn’t turn into a post-industrial dystopia where we no longer have access to our interwebby wonderland we will, of course, be able to view these delights online. If one or two institutions become the gathering point for literary lives then more of us will be able to appreciate the whole creation process but in an ideal world I do feel that the closer an artefact stays to its place of creation the more resonance it will possess.

St. Benedict’s herb, warding off evil spirits

Thank you to Sue of  Mousenotebook who has identified my mystery plant/weed as Wood Avens.

Wikipedia states: Geum urbanum, also known as Wood Avens, Herb Bennet, Colewort and St. Benedict’s herb,is a perennial plant in the Rose family (Rosaceae)which grows in shady places (such as woodland edges and near hedgerows) in Europe and the Middle East.

Usually reaching a height between 20 and 60 cm, wood avens blooms between May and August and its flowers are 1 – 2 cm in diameter, having five bright yellow petals. The hermaphrodite flowers are scented and pollinated by bees. The fruits have burrs, which are used for dispersal by getting caught in the fur of rabbits and other animals. The root is used as a spice in soups and also for flavouring ale.

In folklore

In folklore Wood Avens is credited with the power to drive away evil spirits, and to protect against rabid dogs and venomous snakes. It was associated with Christianity because its leaves grew in threes and its petals in fives (reminiscent of, respectively, the Holy Trinity and the Five Wounds). Astrologically, it was said to be ruled by Jupiter.

In herbal medicine

Wood Avens was stated to be a treatment for poison and dog bites. Paracelsus suggested its use against liver disease, catarrh and stomach upsets.

Modern herbalists use it to treat diarrhoea, heart disease, halitosis and mouth ulcers, and to prevent colic. Not all of these uses are supported by scientific evidence.

Sue warns me that if her identification is correct then I am in for trouble. So it is likely to be a head-to-head with the pernnial geranium (cranesbill). Watch this space, it is likely to disappear under a mound of green leaves.

Going Round in Circles

I really should have been getting ready for work but instead I was off reading blogs as I usually do while I eat my breakfast each morning. It sets me up for the day. I pop in to see all my old friends and then often get sidetracked and find someone new and decide they are worthy of being added to my bookmark bar at the top of my web browser.

This morning a wandering path led me to LAVENDERHOUSE and her posting called CIRCLES OF COLOUR which reminded me of something I started to play around with after a visit to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace in 2007. Yes I did type 2007 intentionally. I went to one of those 15 minute classes. The pieceof red silk is from the class as are those three spiderweb circles stitched to the red silk. Everyone else there seemed to be an expert at embroidery so I was the obligatory slow one in the corner. Luckily now that I am allegedly grownup I don’t care what anyone else thinks and I just get on with enjoying  the moment and taking away from I can. in this case that something was the inspiration of DORSET BUTTONS and so I played around (see bottom left of pic) with something that owes its technique to dorset buttons, crochet, tatting and probably other crafts as well.

The results have remained pinned to the red silk on the wall in J’s old bedroom, where I keep my sewing machine, forgotten until I read Ms LavenderHouse’s blog this morning. Those circles were made with short craps of yarn lying in or around the bin so very much in keeping with what Ms LavenderHouse was told by Madeline Millingtonnot …”not to bother with expensive yarn as cheap yarn in rainbow colours gives a really good result.”

Is this a weed? What is it called?

Do you think it is this:        Creeping Cinquefoil (Potentilla reptans)

Another perennial creeping plant, looking very similar, both in leaf and flower, to a buttercup, but belonging to a different family, Rosaceae, and therefore also similar to a strawberry. Differs from a buttercup in having separate toothed leaflets rather than a divided leaf, and the flowers are not shiny. Creeps by stolons, rooting at the nodes, as strawberry runners.

My new friend

I’ve been doing hard labour in the garden for over a week now. My constant companion has been Mr Robin.

Another Day

well i woke up this morning
early this time
made myself a tea & ate a bowl of b
connecting with the world

first stop harriet
her playlist is devine*
open a new tab
so her music is my soundtrack

lazy sax
scatters stardust
to soothe my early mind
as i visit the perfect worlds of others

tinkling piano waterfall
wire drum-brush beating my heart slow
double bass wakes
reasoning with me
as a red bus passes the windowww

dee dee di dee dee
dee dee di dee dee
and then
the plaintive sax stretches out
pleading for one more chance

* listen to harriet’s playlist here

… and sew I rest my case

I couldn’t bear to part with real money for a camera case so ran this up from a few scraps. I forgot how much things shrink when quilted. Although this isn’t actually quilted because there are no lines of stitching, other than seams, holding it all together, it is padded with a DOUBLE layer of wadding so what was a very respectable flap has magically shrunk to a “just about” flap.  The closure is half a hair elastic and a bead.

Going London LOOPy

Middle offspring is off back to Durham tomorrow and I wasn’t at work so he decided that we should walk the section of the LONDON LOOP from West Ewell to Kingston. The route hasn’t been properly mapped and someone has to do it so we hopped on a combination of buses , one from home to Kingston and then from Kingston to West Ewell and the start of our walk which for most of the way followed the Hogsmill River. The Hogsmill’s claim  to fame is that Millais used it to paint the vegetation around poor Ophelia as she lies drowned. It is easy to see why the location attracted him as there was an abundance and wide variety of lush vegetation. We saw a total of three foxes, a woodpecker and numerous other birds including several bright green ring-necked parakeets that noisily make their presence known in several areas around Kingston and Richmond boroughs.

No doubt my expedition leader will post at a later date on his blog at www.livingwithdragons.com but I will leave you with a map (courtesy of OpenStreetMap & contributors) messily annotated by me to show where we wandered. Miles walked by me = just under 10 so I’m off for a soak in a lovely hot bath. If you don’t here from me soon then please send out a search party as I’ll probably still be in the bath but too stiff to get out.

Book Character Introductory Agency

How do you met like-minded people or even those of an opposite opinion that you could have a fine discussion with? It is no longer considered to be shameful to have to resort to an introductory agency or dating service so what about book characters? Shouldn’t they also be allowed to meet a wider range of friends and even life partners if they really get along well.

I have just started reading “Home” by Marilynne Robinson. Fascinatingly it takes the same set of characters that were in the author’s much-acclaimed book “Gilead” and, as I am beginning to find out, fills in some of the small gaps left by that volume. I was so taken by “Gilead” that I passed my copy onto a friend but now I’m wondering if I might treat myself to a hardcopy to sit alongside the copy of “Home” that I was in turn sent by someone else.

I haven’t read very far into “Home” but I am just wondering how the Boughtons would get along with the March family from Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and sequels. All the parents live by a set of sometimes impossible ideals that if adopted by the world at large would surely turn it into a more pleasant place to live. The prodigal son is always welcomed and the word “grudge” doesn’t feature in their vocabulary.

Today DoveGreyReader has decided that Thebes from “The Flying Troutman’s” by Miriam Toews (pronounced Taves) should have the opportunity to hang out with Flavia deLuce from”The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie”, with the occasional addition of “Anne of Green Gables”.

So put your matchmaking or friendmaking hats on and suggest a few introductions.

Seven up

Seven “emerging talents” have been commissioned to write and perform new work, inspired by museum objects.The poets will attend six closely mentored workshops, between April and July 09, with renowned poet and director, Kevin Fegan. Their finished work will be set to music and visuals and performed as ‘Heritage’ one of 7 high profile ‘Lyric Lounge’ nights. at the Y Theatre in Leicester.

‘Heritage’ will explore Special Olympics values and be a chance for these up-and-coming writers to develop their talent and profile whilst learning more about accessing museum resources.The event is part of the cultural offering of Leicester to celebrate the city’s hosting of the 2009 Special Olympics GB Summer Games.

You may be wondering why this event has caught my eye. I just happen to be the proud “big sis” of one of these “emerging new talents”, Anne Holloway. Of course I think her writing is wonderful and now at least a whole city will have the opportunity of appreciating her work.

Concerned mother

Middle child is on his way from Durham to home in London today BY BIKE. Not all the way. He caught the train to Middlebrough and will cycle approx 50 miles to York and then catch the train the rest of the way. Amusingly the route he will be following is Route 65, also the number of our house so everytime he sees a sign it should keep him motivated to pedal faster to reach No.65 and his bed.

He said he had planned carefully and allowed plenty of extra time. I never think my children allow enough time for anything. According to him he was expecting to arrive at THIRSK (halfway) by 1300 and break for lunch. Well at 1340 he had only reached OSMOTHERLEY which to me looks as though it is halfway between MIDDLESBROUGH and THIRSK making it only 1/4 of his whole planned journey instead of 1/2.

He said in his text to me that the second half is easier. I beg to differ. He still has 3/4 of his journey AND judging by the terrain of the North Yorkshire Moors it looks as though the toughest is yet to come. But what do I know, I’m just a concerned mother.

A Favourite Poem

Spider Webs

Spider webs are very delicate
And to remember.

A spider web is sometimes breaking.
It breaks when you take it
Or where it shakes in the wind
But always to remember
And delicate.

Delicate is when a thing is breaking
Sometimes when you take it
Or in the wind when it shakes.

Spider webs are to remember
That things are delicate and sometimes break.
But after they break
You remember.

Ray Fabrizio

I can’t resist orange ….

… and when I was at the Contemporary Textile Fair at the Landmark Arts Centre in Teddington, on Sunday …. this rug called out to me and …… later ….. came home with me.

As you can see, it’s falling apart at the ends near the fringes. I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

Should I chop the ends off and refringe it?  Should I try to do giant darning on it?

Any comments?

Is it a tulip? No it’s a Nump Bag.

I blogged about the Nump Bag v 0.2 and told you that I posted off northwards to the middle offspring in Durham so quickly that I didn’t take any pics of it. Well MO has sent me images of Nump 0.2 in operation…..

Cosy Times

A friend was kind enough to send me a book containing knitted and crocheted tea cosies. Being one of those people who never has the right needles or yarn I decided just to grab what I had and have a stab at one.

So off I went, whilst watching something mindless on television, wrong needles and inappropriate yarn flailing. This one is large doubled-over footless sock. Then you have to knit or crochet a saucer-like top to stitch inside your footless sock. The final stage is to knit or crochet flowers, leaves etc to burgeon forth from your woolly creation. I had a brainwave – somewhere – lurking in the depths of bags and boxes I had some bits and pieces. With my machete in hand, I braved the depths of what we euphemistically call “the dining room” and managed to uncover a bagful of  leafy, flowery stuff that I threw at my pro-type cosy.

You can see the result above – just don’t move the cosy perched on the upturned plastic jug, because if you do all that verdant growth will fall like leaves in autumn.

What do you read about?

As usual I seem to gain my inspiration from fellow bloggers. Over on Stuck-in-a-Book’s most recent blogpost, Simon has put up a list of one person’s favourite books. I couldn’t sleep at 0330 this morning so left my bed and started to read my usual blogs. I couldn’t resist putting Simon’s list of books that the late Mary Ann Shaffer, author of “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society” had considered her favourites, into a spreadsheet and seeing what sort of book she read. My first thought was that I hadn’t read many of them and indeed had never even heard of quite a few. So here is the list re-ordered into 4 groups (see final column A,B, C, D) with one odd-man-out at the end.

[this table is also available as a pdf file here]

Mary Ann appeared to have an interest in novels set in the First & Second World Wars. However, on reflection I would say that the greatest number of books on the list show an interest in pioneers, settlers, immigrants, those who leave one culture/race and attempt to make their way in another. Some of the books, of course, should be included in at least two of the categories.

Other than “My Antonia”, which was published in 1918, all the books were published in 1945 or afterwards.

There are thirty-one books on Mary Ann’s list. If we saw your thirty favourites what would we summise about you?

The Scent of Spies

“The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I’m a child again and everything’s before me – all the frightening, half-understood promise of life.”

“Spies” by Michael Frayn is one of those books that lurk on the TBRBOH (to be read by other half ) pile. TOH spends a large part of his day travelling on public transport and so consumes vast amounts of the written word during hiis progress. Our reading tastes hardly ever overlap, the works of Brian Moore being one notable exception.

The one-word title “Spies” coupled with “Germans” and “infiltrated on the back-cover blurb led me to believe that this book’s rightful place was on the “his” rather than the “her” TBR pile. How wrong could I be. The blogosphere has been rumbling with mention of this book recently with one much-respected blogger threatening to read this in the next few days. So realising that I was probably missing out on a good thing I picked up my forked stick and went book-divining around the book stashes. Having a dim memory that the cover was green I set out on the trail of this book determined to discover its secret.

The writing is deceptively simple. Once we have moved from the adult world of the narrator to his child self we could be forgiven for assuming that we were now in an Emil and The Detectives or a Nancy Drew mystery. For half the book we remain in this world until almost imperceptively the emphasis shifts and our eyes are opened. With the advantage of age our suspicions are well ahead of our child protagonist but this does not shield us from the anguish that we will feel as intently as he as our initial suppositions are overturned.

To say anymore would be to run the risk of publishing too many spoilers, so just take my words of advice. As well as avoiding the pitfall of judging a book by its cover be sure not to judge a book by its title.

Nump2 / miniNUMP

The NUMP bag created for middle sprog didn’t meet with the rapturous applause that I expected. Whilst my time and effort was acknowledged, the NUMP bag was judged to be too bulky, too heavy and even too capacious. “I could almost fit my laptop in there” was the verdict.

Earlier in the week I found some “kyte” material in my local budget fabric shop. It looked like rip-stop with those tiny self-patterned squares and the hand was similar. Only available in one colour, bright orange, I decided to splash out on the purchase of one metre. So Thursday saw me constructing a smaller, unlined version of the NUMP bag (N etwork cable, U sb cable, M ouse, P ower cable). Instead of different-coloured pockets I sewed a different colour label to the top of each pocket. This cut-down NUMP2/ miniNUMP doesn’t have the pockets on pockets for pens, pencils, mobile phone etc. The best thing about this new addition the NUMP family is that it fitted neatly into an A5 envelope. (Please don’t deride me for not knowing that an A5 envelope is really C5 or D5 or DL because I don’t intend to become a stationery expert at this late stage in my life).

The second miniNUMP was completed I marched round to the postbox and sent it on its way forgetting to record its likeness for posterity. So unless middle sprog obliges me with a snap I won’t be able to share its appearance with you.

Stealing a kid from “Stuck”

There are some bloggers that just seem to be writing for me. Top of my list is Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book. He will insist on writing things that make me scream “me too” or, worse than that, I end up stealing borrowing snippets and putting them on my own blog. So here we go again. S-i-a-B’s posting today is about the other five books that Bloomsbury are going to reprint (the first is “Miss Hargreaves” by Frank Baker.

S-i-a-B had not heard of “A Kid for Two Farthings” by WoldMankowitz so finally I know something that he doesn’t. Phew! I’m more than twice his age so it’s about time that age won out over beauty. AKFTF is one of those books that I picked up a million years ago in a bin/box outside a shop (probably charity shop but who rememebers). Usually those bins contain nothing but dross or what looks like dross and to be honest my copy of AKFTF (as above) certainly looked like pulp fiction. it gave the appearance of being nicotine-stained even if it wasn’t. I was about 14, actually thinking about it, probably more like 12 when I picked this book up and it widened my knowledge of the world considerably, but in a very innocent way. I remember being appalled at the way pets were sold on the market because, although I was born at the tail end of the 1950s, I think I must have lead a sheltered life and been protected from some of the upsetting things in life. I also rememebr being fascinated by dealing in antiques in this story. If I remember correctly then there is a touch of the Lovejoys in one strand of the stories that weave together. So if you are up for a bit of magic, in an era before everyone wore jeans everywhere then stand in line and wait for the Bloomsbury reprint of “A Kid for Two Farthings”.

How popular are you?

Well, your NAME rather than you. Both my sons names have gone UP in popularity but my daughter’s name has gone DOWN.  If you want to see the ranking for the names of you and your family then pop over here.

Just for fun

Do you know your biblical references?

Go on, click on the link and give it a go. I managed 8/10 probably due more to luck and old age than anything else.

The N U M P bag

I’ve spent most of today making a N U M P bag (Network cable, Usb cable, Mouse, Power cable)
for G.

He saw my drawstring sewing things bag and decided that he would like a bag, made to a similar design,
to contain cables and other bits and pieces for his laptop. This cable-organising bag could then be
slung in his rucksack without everything ending up as a rat’s nest.

When opened completely flat, the sewing bag is a very large circle.

The  N U M P   bag, however, is made as a cylinder. It looks a little like a small fabric bucket.
The exterior fabric is black cotton duck. Black chosen to be masculine and the cotton duck because it is a sturdy fabric.

Inside the  N U M P  bag there are 4 pockets/dividers, each made from a different fabric. A really
organised person will always put a particular cable back in a particular pocket, therefore making it
easy to know where each cable is. Each of the pockets has a smaller pocket on the outside, two of
them wide and two skinnier ones which can be used for pens, pencils etc.

The bag has a circular bottom and a drawstring closure. There is a sturdy grab handle on each side,
and a loop so that the bag can be hung up on a hook.

Exciting News

I’ve just read some exciting news over on Stuck-in-a-Book. Bloomsbury have decided to reprint a selection of early  20th century books.  So in August look out for “Miss Hargreaves” by Frank Baker but make sure you pronounce her name correctly as “Hargraves”, she is very particular about that.  Miss H will be in a batch of 6 with hopefully more to follow. I’ll be sure to grab a copy because my old orange penguin copy is falling apart.

Under the weather

I can’t believe it. I have now been in bed for 7 whole days and am now halfway through my 8th day of incarceration. All that time i haven’t  had any strength at all to do anything include eat or use the computer. Anyone who knows me will find that hard to believe.

Is the grass greener on someone else’s TBR pile?

Whether you have 3 books waiting to be read or a giant range of TBR (to be read) mountains in your home it is always difficult to decide what to choose next. Now i am going to make it even worse for you.

Go to  flickr.com and search for “TBR pile” and you will find over 50 images of other people’s TBR piles.  Can you read the titles that other people will be reading soon?  Do their covers tempt you? Will you have to go out and get your own copy?. If those piles aren’t enough then go and do the same “TBR pile” search on google images. Oh my goodness! Can there be that many books in the world.

Snow pics – no pics

Snow today and no trains or buses so the only way to get to work was to walk the 5-6 miles to work. I’m a lucky girl so that doesn’t mean tramping through city streets. Once I have walked down to old Father Thames then it’s barely a couple of steps till I am in the largest Royal Park complete with deer, heron, Canada Geese and exotic Psitacula krameri (ring-necked parakeet).

Of course I took my camera with me and took loads of pictures of everything I saw including a SNOW DALEK  taller than a man. It was so well-executed. I suspect that it was built my arts students from Kingston University who have a hall of residence across the road. When I arrived at work i wanted to share my delight at this creation with my colleagues so I borrowed my boss’s universal card reader and prepared to download my pics.

Thank you Julie for finding my exact "Kingston Bridge Snow Dalek"
at http://flickr.com/photos/afraidofducks/3247872829/
I hope that "Afraid Of Ducks/ Mark Merifield" won't mind me showing you his photo.
I wonder if he made the dalek as well as "shooting" it?

Things don’t always go to plan, do they? I shouldn’t be so reliant on modern technology. I should enjoy what I see and not always think, “Oh take a picture” “put it on my blog”. First of all I thought the computer wasn’t recognising the card it kept asking me if I wanted to format the card. Nooooooo!!!!!!  So I put he card back in the camera and tried to look at the pics on there. But the pics that HAD been there, because i saw at least two of them had DISAPPEARED!!

sob … sob …. sob     so my snow pics have turned into no pics!

I’ve tried searching online for the Kingston Bridge Dalek but the talented people who made it were sensible and enjoyed the process of making their artwork and causing everyone to smile as they crossed the bridge to work. They weren’t as blog/online/web/intenet addicted as some people. If you google “snow dalek” you will find some examples. Snow Daleks are obviously IN. However, you won’t find a snow dalek as impressive as the one I saw this morning.

Purple Play & Sock Silliness

I live not far from Hounslow, Middlesex. It is a mini-mini-mini Southall. By that I mean that it has a high Asian population and consequently a good few shops full  of Asian goodies. One of these shops sells fabric, much of it with a great bling factor and even better than that there is usually some very cheap fabric to be had. The downside is that I never really NEED any such fabric but of course I can’t resist a rummage in the remnant bin or the purchase of “just one metre” of this and that. So it was that a few years ago I acquired this purple fabric.

If you look at the bottom of the photo you will see the front of the material. It really is a bit too much for me to think of anything to use it for and so it has languished in various bags, piles and heaps since it came home with me.

For a while I have been considering that the back of the fabric would be more useable even though those gold squiggles show through in places. My scissors first cut into two pieces that I sandwiched together with some wadding to make a cover for a notebook. I also sewed in two bookmarks made from wrapped yarn. I used a length of red yarn and machine wrapped it with red bobbin thread and blue top thread.

My second piece of purple playfulness was the unfinished clutch bag in the middle. I bought some bondaweb with the idea that being double-sided I could fuse it between two layers  of the fabric and it would also give it some substance. I don’t know what I was thinking of because of course the bondaweb is so gossamer-like that once the two protective layers are removed  there was no substance left. I probably should have abandoned the project there and then but I’m not like that. I enjoy messing around. So I picked up my second attempt at wrapped thread that had turned out to be what I grandly call “antique gold”. I then began to sew strips of this wrapped thread all over the cut out & sandwiched fabric pieces (one body +flap piece and two gussets). Soon they began to act rather like a corset and when I sewed the pieces together into the bag shape it was more or less self-supporting. Now I think that I will I have to line it somehow and I’ll probably use a double or triple length of the remaining wrapped thread for a strap (even though clutch bags don’t need a strap).

Moving on to the SOCK SILLINESS …

I have my father’s big toes. They seem to have a life of their own and though I don’t ever feel them at it, I know that they wriggle and jiggle all day inside my shoes. How else would I have one giant hole in each toe of nearly all of my socks. Yes, I do know how to darn and I do darn although most of my socks are a cotton mix and don’t accept a lot of darning or in my case, major reconstruction, as well as wool socks do.  A week or two ago I was being all New Yearish and I emptied and sorted my sock drawer. I had no idea how many pairs of socks I had  because quite honestly I ran out of fingers and toes (big or small) to count them on. I took a deep breath and decided to throw out all those socks that had darns on the darns or were in urgent need of such. The pile was mountainous and I just couldn’t bear to throw them out. I had several pairs of spotty, dotty socks and many with stripes. I have a weakness for both. So .. I cut off the damaged toes, the heels (which  are the most three-dimensional part of the sock) and the cuffs. This resulted in two “tubes” per sock and I cut down each down the length resulting in a flat pirce of sock fabric. Then in a very haphazard way I zig-zagged the pieces together. Now what on earth have I ended up with …. a squilt? And what on earth do I do with this “squilt”?

Finally … on the left …. two more pieces of the fabric, right bright sides together. The flower’s centre made from a green foil wrapper from a chocolate (“borrowed” from the Loom Monkey’s magpie stash of “useful things”) and the orange petals machine embroidered. Finally I stitched a decorative machine-embroidered border around the edge of the piece sandwiching the two pieces of fabric together.

Transformation

Left and middle are how I used to look and now I look like the pic on the right. I couldn’t believe how much hair was on the floor after the cut. I decided that as I always scrag my hair right up off my neck all the time that I might as well have it chopped off. I’m not convinced about the visual results yet but it certainly feels good.

All NEIL to the winner of the 2009 Newbery Medal

Here and on other blogs there has been talk of favourite books from childhood so it seems appropriate to mention news about a children’s book published last year that should surely be well-remembered years from now.

The Newbery Medal is awarded annually by the American Library Association for the most distinguished American children’s book published the previous year. According to my calculations this is the 87th year it has been awarded and I am delighted to say that I have read this year’s winning book, “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean. You can see it here at the bottom of a pile of new children’s books. I read both TGB and Chris Priestley’s two Tales of Terror books while on holiday in Cornwall in September. Whilst the Terror books were enjoyable enough I was well aware that I was reading a children’s book. Neil Gaiman’s book was diferent. I think I was a child again or at least suspended any adult thought that I should be reading a “good” well-written book and was totally immersed. I couldn’t put the book down and I lived the experiences with the characters.

My edition of “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaimanis published by Bloomsbury and is a joy to behold and hold even before starting to read.

The exciting news is that a film is to be made of the book directed by Neil Jordan. Jordan directed “The Company of Wolves” which was based on short stories by Angela Carter in her collection “The Bloody Chamber”. She also wrote the screenplay for the film. When my daughter was about 7 or 8 her favourite animals were wolves and I somehow allowed her to see the film “The Company of Wolves” before I had viewed it myself. It’s amazing that someone didn’t inform social services and have her taken away from me! Neil Jordan has directed other films including “The End of the Affair”, “The Crying Game” and “Interview with the Vampire” but I don’t think that I have seen any of those.

Here’s the trailer from The COMPANY of WOLVES

and The END of the AFFAIR

I seem to have digressed from my original subject, Neil Gaiman and “The Graveyard Book” which tells o the life of a young child who has been brought up in the parallel world that exists in the graveyard, Once you accept the central premise of the book you are swept along with events. I can’t wait to see what Neil Jordan does with the book and it will interesting to see how the casting dice are thrown.

Puffins on Parade

I thought I’d share a glimpse of some of my old puffins with you. Here they are – enjoy!
The extremely well-loved one 4th from the right on the top shelve is “The Grove of Green Holly” by Barbara Willard. The most-battered on the lower shelf is “The Wardens Niece” by Gillian Avery.

I found a piece about Barbara Willard that you may like to read: “The Pleasure of Her Company – Remembering Barbara Willard” by Lance Salway.

Finished reading, started reading

A few days ago I finished reading “Two Caravans” by Marina Lewycka. For some reason I keep calling it “two tractors” even though when I say the words I see a caravan. All the quotes about this book use words like funny, hilarious, humour yet that’s not what remains with me. This is a sad book that lets us see into the world of those who work for below the minimum wage often with anything that they are have been told they will earn being taken for “expenses”. Now I am swinging things in the opposite direction from the hilarious and that again is mis;eading because this is a very enjoyable read and yet it causes me to spare a thought for things that if I am honest I would rather not hear about. I would prefer to be safely tucked up in my comfortable home, rather like  one of the minor characters, worrying abut what sort of vegetarian I should be or what colour my kitchen should be, than what two or three items I can purchase with the very little money I have. If I buy an own brand “basic” loaf, and margarine will I still have enough to buy a tin of pilchards which I have been advised is one of the cheapest forms of protein. Is it ethical to steal carrots from a field to ensue that I take in some fresh food? We have all seen clips of battery chickens on TV but somehow seeing those places through the eyes of a migrant worker and learning what he has to do to earn his meagre wage and “see” his ghastly living conditions in my imagination had a much greater effect on me.

Then sticking to my resolution to read books I already have, I picked up “Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo” by Ntozake Shange.  This is the story of three sisters from Charleston, South Carolina. So far I can see that Ntozake Shange shares at least some experiences with one of the girls.

The Enjoyable Reading of Brian Moore

What do you do when you go on holiday? Go to the library of course, especially if you are tempted in by a notice saying, “BOOKS FOR SALE”. Two hours later you scrape yourself off the floor of that municipal building and pay up for a stretched armful of books that you can’t possibly leave to be unloved.

And so it was that I acquired my first Brian Moore. It was a very slim volume, its purple, plastic-protected jacket faded to mauve: “Catholics”.

The book begins:

The fog lifted. The island was there. The visitor walked to the end of the disused pier and saw it across three miles of ocean, riding the sea like an overturned fishing-boat. morning sunlight moved along a keel of mountain, above valleys black as tarred boatsides. He thought of Rome. Surprisingly the Order itself had little descriptive information. In the Lungoterre Vaticano he had been handed an out-of-print book: Weir’s Guide to Religious Monuments.

Though I picked the book up in the library in Padstow, Cornwall, the beginning of this short novel reminded me of the first time I had travelled to Caldey Island, off Tenby, South Wales to stay at the guesthouse of the Cistercian (Trappist) Caldey Abbey.

So if you have never read any Brian Moore, or indeed visited a monastery, then Catholics would seem a good place to begin.

Now I know that I have promised not to buy any books but after I have shepherded my Brian Moore’s together, I will make a list of those I need to look out for, and I will carry it with me, because if you see a book that you know you need then you have to buy it. don’t you.

Meanwhile, in preparation for my Moore hunt, I will share my list of books with you. Brian Moore also wrote as Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara but I’m not sure if I will start on those just yet.

BRIAN MOORE 1921-1999 “his books often have a religious motif, without religious intent” “‘every tale should tell itself’. Story is everything… the writers we remember were dedicated story-tellers.”
Wreath for a Redhead ( in US “Sailor’s Leave”)	1951	writing as Michael Bryan
The Executioners	1951	writing as Michael Bryan
French for Murder	1954	writing as Bernard Mara
A Bullet for My Lady	1955	writing as Bernard Mara
Judith Hearne	1955	read & seen film
This Gun for Gloria	1956	writing as Bernard Mara
Intent to Kill	1956	writing as Michael Bryan
The Feast of Lupercal	1957
Murder in Majorca	1957	writing as as Michael Bryan
The Luck of Ginger Coffey	1960
An Answer from Limbo	1962
Canada	1965
The Emperor of Ice Cream	1965
I Am Mary Dunne	1968
Fergus	1970
The Revolution Script	1971
Catholics	1972		read
The Great Victorian Collection	1975		read
The Doctor’s Wife	1976	have ? but not read yet
Two Stories	1978
The Mangan Inheritance	1979
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes	1981
Cold Heaven	1983
Black Robe	1985		read
The Color of Blood	1987		read
Lies of Silence	1990		read
No Other Life	1993		read
The Statement	1995		think I’ve read
The Magician’s Wife	1997		have but not read

The Last of London

So here’s the last instalment of pics from my day out in “Big Grownup London,” as the childen used to say.

We emerged from watching the light installations in the subways around the IMAX cinema and started to walk across Waterloo Bridge

from Waterloo Bridge, looking left

from Waterloo Bridge, looking right towards Blackfriar’s Bridge & St Paul’s Cathedral

almost at the far (North) side of Waterloo Bridge, we look down to see our destination, Somerset House

after our visit to the Terrace Rooms, Somerest House to see Richard Bryant’s “Greater London” exhibition

we stood on the terrace and looked across at the House of Parliament, rising out of the cold January sky

Northwards and slightly east and we found ourselves in Covent Garden where I looked down & spotted these colourful tables &  chairs

Don’t forget to look up when you walk around town – you never know what you might see

I do hope the floor inside this inter-building covered walkway/ pedestrian bridge is more level than it looks

There’s “Richard Bryant’s London” in the window of Hatchards, elbowing Diana (Mitford) Mosley’s “Pursuit of Laughter” out of view

some more colourful changing lights as people began to head for home

darkness began to fall and I made my way to Green Park, Vauxhall and eventually home.

Underneath the IMAX

The subways round the IMAX cinema have been treated as a lighting installation. The lights change gradually from one colour to the next. if you look at the green image below you can see that it has just started the red sequence. Very slowly,  bulb by bulb, the lights will switch from green to red until the whole subway is glowing red. It was fascinating to watch but still had that creepy feeling that seems to emanate from subways and underpasses.

Ruth in Wonderland

I don’t know about you but I’m still a bit of a child when it comes to stunning window displays. Yesterday I popped up to London and walked across Waterloo Bridge to see an exhibition by my boss at Somerset House and then afterwards just wandered slowly around a little of London. Maybe I’ll share some photos with you over the next few days.

Everyone was back at work after the break and it wasn’t a weekend, Christmas and Sale shopping seemed to be all done and we’re supposed to be suffering from the credit crunch, so the pavements were relatively uncluttered. Eventually I found myself in Piccadilly and stories told to me by my grandmother came to mind. She told of “the poor children” pressing their noses against the windows of the rich and being amazed at the sights within. They saw houses decorated like palaces, piles of delicacies and sweetmeats, the like of which they could never have imagined, all lit up by candles that cast a magical glow. It felt a bit like that when I caught glimpses inside The Ritz and marvelled at the windows of Fortnum & Masons and the Waterford & Wedgwood shop in the Piccadilly Arcade. So now I propose to present to you a magic lantern show of what I saw.

Gilead

Sometime last year, or was it the year before, I picked up Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and started to read. It didn’t draw me in and I thought that life was too short to struggle when there were plenty of other books to hand. Fast forward a year or so and isn’t it amazing what a challenge can do? The revered DoveGreyReader has a column at the left-hand side of her blog showing the heap of books that she is “currently reading”.  I spied Gilead nestling near the top of that heap and that was enough. The hat was thrown in the ring and I picked it up.

An elderly preacher who has been blessed with a late marriage at 67 and the birth of a son when he was almost 70 fears his imminent death at 76 and sets out to write a letter to his son setting out, as he puts it, the family’s begats and all the things he has never said because he has spent his whole life studying and writing sermons. The book is a shock to the system. It is like nothing I have read before and I’m sure that is why I had to set it aside when I first encountered it.  Life in the small town of Gilead is quiet and slow-moving and I think that is another reason why I struggled with my first attempt. The slowing down of my own life over the Christmas holidays went a long way to preparing me for this attempt. I stumbled a little before page 50 but the knowledge that DoveGrey Reader was with me somewhere on the same road was a comfort and I girded my loins, took a long slow breath and found my pace.

This book most reminds me of the fragmented accounts and stories passed to my sisters and me by our maternal grandmother. Gentle soft conversation washing over you as you hardly concentrate. Each small piece of information doesn’t mean much but put it altogether and you begin to build a picture of a person, a family, a time. You can only touch the edge of all that has gone before as your life is ahead of you but you can be sure that all that has occurred is part of what you are and will be. As I read it caused me to reflect upon my own family. My grandfather was 76 when my father was born. It the one photo that I have seen of him, he, like Ames, sports a long beard. It must have been strange for hime to have a young family years after his “first children” were fully grown. How I would have liked him to have written a letter to my father, his 3 year old child, in his last few days before he died aged 79.

Ames, often alludes to some shame in the life of his godson John Ames Broughton.  Were this a more action-packed book I would have been impatient to discover the full story but if anything this book teaches you patience.  John Ames will not be hurried, he is getting old and by the end of the book we come to realise that not even he knows the full story.

Ames talks of Fuerbach and Calvin and other religious and philosophical writers. I have heard of the latter but not the former and I’m sure that anyone who is familiar with the works of these and others will  garner far more from “Gilead” than I ever could as could those who are familiar with American history. When I had finished I had to run off and google “Free Soilers”. Maybe I need to make myself a time line and hang a few events on it and read around the subject.  Now where does March by Geraldine Brooks slot in?

A Walk in the (Royal)Park

map with thanks to OpenStreetMap and contributors

I’ve been lazy over the Christmas holidays and not ventured out much. I was lying in bed this morning at 1030 reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson when My Little Darling threw herself on top of me, hugged me and said, “are you coming for a walk?”

I’m always complaining that I need exercise and deriding the family for not dragging me out so, of course, the book had to be set aside, clothes thrown on, hat, gloves and coat donned and best foot put forward. Unlike some bloggers I don’t live in the wilds of Scotland, near the sea in Cornwall, the edge of a moor in Devon or a prairie in wherever you get prairies, but within a stone’s throw of my house I do have Bushy Park, the second largest of the Royal Parks with an area of 445 hectares (1,099 acres) and a deer population of 300+.

If you look at the purple dots on the map above(courtesy of OpenStreetMap.org),  you will be able to see the route that we took. We took something over two hours on our circuit so any cobwebs were well and truly blown away. Poor MLD who is about half my mass was feeling cold by the end of the walk but of course I have plenty of insulation to keep me well-protected from the elements.  I have been toying with the idea of walking to work at least one day a week in 2009 and the route would be exactly that which we took until we turned northwards to begin our walk home. I would only have to continue eastwards, towards the River Thames and Kingston, for another 10-15 minuutes and I would be at work. Altogether the walk would take me about one hour and ten minutes. At this time of year I would not be able to walk home through the park as the gates are locked at dusk so I would use my Oyster Card to hop on a red double-decker bus and be dropped off a few strides from my home.

I thought I’d share a few images from our walk.

Just after we turned eastwards, to begin our return home, we walked past “Leg of Mutton Pond”. A watery sun shone overhead causing most of the trees to be silhouetted into what I like to refer to as “Winter Lace”.  This is the season that makes me most aware of trees, even more so than spring or autumn. Everything is laid bare and you can really appreciate the negative space between the branches and twigs.

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The noisiest inhabitants of the trees in Bushy Park, and indeed all around this area, are bright green parrot-like birds which according to the RSPB are ring-necked parakeets, the UK’s only naturalised parrot. 

We walked under one tree where a few of them were congregating. One of them had ensconced himself in a hole in a tree and was fluffing up his chest feathers in an attempt to keep himself warm. His compatriots flew around the tree in circles, shrieking loudly with sounds more appropriate to an amazonian jungle than a royal park.

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It’s difficult to believe that there is all this wildlife to observe when we are within the M25, London’s orbital motorway, a bus-ride from Heathrow Airport and not from the city of London itself. On our walk today we soon came to realise that we were being observed as much as we were doing the observing. What do the 300+ deer in this royal park think of the large, often noisy, two-legged creatures who invade their privacy during daylight hours?

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It was past 1300 by the time we crossed the iron bridge that leads to Duke’s Head passage, passing  Hampton’s open air swimming pool before finally leaving the park. Leaning over the bridge where the children often played poohsticks at the end of a walk, the ice was still thick and it seemed likely that a freezing night would swallow up the park before the existing ice had a chance to melt. All the more surprising to see swimmers in the open pool proving the claim that the pool is open 365 days of the year for those brave enough to remove their warm garments.

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So it’s back to work in the morning and any walking will be done to get me from A to B, rather than for the sheer pleasure of being outside. Will I pop down to the station and buy a ticket to ride or will I tramp through the park? Place your bets ladies and gentlemen.

Truly Believable

I picked up my current book because it is a collection of short stories. The review quote from The Times on the back cover  alerts me to the fact that “Eddie Virago’s back. The hero of  Joseph O  ‘ Connor’s widely acclaimed novel Cowboys and Indians features in the first of thirteen stories that make up True Believers.

In some ways this collection takes me out of my comfort zone and also remains there. The stories deal with ordinary people and the everyday pain of ordinary life. Admittedly several are set in Northern Ireland and chronicle a way of life with which I am unfamiliar but underneath and within every story is a pervading sadness which is not far from all our lives.  The stories deal with people leaving, being left or thinking of leaving. People looking back to where they came from and to where they are going and trying to make sense of it all.

True Believers was Joseph O’Connor’s second published work. I am tempted to look out for other writings by him, there are quite a few. Here is what I can choose from:
Novels
Cowboys and Indians. 1991
Finbar’s Hotel (serial novel, with others)1997
The Salesman.1998

Short Stories
True Believers.1992

Plays
Red Roses and Petrol1995
The Weeping of Angels1997

Other
Even the Olives Are Bleeding: The Life and Times of Charles Donnelly. 1992
The Secret World of the Irish Male (humorous essays)1994
Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America.1996
The Irish Male at Home and Abroad (humorous essays)1996

As a reward for reading through that list, I throw in a “did you know”.
Did you know one of his siblings is the musician Sinead O’Connor?

First Book of 2009

Last year finished well. I received the slim and beautiful PITMEN PAINTERS play by Lee Hall thanks to the bounty of DoveGreyReader and delivery skills of Rocky, the ReinCat with his DoveSleigh. If you have no idea what i’m talking about then pop over to the wonderful blog that is DoveGreyReader and, sooner or later, all will be revealed.

I still have TWO CARAVANS secreted in my bag and will be continuing to tow the book along behind me, to and from work until I finish it or one one of my ancient axles rusts away.

Yesterday, New Years Day, I bent down towards the bottom of the shelves just inside what is euphemistically called “the dining room” and ANGELS FLYING SLOWLY  by Jill Roe, caught my eye. It must be the influence of the Christmas season with its surfeit of angels and no doubt if these heavenly beings indulged as much as humans then they would indeed fly slowly.

I wasn’t sure quite what to make of this book as I read the first chapter. It was extremely easy to read and could sit comfortably alongside Noel Streatfeild’s “A Vicarage Family”. Was this a children’s book? It chronicled the lives of two sisters whose lives are changed when their father leaves the family home and their mother remarries. The Vicarage family do not come from a broken home, the girls are not sent away to a convent and most of the time are not unhappy but the way in which we learn about the daily routine of the children in each book has striking similarities.  Jill Roe’s book is set in the late 1940s and the early 1950s whereas Noel Streatfeild’s account leads us up to the start of the First World War in 1914 but to all intents and purposes there is not much difference in the way the children are expected to behave. One set of children have a father who is a vicar and have the torment, as Victoria, a thinly disguised fictionalisation of Noel, sees it of learning her collect every Sunday. Isobel in “Angels..” has to learn pages of her catechism.

There is an innocence in “Angels ..” that could leave this book firmly with a children’s book As we progress to what cannot be called a climax  there are sexual overtones, perhaps better referred to as undertones, Even though they have been there all along, we together with most of the girls in the convent, have not picked up on them.

The last few pages provide what I can only call an appendage, rather than a twist. I was not convinced and I do wonder if these few words were added at the behest of an editor, publisher or author’s advisor of some sort.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has read this or any other of Jill Roe’s novels.

Angels Flying Slowly (1995) A New Leaf (1995) The Topiary Garden (1996) A Well Kept Secret (1998) Eating Grapes Downwards (1999)

Blanket for Charlotte

I managed to make this “blanket” for Charlotte and get it to the post office yesterday, hoping that it will arrive at her house before her birthday in 2 days time,

Say Cheese!

Just arrived back from a round trip to Birmingham to see the first born son (in middle). It’s quite an achievement to have all three in the same county at the same time. These days the boys resemble each other, especially in profile, though they never did when they were young. As for MLD (My Little Darling) she just looks more and more like my baby sister, so much so that I wonder if she is my sister’s child, rather than mine.

And here they all were, 14 years ago in September 1994. One to start school for the first time, the others to start new schools, one junior and one secondary. It’s impossible to get all three smiling at the same time!!

Happy Christmas 2008

Happy Christmas to all

Slim & Black is Beautiful

Since I’ve been cut down to working only three days a week I find that on a Tuesday I feverishly work to tidy everything up so that all will be well until I return to finish my working week on a Friday. More and more this seems to find me working an extra hour or more on a Tuesday just to keep things under control.  So by the time I reached my front door at almost seven thirty it really was quite dark.  No one else was at home so the hall light wasn’t on. Just as I put my key in the door I glimpsed a puffy envelope lurking just under the brick arch of our 1930’s semi.

I’m sure you all share that feeling when your hands clasp one of these exciting packages.  It’s good enough when it’s something you’ve succumbed to online and have ordered yourself, but I had no idea what this was. The only clue was  a “Faber” franking mark so I knew it was likely to be good. Then out slid this exquisite volume. Oh slim, how I love you. You are precious and dark and on your front is a painting. Could you be any more wonderful? Oh yes you could because you are a play. Plays are magical. As I read I hear the voices, I plan the costumes and envisage the set. You will be a wonderful comapnion for my ancient black paperback copy of one-act plays by Chekhov.

This new object of my affection is a copy of “The Pitmen Painters” by Lee Hall kindly sent to me as a result of an advent draw over at DoveGreyReader and put inthe post by Gemma at the publishers, Faber and Faber.

The time is 1934, the place is an unassuming hall outside Newcastle, the players are a group of miners and the occasion is week one of a WEA course on art appreciation. Watch this space.

You have to see this

Pop over to CraftyOrCrazy to watch a video

Experimental

My Little Darling has taken to padding about the house in a pair of old knitted slippers. So I decided to experiment with crocheting some and seeing if I could do it all in one piece. So i grabbed some scraps of wool and here is the result.

Start at the toe with a short chain (I did 7 ch) and crochet all round, doing several (2 or 3) stitches into each end chain. dc (double crochet) didn’t grow fast enough for lazy me, tr (trebles) were too lacy but htr (half trebles) seemed to be a suitable compromise between the two.

Keep adding rounds of crochet as the slipper creeps up the foot. KEEP TRYING IT ON.  Sometimes you will need to do the odd 2 stitches into a “hole” to allow the slipper to increase in width to take your widening/fattening out foot.

My feet are a UK size 7 and I continued till I had done about 13cm.

Then you will crochet down one SIDE of the slipper, under the bottom, then up the other side. STOP.

TURN. Go back down the side, under the bottom of the slipper, and up the other side. TURN

Keep doing this until your “working edge will meet itself UP the back of your heel. I will try to draw a diagram and load it later.

Allow the workind edge to meet itself at the back of your heel and slst the slipper together forming a seam up the back of your heel. If you pick up the “inside” stitch then you will forma decorative double rib up the back of your heel and the inside will be smooth and comfortable.

I then did 3 rows of dc around the opening where your foot goes in, missing a “hole” at each corner. Also added a decorative “thingy” on the front of the slipper.

Jurying her Trifles

Reading DoveGreyReader’s blogpost this morning reminded me of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” / “Trifles” her short story and play in which the neighbouring women are able to “read” the state of mind of a woman whose husband has been murdered. Looking at the stitches in her patchwork quilt they can see that at one point all was not well. Would it be possible to guess someones state of mind from work they post on their blogs? Will someone guess that the reason I knittted up a couple of shawls in quick succession is because our heating keeps breaking down and I need to wear a shawl on top of a jumper? Or will they deduce that I need comfort and only a shawl can provide that woolly hug?

If someone doesn’t post does that mean they are happy and are enjoying real life so much that they forgot about the virtual world?  Should we read between the lines when all seems sweetness and light and we are invited to read about the perfect home, perfect spouse and perfect children? I was recently brought up with a jolt when I senses something not right in one blog that I regularly read.  Just two sentences suggested that one member of the family would no longer be living in that perfectly-crafted home I wonder if someone will be writing a dissertation based on blog evidence (primary sources?) any day soon.

Honey, I Read a Book

Even a lapsed reader has to read sometimes, so over the last few days I have been reading two books. The first, snatched in the few minutes of train travel from home to work and back home again, is “Heroes & Villains” by Angela Carter. The book is slim, an attribute I appreciate. I don’t share the publishers outlook that a book has to be a doorstep to be worthy of publishing. It’s not that I can’t read a lengthy tome, I proved my stamina with “Pinkerton’s Sister” by Peter Rushforth, when all around were falling by the wayside, rather, I choose not to if something wonderful can be contained in just a few well-crafted pages.

I picked up “Heroes & Villains” because it is by the blessed Angela Carter, a writer who died too soon, so of course all her books shoul be read and treasured. I find that I am continuing to read “Heroes & Villains”  because I should, rather than because I can’t put it down or because I find reading it such a joy. I’d never heard of the book until I stumbled across it on the shelves of a charity shop and I wonder what other readers think of this work of hers? Was it one of her best books, or one that should be allowed to lurk in obscurity. It is slim and so I shall persevere. Now that I have two “free” days a week maybe I should stretch my mind a little, do some guided reading or even enrol in an adult education class. There are many references to art, literature, philosophy and disciplines I have probably never heard of. Perhaps I am just too dim to see what the book is about.

The other book that I am reading is still only in working manuscript form. It is my baby sister’s first novel. I have seen it in many pieces, rearranged and reordered. Currently the game is to find a title that gives an indication of the content. The working title, the one we all know and love, tells the prospective reader nothing and so we have been brainstorming to find one that magically makes this oeuvre the book that must be published.

Somehow I don’t think “Honey I Shagged a Crow” will turn this new work into  the fastest selling best-seller since “The Da Vinci Code”.

Baby It’s Cold Outside

As I stepped off the train last night it was a little chilly around the earlobes. Maybe I’m growing old and will soon be seen donning Damart thermals as autumn changes to winter. There was a time when I enjoyed the winter weather, especially the year that I learnt to cross-country ski.

Here’s a picture from that year. Was it really so long ago, it seems like yesterday.

Spinning into Space

Are you a hoarder, or a chucker? If you are a chucker then I suggest you never come here again because I think chucking must be against my religion. Intellectually I know it is something that must be done but like bungee jumping or parachuting, it’s something I don’t even like to think about.

Nevertheless, occasionally I grit my teeth grasp the frame of the aircraft, whoops, I mean room, walk in or rather hop skip and jump over the piles of detritis and see if there’s any way I can reduce the mass. I had a brainwave yesterday. Instead of chucking I will convert things. You’ve already seen my earth mother shawl, which I suppose was a preliminary attempt at conversion but yesterday I went right back to the raw basics.

I think I have a few of these (fleeces) scattered around the house. Most of them are safely enclosed in cotton bags so they remain invisible to normal people. This one, still full of oozy orange lanolin is open to view so I decided to disguise it by using my trusty Ashford traditional Spinning Wheel

and convert the fleece into yarn

It was a cunning plan but I forgot that essential ingredient – TIME !!

So far I have managed two bobbins full which actually is only one bobbin, because the singles have to be plied together to make a stronger yarn.  Remember I’ve got a whole sheep in that basket (or its fleece anyway) and Rome wasn’t spun in a day!!

So have I any more space in my house? Of course not. All I’ve done is drag a few things out into the light of day and make more of a mess than there was in the first place.

Not only ONLINE but also IN PRINT

One of my favourite bloggers, DoveGreyReader is IN PRINT yet again.

If you live down in the West Country and strolled along to your newsagents on Saturday to pick up a copy of the WESTERN MORNING NEWS you would not have been able to miss the large illustrated article about her and her blog.  However, if like me you only dream about living in that neck of the woods then you will have to be content with clicking on the headline below and reading the article online.

Lynne is online literary legend

Saturday, November 15, 2008,

I first “met” Lynne virtually through an online book group that she moderated so imperceptibly that I was unaware that it was her group. After a year of daily chatting with her and the other members of the group, several of us spent a few days at a mini book conference at a Cambridge college enjoying talks, seminars and cocoa dorm parties with equal pleasure.

Then blogs were invented and most members of the group tentatively began their own, some such as DoveGreyReader, Random Jottings, Stuck-in-a-Book & Harriet Devine, with tremendous success.

I’m pleased to see the world outside the blogosphere recognise the contribution that bloggers such as as DGR (DoveGreyReader) bring to the literary world.

Red and Black Recurring

You may remember a while ago that I made MLD (My Little Darling) a red and black quilt. She has a liking for the colours so I decided that, although she has already had her birthday present one month+ in advance, in the shape of a ticket to yet another not to be missed event , that she needed to have one or two things on the actual day. I am proud that I have been organised enough to complete these well on time. No fancy pattern just a “bog standard” toe-down sockand two different colours. I decided to go for the fraternal look – socks that appear to be an exact pair until you look more closely. So each sock was cast on at the cuff with a different colour. The cuff was k2 p2 rib in vertical stripes and then the socks mirrored each other absolutely everywhere EXCEPT that the black-toed one has an extra row of dots just before the toe.

Comfort Knitting

What do you knit when you find yourself at home with  your stash? I feel inclined to call this my Mother Earth shawl. A nice simple pattern starting with just 15 stitches and ending up with so many that they tried to escape from my 80cm circular needle.

The 2 metre “wingspan” shawl is made from wool that started life as a smelly fleece that I washed in my bath, then dyed and finally spun on my spinning wheel before putting it all back together in this cosy shawl that My Better Half describes as “rustic”.

Famous Knitting?

Just in case you don’t know, the rock star in the photo above is one Jared Leto. “But what is that he is clasping in his right hand”,  I hear you clamour. That, my friends, is a pair of dark blue, slightly tweedy fingerless gloves knitted by this Crafty Person herself.  In an idle moment I had knitted up a pair of these in some of my not inconsiderable stash when MLD (My Little Darling) declared that they would be ideal for Mr Leto. But she couldn’t give him the pair that already existed, he had to have a pair specially knitted for him and then she and he could have the SAME GLOVES!!!  The gloves were handed to Jared by MLD herslf after the EMA’s (European Music Awards) last weekand the weather has certainly been chilly enough to suggest that he might actually need such an accessory, unless he has flown back to California. So if any of you see J wearing these snappy items please report back here. It’s a bit like Spring Watch with Bill Oddie but what we are waiting for is a glimpse of glove!!

Inspiring Art

As the show that is the US elections draws to a close I decided to share what could be called a piece of election art with you. One of my newest friends is the talented fiber artistn Dindga McCannon. I met Dindga last year and have been corresponding with her ever since. We met up again this year and she promised to send me pictures of some of her latest commissions.

One commissioning client was so enthusiastic about the chances of democrat Barack Obama becoming the next president of the USA that they commissioned McCannon to make a piece of fiber art to commemorate this charismatic man.

Dindga McCannon decided to create a series of pieces. She told me that when someone commissions a piece of work from a particular artist they are quite often thinking of work that the artist has created in the past. SInce the age of ten, McCannon has been an artist and she explained to me that an artist must not stay still but continually be inspired by people, events and ideas around them. For that reason she designed and made several pieces knowing that the piece the client might expect was unlikely to be the piece that most excited her as an artist.You can learn more about Dindga McCannon here and see a video that features another piece from McCannon’s Barack Obama series.

The result of the election is still unknown but I for one vote Dindga McCannon’s art a winner.

Confessions of a lapsed writer

Not content with being a lapsed reader I have now become a confirmed lapsed writer as well.

I love blogland. I feel as though I know so many people. One day we hang out at one person’s blog but then one by one we move on and read and comment on someone elses. Sometimes you bump into the same little clique of people. Sometimes you glimpse someone across a blogpost or on a blogroll that tickles your fancy and you can’t help hanging around their blog for a while. At first you might sit in the corner and just look and listen to see what all the really cool people are talking about. Sometimes you pluck up enough courage to comment with a forceful “Me Too” or similar. You may even forsake your old blog cronies and hang out more with the new crowd dreaming that their lifetstyle is yours. X is so talented building a whole house from a piece of string, a bent paperclip and an old tea towel from a jumble sale. Y manages to ready 30,000 books in an hour and a half, write reviews of them all and make gingwrbread people for her family, run a small business and be an ambassador for the UN. Z has an allotment, 3 goats, is sailing round the world in a coracle whilst gaining the world speed knit record.

So why can’t I do that? Why can’t I manage to read a book in less than a year? Why can’t I manage to post something on this ramshackle blog of mine?  Why can’t my house be completley brilliant white except for a few gingham items artfully put together with my own hands?  Because I am addicted to other people’s blogs and it takes me all my waking hours when I am not at work to read them.  I shoudl sign up to BlogReaders Anonoymous but instead I have “Me Tooed” over at Chuck Westbrook’s blog and committed myself to reading a new blog every 2 weeks. Someone in a white coat please come and take me away.

Ecstatically Happy Bunny

After several weeks of extensive investigative surgery, and a final bypass operation yesterday, I am overjoyed to announce that my daily task of draining the washing machine manually via that little door (bottom left), are well and truly over.

The beast is still dragged out from under the work-surface, and operating on bypass, but we are confident that his circulation will be back to normal when we put him and his hoses back where he belongs.

I love mod cons!

Well done White Tiger

I thought that was quite an amusing blogpost title. White tigers are RARE and I said WELL DONE. No, oh well never mind. Back to congratulating author Aravind Adiga  his book “White Tiger” being the winner of the Booker Prize 2008.

I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of the book by DoveGreyReader and even luckier that it arrived some while before a week’s holiday in a comfy cottage in Cornwall. Have you ever been so fired up about something that you thought about writing a letter to your Member of Parliament or a newspaper or just anyone so that you get get your feelings about something off your chest? Maybe you have a blog and that is where you let off steam.

The main protagonist in Adiga’s book IS the White Tiger and

Do you believe in Angels?

I just had an email from one. Her name is Dindga McCannon and she is an author, illustrator and talented textile artist from New York.

She materialised in front of my eyes almost a year ago to this day at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Ally Pally when I was looking for someone I had never even seen a photograph of but knew was a black artist. I had been stalking anyone who looked as they they might be my “target”. When I walked up to Dindga and said for the umpteenth time, “excuse me, are you …..?” she smiled and replied, “no but she’s a good friend of mine.” How weird was that? We spent a day together last October (pic above is of Dindga outside the Geffrye Museum on that day) and we have kept in spasmodic contact since. Weeks ago she told me she would probably pop over for the show again this year but we haven’t emailed recently and I decided not to go this year. Last year I bought some Habo stainless steel yarn and I haven’t knitted it up yet because I didn’t ever allow myself enough time to get to grips with the Japanese knitting diagrams. Feeling guilty about that particular part of my stash I thought it best to stay at home with my debit card out of harm’s way.

So suddenly, up popped an email from this textile angel asking me to meet her at a set time “by the giant knitting needles”.  I emailed back saying I wasn’t going this year but she took the trouble to phone me straight away and persuaded me to get out of the house for the day.

Giant knitting needles here I come!

Not a Happy Bunny

This unhappy bunny learnt yesterday that with just 17 days notice she will be reduced from working 5 days a week to just 3 resulting in a 40% decrease in monthly income.

Looking back

Gift for Bookworms?

I came across this notebookon the website of Culture Vulture Direct

It is described as “Books to Check Out Journal”: Handy notebook for any bookworm, with sections for making notes of Booksto read, listing Booksborrowed and cataloguing favourite reads. Hardback, 17cm (6 3/4″) x 110 cm (4 1/2″), 2 pockets.

I can think of several people I know who wouldn’t mind finding this in their Christmas stocking.

On holiday

I’ve opened “The Door” by Magda Szabo

This book has been on the giant toppling TBR pile by my bed so large that I had to start reading it before it toppled off the heap and killed me. I don’t think that I will give anything away by saying that the narrator of the book is is a woman who “had begun enquiring about domestic help the momemt we finished moving our library-sized collection of books and our rickety old furniture”. Literary and film experience has shown that likely candidates for such a position can range from Jane Eyre, Mrs Harris and Mary Poppins by way of Mrs Doubtfire and Nanny McPhee up to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. In this case the successful applicant is a cross between Mrs Harris and Mrs Doubtfire, without the drag or the haute-couture aspirations. A couple of decades ago I came across a similar individual. She “did” for most of the big houses near our small flat and an arrangement was only entered into if SHE decided to take you on and not the other way around. The penultimate sentence of the third page states, “I killed Emerence” so a chill that is not just generated by summer swiftly turning to autumn here is definitely hovering around. This book is definitely accompanying me on a weeks’s holiday starting tomorrow.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

What a title! What on earth can the book be about? If I’m honest I don’t really care. With a title like that I know that sooner or later I will will have to read it. The book is published by Gallic Books a publisher I have never heard of but already i am tempted to see what else has been put out into the world by them. So far, and before I have even seen it or held it in my hands, this book has gained two points, Firstly it has a title that intrigues, secondly it has a cover that is more than acceptable and probably as elegant as the spiny one that it contains, I think that before long I will have to get my hands on this volume and I have a feeling that it will jump towardds the top of the TBR pile. If you are as intrigued by the title as I was then you can read the beginning of the book on Gallic’s website.

My sisters are mad

I’m the oldest, then there’s Sister C who doesn’t have a blog but does have an allotment. But hers is not just any old allotment, oh no! “The St Anns Allotments are the oldest and largest detached town gardens in Britain, possibly the world. Their unique history and heritage has been recognised and it is a Grade 2* listed site.”

The picture above is of her latest adventure in that listed land – A RECYCLED PLASTIC BOTTLE GREENHOUSE!!!! Her allotment neighbour (seen above) helped her make the timber “outline” and then with the help of anyone she has ever known she collected, and is still collecting, empty, lemonade, cola, ginger beer bottles. My baby sister, the writer, who has two allotments with her partner on the same site, explained how the bottles are used. She is suffering from what they call “White Hand” an affliction that falls upon you after a session of cutting the bottles with scissors. The repeated scissor-action drains the lifeblood from the bottle worker, turning it white! The base of each bottle is removed, with scissors. Then a V-shaped slot is cut on either side, near the top of the bottle after its location being carefully measured. A little V-wing is then able to pop out of each side of the bottle so that when the next layer of bottles is stacked it does not slip too far down. Clear as mud? I was given the gory statistics of how many bottles were in the roof and how many bottles were still needed to complete the project but I never was very good with numbers.

Auditions over, roles cast and the fabric performs

A while ago I was auditioning fabric for a quilt destined for my own bed this time. So here is the result.
The fabrics in the quilt are:

some samples of shibori indigo dyeing that I did several years ago
an already tie-dyed sheet from a jumble sale
sections of a curtain from another jumble sale
one or two small remnants from a friend
some old pieces of sheet dyed by me in yellow & blue

The whole thing was backed with a dark blue piece of sheeting and now I have started a sort of sashiko type quilting. In other words I am using a very visible cotton thread. On the reverse side this often shows up in high contrast. Particularly noticeable are the flowers, fish and “compass”. I still have quite a lot of the quilting to go but I am not going to reush it. When the spirit moves I will pick it up and do a little. I might even take it on holiday with me at the end of September at least I won’t be cold.

Still reading … THE GARLIC BALLADS

Life, work, quilting, everything seems to have come before reading this book which I have been carrying backwards and forwards to work on the train for what seems like long enough for me to have harvested my owngarlic crop.

The book is not an easy read. For one thing everyone seems to be called Gao or Fourth Uncle/Aunt or Elder Brother. On this naming problem alone the book is more complicated to navigate than any Russian tome. I think that if I started to read this book again I would note down a new major character as they appeared. My problem was mainly with the Gaos. One Gao was all set to elope with 4th, or was it 8th Uncle’s daughter, and she confusingly referred to her prospective joint-elopee as “Elder Brother” as a mark of respect rather than any indication that they were siblings. Another Gao was flung into jail but then so were so many others, including xth Aunt and goodness knows who else. I should have understood, before I started that in China John Smith would be known as Smith John, his brother would be Smith Michael and probably at least half the population would also be Smith something or other. If each chapter hadn’t started with a few words from a ballad written to commemorate something in e.g 1987 I would have forgotten that this book is set in the 1980s. Life is so primitive and the treatment of people both by their families and by the authorities and police is barbaric. We’re not like that are we? Have things moved on so much in 20 or 30 years? Last night I saw a few minutes of a programme about police shows on TV. The part that I saw was talking about “The Sweeney” made in the mid to late 1970s and co-starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman. The programme mentioned the fantasy police series “LIfe on Mars” in which a present day policeman finds himself transported back in time and working with a detective who is close to being a clone of Reegan, the character played by John Thaw in “The Sweeney”. With hindsight the attitude and behaviour of the police in those programmes is unacceptable but at the time it was just how things were. We in the west are not so lily-white and without fault as we get on our high-horses and look down on how things are done in China. We are a very small nation and we still haven’t cleaned up our act completely so we shouldn’t be too quick to criticise others.

Reading “The Garlic Ballads” helped me to understand how rural and primitive China is, or at least still was at the end of the 1980s. Think how things have changed for us in that same space of time. Did you have a computer, an internet connection, a mobile phone in the 1980s? Now think how much of your daily life is influenced by those three things today. Because of the Olympics China has opened up. Let’s hope that that enormous country can learn from some of our mistakes.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, I still haven’t finished the book.

A girls’ guide to India

Way back in the 70s I was lucky enough to spend 29 days in India. So that’s why this book appealed to me. Like the cover the content is amusing and if you read the book in public you may find that people move away from you because most pages will cause your lips to break into a smile. Some people find that disturbing.

The author has travelled extensively in India and has amassed more than a backpack of hints, tips and essential advice which were screaming to be shared with more than a handful of travellers.

This is no dry tome of Nanny-knows-best facts. The book is cleverly divided into bite-sized chunks by letters of the alphabet. I found the book so interesting that I was up to M before I had even drawn breath. I forced myself to set it aside as I was in grave danger of resigning from my job, throwing a piece of string and a hot water bottle into a bag and catching the bus to Heathrow.

Rehearsals Begin ….

Surprise all around. Seven promising candidates banished from any chance of appearing in this production!

One entrant proved to be more suitable for a part than was immediately obvious and as you can see Mustard Indigo Tie-Dye is on stage for the duration of the performance. My initial thought was that he would make an ideal backstage team (back of the quilt) but his personality was uncrushable. My original favourite was an off-cut with a white background and crisp orange flowers and green leaves but in reality he couldn’t hold the note long enough and was sent home to the scrap bag with his tail between his legs.

Now the problem with Mr Mustard Indigo is that he can’t quite make it to the end of the run and I am frantically preparing some additional pieces to complete the season. This weekend I shall be dyeing and hope that I can create a piece of cloth that will fit in with what has already been sewn together.

Mr Mustard Indigo’s parentage is uncertain. I bought him at a jumble sale and he has lurked in my stash for almost a year. I wonder if he is the result of a union between an indigo vat and a session of rust-dyeing? I suppose I will never know. I am not so adventurous and so this Bank Holiday weekend I will be dunking some unsuspecting mousey bit of fabric in a couple of packets of Dylon.

Strange Words

Make sure you sit facing the door

and try not to hear the clippity-clop of your colleague’s shoes as they walk across the floor.

L I S T EN

one day a woman bought a book

she thought it was slim and contained almost nothing

but as she read she was entranced and couldn’t put it down

she was transported to another land and the magic took such a hold of her that she nearly forgot

to get off her train

“Strange Words” by Patrick Chamoiseau,

and in my edition published by Granta, is a charming little book of Creole stories.

I love the way the shape of the words on the page help to tell the story and draw you in.

The themes are as old as the hills.

A stranger who turns out to be something more than they first appear.

A young beautiful girl moves away from her family and is shown round her new home

but told not to enter some rooms….

I picked up this book with the intention of sending it to my baby sister who is currently writing her first novel which could loosely be classified as “magical realism”. But the book has cast its spell on me and every time I reach for an envelope the book whispers its transfixing incantation,

Keep me, keep me

I am  yours

F  O  R  E  V  E  R

Today I will mostly be …. auditioning fabric …

Now Reading …

Yes, I do know that the Beijing Olympics are in full swing but it is purely coincidental that this book was at the top of my TBR pile. Where did it come from and why did I buy it. Please don’t expect any erudite answer.

Some of you may remember that Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book posted some sort of question about an A-Z of favourite authors. Of course, now that I’ve gone looking for the original post, I can’t find it. Anyway, on a lunchtime jaunt to the newly re-arranged Kingston Oxfam bookshop I decided to find a few authors from the less populated letters of the alphababet. One lucky find was “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto, described as “what it means to be young and frustrated in modern Japan”.

Although written by an author, also beginning with a “Y”, “The Garlic Ballads” by Mo Yan feels as if it is written about another time, rather than just another country. I knew that the book was set in almost contemporary times by references to items such as cars etc and, later on in the book, someone’s father had done something in 1949 but the feeling was of long ago. I was quite shocked to find that the time-frame is 1988 as so many of the behaviours and attitudes are archaic. It may be illegal to beat your young adult daughter but it still appears to be common practice. The chapters are headed with verses from ballads written by a musician about the garlic troubles. Garlic is a very profitable crop and the farmers are encouraged by the government to give much land over to its production but sadly there is a glut and intertwined with more personal stories we learn more about this agricultural situation.

I work for a picture library and over the past few months many images of the amazing Chinese Olympic buildings, the “Bird’s Nest, the water Cube”, have passed before my eyes. The images conjured up by Mo Yan in “The Garlic Ballads” provide a thought-provoking contrast.

It’s cold oop north …

… or so I have been told. TLM (The Loom Monkey) saw the quilt I had made for MLD (My Little Darling) and proceeded to tell me why he needed a quilt more than her. Having put the finishing touches to MLD’s red, black and white quilt while we were on holiday in Cornwall I had to immediately start work on TLM’s so that he can take it back to Durham with him for year 2.

I tried to use fabric I had already so the plain fabrics were from my stash and I spent real money on the patterned purple for the sashing and borders. I didn’t quilt it much because I quite like the puffy look. I quilted through the middle of each sashing strip and in the ditch between each coloured panel.

The quilt is not as big as MLD’s which would easily do for a double bed but having run out of room in the car when we brought TLM home I think restraining the size of it is a good idea. What it lacks in size it makes up for in brightness.

Harry and Hermione Have a Lovely Day

The academic year is over and it’s time for Harry Potter (alias The Loom Monkey) to return south.

But first he has to show Hermione (alias My Little Darling) around Durham

From Prebends Bridge that iconic view of the towers of Durham Cathedral

The sanctuary knocker

and those summer daisies that always add a magical touch to a graveyard

DGR at Dartington’s Way with Words literary festival

Readers in over 90 countries now log on to the daily blog of self-confessed bookworm Dovegreyreader, alias Lynne Hatwell.
At dovegreyreader.com book reviews, suggested “reading trails”, visits to literary events, stately homes and wonderful scenery rub shoulders with insights into the family life of this blogger who has the distinction of being archived for posterity by the British Library. Readers feel like members of an extended family as they share in events such as the publication of her drummer-boy father’s biography and the rescuing of a family of ducklings. As well as inspiring avid and lapsed readers alike, DGR is a health visitor in a scattered rural area. For years she has been advocating books as therapy and always has a shelf of books ready to “prescribe” to those in her care.

The blog has grown from many years of keeping a “book of books”, a list of all the books read by Dovegreyreader complete with her thoughts and comments. As happy in the 21st century as in any of the centuries about which she reads, Dovegreyreader has kept up with technology first of all moderating an online book group of like-minded individuals and then seizing the newfound joy of blogging. Along with her excellent suggestions for reading comes the chance to win books in periodic book draws. Publishers have realised the power of this blog and eagerly send DGR, as she is affectionately known, books to share with her coterie. All draws for these goodies are undertaken by Rocky, the cat, master of the aga. Anyone who finds themselves in need of reading suggestions, with the added advantage of the occasional chance to win a free book, should take themselves to http://www.dovegreyreader.com If a virtual taste of DGR is not enough, then tickets to hear her speak at Dartington’s Way with Words literary festival at 1130 on Sunday, 13th July 2008 are available for £5 from the festival website at http://www.wayswithwords.co.uk

Heirloom update

I now have 2 rows of 5 blocks all sewn together, another 5 rows of 5 to go. By the time i get to the end my suturing of the wadding will be so practiced that I will be able to moonlight as a surgeon.

Another Year Older

Yesterday was my birthday and so I have no guilty conscience about having a bog-free day. Here are two of my cards: on the left, cowparsely from my baby sister, Anne and on the right a textile design by Jacqueline Groag from my work colleagues. Isn’t it wonderful when you receive just the cards that you would have chosen for yourself.

I am still reading, and loving, Eucalpytus by Murray Bail. The chapters have become shorter and are an ideal length for my four stops on the train from home to work and back again. I have to confess that I have almost consciously taken to catching trains that my “train friends” WON’T be on because of course you can’t really stick your head in a book when someone you know is sitting next to you and eager to chat about what an awful day / amazing holiday they have just had. Sometimes I even have to speak French, or to be more accurate, listen at French because a lovely woman from Paris travels in my direction every now and then. She speaks at breakneck speed and with a heavy accent so I have to maintain close eye contact, as well as watching the movements of her lips, in a vain attempt to use all my senses to take in the information so that my poor brain can compute the data into something that makes sense. I resort to smiles and nods and once every few paragraphs of her stream of consciousness I interject a v e r y s l o w attempt at a sentence which she corrects charmingly for me and then speeds off again in her narrative. So by leaving for work later than the train gang and leaving for home after they have travelled, I am able to breathe in the Eucalyptus fumes for a few moments.

It’s All in the Bag (almost a tutorial)

An idea of how to make a circular drawstring sewing bag

I thought I’d have another go at making a drawstring sewing bag and this time take a couple of photos to explain what I mean.

The basic requirements for this little bag are:

. 2 lined circles, one bigger than the other,

. cord or ribbon for the drawstring

. 2 large beads or buttons or some extra fabric to sew on the ends of the drawstrings

The circles have to be quite a bit larger than I imagined. I suggest drawing around a dinner plate for the SMALLER circle and one inch outside the dinner plate for the larger (outside) circle.

1. You will need to cut 2 of each of the 2 circles so you will end up with 4 circles, 2 big and 2 slightly smaller.

2. Sew all around the SMALLEST circles (right sides together) with approx a 1/4 inch seam EXCEPT FOR A GAP OF ABOUT 3 inches that you will need to turn the circle inside out. Turn this small circle inside out, press and then top stitch near the outside edge carefully closing the opening by neatly tucking the seam allowances inside. Put aside.

3. Sew the 2 LARGEST circles right sides together. you will need to leave approx a 4 inch gap for turning AND ALSO 2 one-inch gaps, opposite each other to use to thread the drawstrings through.

Turn this LARGE circle inside out and press. Top stitch around edge, EXCEPT for 2 one-inch gaps using the topstitching to neatly close the 4-inch turning gap.

4. Fold the SMALL circle in half and iron to press. Fold in half again & press with iron, and fold in half one more time and press again. Open up carefully and you should have folds that divide the circle into 8 sections. Using tailors chalk or ordinary blackboard chalk draw over these folds so that your circle looks like a cake cut into 8. (see first photo at top of page). Find a small circle (e.g a glass) to draw around in the centre of this circle (see above). This will look like the centre of a flower with 8 petals around it.

5. Place the SMALL circle on top of the LARGE circle equally (see photo above). Place a pin in the middle. Carefully pin in between each line so that you will be able to sew along both sides of each line.

6.Starting at the outside of the small circle, sew down the right-hand side of the chalk line till you meet the centre drawn circle, sew along the curve of this centre circle till you meet the next line. Sew along the nearest side of the next chalk line (towards the outside of the circle of fabric) and then back down alongside it until you meet the centre circle again. Sew along that section of curve and up one side of the next chalk line etc etc until you finally arrive back at where you started. ALL THIS STITCHING WILL SHOW THROUGH ONTO THE OUTSIDE OF YOUR BAG. These lines of stitching make eight small interior pockets for reels of thread etc.

7. Back on the largest circle, sew a second line of stitching one-inch inside your outside line of stitching (do not leave any gaps in this stitching.

8. With a safety pin, thread a long drawstring (longer than the circumference of your circle) in through one gap, all way around the circle and back out where it entered. Starting at the OPPOSITE gap, thread another long drawstring through the other gap, all around the casing and back out where it entered. You need to knot the paired ends of drawstrings and either tie a large bead or button through and knot securely so that they don’t disappear into the gaps or, do as I did and, sew each pair of ribbon ends into a piece of doubled-over fabric and stitch quite a few times to secure the ribbon inside the fabric. On reflection it would have been neater to make triangular-shaped “ends” to sew the drawstring/ribbon into.

I’m quite pleased with this bag apart from the fact that the inner circle shouldn’t have been so much smaller than the outer circle.Next time I will make them with probably only one-inch in difference between the two circles.

Somehow I should be able to make a circular pincushion that is permanently attached to the “flower centre” inside the bag.

It also needs an attached needle-case and attached small scissors holster.

Blame the alphabet

Back in April, Simon of Stuck in a Book listed his A-Z Favourites, one favourite author for each letter of the alphabet. Of course some letters had too many authors to choose between and Xylophone was not allowed as the name of a author. SiaB’s post came to mind during one of my lunchtime forays to the Oxfam bookshop. I decided that I would like to join the members of Cornflower’s Book Group who are about to read “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak. The Oxfam bookshop helpfully arranges their contemporary fiction alphabetically by author so I was concentrating my search on the final shelf. Alas not a Zusak in sight but I came away with five books tow of which were by authors beginning with “Y”. I haven’t read them yet as they are reserved for my holiday reading horde but I must at the very least commit the authors names to memory in case my life ever depends on finding an author for each letter of the alphabet. I suppose you all want to share my secret “Y” entires, do you?

Mo YAN – The Garlic Ballads
(apparently he has been referred to as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller

Banana YOSHIMOTO – Kitchen
In an interview, the author states “I have in mind sensitive, somewhat adolescent people who are stuck between reality and fantasy. Young, rebellious people like to read my books, but I guess what I really like is to encourage adults who still have playful, adolescent minds”. This statement suggests that BY may have something in common with one of my favourite authors, Amelie Nothomb. After I have read “Kitchen” I will let you know if my supposition is correct.

I know, I did buy five books, didn’t I? The others are:

Dierdre MADDEN – The Birds of the Innocent Wood
Sarah STOVELL – Mothernight
Dan FESPERMAN – Lie in the Dark

I have instructed My Dearly Beloved many times to buy his books from the Oxfam shop. Until yesterday he has disobeyed me but he finally has to agree that some of my instructions are worth heeding. The lights in the OS are not harsh and intrusive, you don’t have to jostle your way past 2 for the price of 3 and promotional display hazards, the money goes to a good cause and the money you save can go towards ……. buying more books.

Heirloom in the making?

Yesterday I went to the second part of a two-part workshop on how to do “Quilting-as-you-go” tutored by Carolyn Forster.

On the first day, six weeks ago, she showed us masses of her quilts made using this method.

Then we had the tough job of deciding which block design we would make and we began cutting up fabric and piecing our blocks.

She showed us how each block was sandwiched together and quilted as an individual block, just leaving a couple of inches of the “frames” unquilted so that they could be joined together later.

Each of the completed blocks measures 16″ x 16″ and I have 35 of them all quilted up and ready to join together in rows. Each row will consist of 5 blocks and will have 7 rows, so it will be quite a big quilt. As they say in the US “you do the math(s)”.

On the left you can see one completed block, made up of a sandwich of: a pieced top, wadding, backing fabric. On the right is a bag containing the remaining 30 blocks waiting to be joined together in another 6 rows.

Not content with having been immersed in sewing all day I was so inspired by seeing Carolyn’s sweet little drawstring, circular needlework bag that I had to cut out and try to make one myself. Inside it had six pockets for reels of thread etc. i also made a matching needlecase. I can’t show it to you because I have packed it all up to send to a friend of mine. She has moved several times in the last few years and when I visited her in her latest home I was horrified that serial clearouts had left her without a sewing bag/box. She confessed to me that she had no needle and thread in the whole house. She has been on my mind since I discovered this distressing situation and now I hope that my late-night sewing session will ensure that her new home is complete.

On the reading front I forgot to tell you about the recently completed “An Artist of the Floating World” by
Kazuo Ishiguro. This lets us into the world of an artist in post-war Japan. Those who have read “The Remains of the Day” will be familiar with the author’s gentle measured style of writing which suits this story in which a widowed artist is faced with arranging a marriage for his second daughter. We experience with him the difficulties of adapting to social and political changes which have a direct effect on his immediate family.

i have moved on to “Eucalyptus” by Murray Bail which coincidentally also deals with how to ensure that a suitable partner is found for a daughter. We may laugh at Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennett and Emma with their matchmaking preoccupations but both books that I mentioned above emphasise that the problem is still uppermost in the minds of many a parent and friend. The quilt I am making is for my only daughter. She should really be making it herself as part of her bottom drawer and I should be making use of the ladies at my quilting bee to search out a spouse for her.

Today both Dovegrey Reader and Stuck in a Book write about similar subjects: the stories behind people at the end of their lives. It makes me wonder about the lives of those I see all around me. None of them appear to be “ordinary” but maybe that is the whole point of life or lives, each of them extraordinary in their own way.

The photo above is of the house where my father and his siblings were born. As I grew up I thought that my father was one of three children. After his death I learnt that he was one of four; he had a half-brother who he knew as his cousin until a day in the the early 1970s when his sister and half-brother came to visit us. After my mother’s death I discovered that in fact he and his siblings were the second family of his father.

Researching family history I asked my aunt to fill in some gaps for me. Little did I expect the thirteen page letter that arrived , spilling its contents into my head like a Catherine Cookson saga. The letter and my own research caused episode after episode to unfold until truth became as unbelievable as fiction. In 1850, in Oxfordshire a twenty-nine year old spinster named Charity gave birth to my grandfather Charles, a name he would convieniently share with his second family’s other grandfather. For several years they lived with her parents and siblings but by 1861 her father was dead, her brother was head of the household and she and her child disappeared from view. We can only imagine the dramatic scene in Episode x of this saga. “Father is dead, I am head of the family now and you can get out and take that bastard with you.” My aunt’s sanitised version of her father’s early life was that he grew up in an orphanage. The harsher reality was that he spent his growing and early adult years in the workhouse. Merely seeing the word on paper, or reading it in your head conjures up awful images. Superficially it doesn’t appear to have harmed Charles. It seems to have at least instilled the work ethic into him. He stayed on once he was an adult to become first a “porter” and later “Assistant Labour Master”. I suppose that the workhouse and Poor Law was the forerunner of the Social Security system and indeed my grandfather took advantage of the system as much as anyone sitting for their Civil Service exams in later years. By the beginning of the twentieth century he had risen to being Registrar and Relieving Officer for an area stretching from Henley to Ascot. In other words people came to him to register births and deaths and he doled out Poor Relief. When he died he left a house (see above), a field and a cow. Nor bad for a boy from the workhouse.

If you want to see next week’s episode now, the tune into Channel X !

Do you remember those twee little cartoons …. Love is ….

Well here’s my contribution to that genre: Love is ….. a TWODALOO !!

I’m frankly speechless. If you really want to read more then please do.

Where was the editor?

I’ve almost finished reading NOAH’S ARK by Barbara Trapido but I have been annoyed and distracted by a couple of errors which should I think have been picked up by an editor. Quite early on there was a reference to the books of Beatrice Potter. That niggled away at me and, although a little self-doubt crept in, I was in danger of being stared at on the train for chuntering out loud, “I know I’m right, I can’t have been wrong all these years.”

It upset me so much that when the train stopped at my station I left my bookmark in the offending page rather than the page I was reading. Of course I did nothing and next day on the train I reassigned the bookmark to its more usual function. Dear old B Potter popped up later in the book, this time with her name spelt correctly as BeatriX. I was pleased that someone in publishing knew the woman’s name enough to spell it correctly. However, I was still astounded with the inconsistency of things.

All this would have been forgotten but this morning, when I can’t be more than 12 pages from the end of the book I see that the editor has been slacking again:
Hattie at first was not to be coaxed from the darkness of her bedroom where she sobbed under a Hollie Hobbet quilt.

Now anyone who was around in the late 1970s will know that Hattie’s quilt was Hollie Hobby NOT Hobbet. I could forgive an alternative spelling of Holly because quite frankly I don’t know which is correct. We had an enormous real child-sized HH rag doll and I have a feeling that her removeable prairie-style dress might still be lurking in my house now. The location of the corpse of poor HH is something about which I have no idea.

Still looking good 50+ years on

Am I talking about the Heals curtain fabric in the background, COTTAGE GARDEN that originally sold for £10 9s a yard or the talented textile designer Mary White pictured here with her design?  Well if I look as good at 58 as Mary does at 78 then I’ll be happy and if I could ever create something as fresh and exciting as COTTAGE GARDEN , let alone something that still looks modern over 50 years later, the I would be ecstatic.

It’s no wonder that Mary’s daughter-in-law, Sarah Dening couldn’t bear to leave the unused designs gathering dust in the loft. Sarah is married to one of Mary’s sons and his penchant for wearing distinctive shirts must surely have been Sarah’s inspiration for bringing Mary’s “lost” designs to light as exclusive men’s shirts.

Mary never gave her designs names, she left that fanciful part of affairs to the manufacturers who snapped up her designs. Her clients read like a textbook of  textile design history: Heals, Liberty, David Whitehead, Turnbull & Stockdale, Gayonne …. I could go on because Mary was indefatigable in the way she traipsed around with her portfolio putting each new batch of her designs in front of  the textile buyers in Manchester and London.

It seems that this determination has rubbed off on Sarah Dening with her business Pigletchops that is producing Mary’s original designs for a whole new generation. In the 1950s Mary benefited from a good life style thanks to her designs being produced by British companies. In view of this Sarah has vowed that these British designs will be printed in the UK and the products will be totally made in the UK. That sounds easy enough but as we know most of what we wear has not originated in the UK. It took a lot of hard work for Sarah to stick to her principles but she has done it and the shirts now available at Pigletchops have labels that proudly celebrate this feat.

Photos by, and thanks to Emily Tullett, Manager of fashioncapital; Cottage Garden curtains from private collection of Ruth Marler

MAGICAL REALISM : a plan

A short while ago I wrote about my ignorance of the genre MAGICAL REALISM. I decided that something should be done to fill this gap in my literary knowledge and went a-clicking  on those book sites  that we all know so well. I’m off to Cornwall for a week at the end of June and so I have decided that that will be an ideal way to begin my foray into magical realms.

I’ve selected three books, the two you can see here; “The Medusa Frequency” by Russell Hoban and “Nights at The Circus” by Angela Carter. I am waiting for “Threshold” by Ursula Le Guin to arrive.

With a bit of luck The Medusa Frequency may prove to be a crossover book, meaning that it can crossover from my reading pile to that of mu husband. This doesn’t happen often, the most successful crossover author so far being Brian Moore. I love Brian Moore’s works for the Roman Catholicity of them. If you were educated in a convent books like Brian’s seem to exert a certain hold. The other half reads them because they tell an exciting story and you can’t really argue with that.

My Other Life

I’ve been having an exciting few days. On Friday I was interviewed by BBC TV about the 1950s textile designer, Mary White. I did some original research on her about ten years ago so they decided to ask me about her.

Then yesterday I spent the day in a “private functon” at Liberty. What a great life, sitting around in between visits by members of the press eating dainty sandwiches, strawberries and cream and later on afternoon tea.

Meanwhile Mary was being interviewed in person and on the telephone. I could get used to this sort of life.

When Mary, a freelance designer left off traipsing around to manufacturers with her huge portfolio of designs and concentrated on bringing up her children and teaching pottery she put all her unused designs up in her loft. The children grew up and when one of her sons married his wife discovered the hidden treasure and decided it shouldn’t languish in the loft. Now she runs pigletchops.com and Mary’s “lost designs” are being used on a series of men’s shirts. These are being issued in limited editions of 100 and are best described as Mid Century Modern for Men.

I spent quite a while talking to Piglet Chops proprietor, Sarah Dening and she let slip that they are about to launch an item of women’s clothing that will be just the ticket for the coming summer months. I can’t wait to find out what this new item will be because at the moment I just wish I was a man because I would have to have those shirts.

Mid-Century Modern for Men (as seen on www.retrotogo.com)

Pigletchops offers limited edition men’s shirts made from classic 1950s Mary White textiles

A mix of the old and the new – new shirts made from vintage textile designs – Pigletchops limited edition Mary White textile shirts.

Mary White was a successful textile designer in the 1950s – producing textiles for the likes of Heals, Liberty, Edinburgh Weavers, David Whitehead and Turnbull & Stockdale. In fact, some of her designs reside in places like the V&A and The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.

The shirts are the work of Mary’s daughter-in-law, produced in limited numbers (100 of each) from 1950s designs created then stored away…until now. All the shirts are semi-fitted, made of 100 per cent cotton poplin and have a two-button single cuff. They retail for £149 each.

Find out more at the Pigletchops website

If you are wondering why I’ve suddenly stopped talking about books or yarn then I will explain. Back when I was a very mature student I went to a jumble sale and caught glimpse of a pair of curtains that yelled 1 9 5 0 s to me. I dragged those curtains out, handed over my 50p (‘cos they were just clearing up and had to get rid of everything) and decided I would do my dissertation on them, When my tutor told me there was no way I could because I would never be able to find enough out about the designer it was like red rag to a bull and the rest is history. The curtains were “Cottage Garden” by Mary White and manufactured by Heals.

I’m thrilled that Mary White’s work is being seen again or rather in the case of these designs, for the first time because these are designs that she didn’t let anyone buy at the time. They have been biding their time in her loft and now when we are ready to appreciate such things again she has allowed them to be used in these limited edition shirts. I can’t help wondering if young designers of today will prove to have work that stands the test of time so well.

Daughter as Muse

Different people  see  different thing don’t they?  I just saw a  Dutch  painting photograph but of course when I looke later I could see that it was young girl with a carrier bag on her head! Artist/Photographer Hendrik Kerstens has documenting his daughter as she grows up. I don’t think that my own daughter would be so obliging.

http://www.witzenhausengallery.nl/artist.php?idxArtist=12&offset=0

An orderly Q

Every morning I get out of bed, put a load of washing on, make my breakfast and retire with it for my daily dose of blogland. My favourites are saved on tabs in my web browser and are abbreviated to: DGR, HD, RJ, SiaB, AH and LWD. Two of those are little-known private interests but I’m sure that you can all guess the identities of the first four. It was over on Stuck-in-a-Book that I came across reference to a Roman writer, Quintilian. Recently, in blogland, there has been a smattering of alphabetic lists of favourite authors. This was started by SiaB as an Alphabet Meme and then picked up by other bloggers. SiaB provides us with a handy list of those who picked up the meme.

This morning Siab wrote about a book he has just finished. It is non-fiction and references other writings, including those of Quintilian. What a prize for someone doing the alpha meme and who only has Arthur Quiller-Couch so far for the Q entry. Quintilian is writing about education, more precisely about the education of an orator but he does seem to exude an amazing amount of common sense. He begins in Book One by talking about those who have a hand in the education of an individual, beginning with the nurse and the parents. He moves on to write of learning the alphabet, and of writing:

The accomplishment of writing well and expeditiously, which is commonly disregarded by people of quality, is by no means an indifferent matter. Writing itself is the principal thing in our studies, and by it alone sure proficiency, resting on the deepest roots, is secured. A too slow way of writing retards thought, and a rude and confused hand cannot be read; and hence follows another task, that of reading off what is to be copied from the writing. 29. At all times, therefore, and in all places, and especially in writing private and familiar letters, it will be a source of pleasure to us not to have neglected even this acquirement.

This is all very pertinent to the moment for me. I have just been encouraged to start writing real letters to a friend again. This is something that I haven’t done for quite a while and most people I need to correspond with have an email address and as long as your communication is welcome you are usually guaranteed a speedy response that doesn’t involve relying on the uncertain services of the Royal Mail. Please don’t get me started on that topic or I will join Elaine, of Random Jottings, in what she calls GOW (Grumpy Old Woman) mode. So far I have received the first epistle from my friend and after having to reply to her using my daughter’s chewed old school fountain pen I dragged myself away from desk in my lunch break and bought myself an ink converter for my lovely black and gold Waterman’s pen and a bottle of Havana Brown. She should have received my letter by now but I am not quite sure how many days it will take her to decipher my squiggles. Perhaps if I had been given ivory letters to play with as a toddler, as Quintilian advises in his Institutes of Oratory, so that I could learn their shapes as I learnt their sounds then my writing would now be more legible?

still reading: FUGITIVE PIECES by Anne Michaels

I know you all think I’m an incredibly slow reader but that’s not really the case. I’m not as fast as some people I know like supersonic Random Jottings, or as prolific as Dove Grey Reader, as learned as Harriet Devine, or as amusing as Stuck-in-a-Book. I’m just what I call a “lapsed reader” because I don’t make time to read any more. I rely on the 13 mins of travel time on the train from home to work and back again but unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, I have amassed a posse of what we call “train friends” or “the train gang”. It works rather like velcro. I started talking to one woman on the platform one morning and we progressed from nodding and saying hello to having deep meaningful discussions about the virtues of different types of bag (yesterday’s conversation). Another friend has a penchant for colourful hats and stripey socks so it was natural that I should make her acquantance. She knew someone else etc etc . Now we really need to reserve a carriage just for the gang. About half of this merry brood get on at a previous station so we have to stand in the right place and look out for them in the carriage and invade any empty seats around them. If we were brave enough we would evict the intruders that were sitting on what should be our seats. Shamefully we have become such a rabble that some people DO offer to move when we board the train and they scuttle away to a quieter part of the carriage.

So with a large morning and smaller evening party of friends to join I rarely get as far as opening my book. If I do you can guarantee that within one paragraph a fellow velcro-pal appears and all chance of literature disappears.

I don’t know what I expected when I picked up Fugitive Pieces, certainly nothing like the book I found. I was drawn to the cover and the title. I think I expected memories of a woman, not realising that the head on the cover is probably that of a young boy. A clever title. It took a while for it to dawn on me that both the traces of music and geological references are “fugitive pieces”. I’m on the final stretch of the book. I was momentarily confused when the main protagonist changed and I’m not really sure why that was done as I’m not out of my confusion yet.

Anne Michaels is a poet and if she wasn’t considered as such before the publication of this book then she surely would have been recognised as such after this book made its way out into the world.

Magical Realism – a genre I didn’t know existed

I’ve been chatting to my sister about the book she is writing and she said she was afraid that it might head off to chicklit territory if she wasn’t careful and lose the MAGICAL REALISM element. Now call me me ignorant but I didn’t know there was such a genre. She was trying to get her youngest to bed so couldn’t give me an idiot’s guide to the genre so just gave me an example you have to accept the magical things that happen if a book also contains such mundane things as people getting on and off a bus.

Well of course I went off a-googling and found this:

Felix Grant (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/magreal.htm#beginning ) says:
Magical Realism is, like all such categorisations, impossible to define precisely. It also overlaps other genres — including “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

He then proceeds to list 7 books widely considered to belong to the canon of magical realism and a further 18 that he teaches about on his lit course. I didn’t do very well with the list. I own 3 of the 25 books, started two, put them aside: bought another for the woodcuts rather than the book but DID read and enjoy it. I’m wondering if I should gather some of these volumes to my ample bosom and take them with me on holiday next month and explore a new genre. Anyone else up for exploring new territories? You can see the full list below with my notes about my scant knowledge of the books listed.

Watertight agreement on a “canon” is difficult to obtain, and I wouldn’t claim it for my list. Perhaps the first seven titles below could be said to belong within the canon; beyond that the borders are hazy.

These seven are generally accepted and quoted by a range of authorities as definitive examples of Magical Realism:
* Carey, Peter (Australia) Illywhacker
* Carter, Angela Nights at the Circus
* Kundera, Milan (Czech) Immortality
* García Márquez, Gabriel (Colombia) One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Rushdie, Salman (UK/India) Midnight’s Children and Shame
* Swift, Graham (UK) Waterland

I think I STARTED Illywhacker but put it aside
Heard of Angela Carter but not Nights at the Circus
Heard of Milan Kundera but not Immortality
Heard of Salman Rushdie and Midnight’s Children (started it, can’t remember finishing it) but not Shame
Heard of Waterland but not Graham Swift

A lot of fiction which predates the term Magical Realism is nevertheless recognised as falling within its definition. The most obvious example is Kafka, and in particular:
* Kafka, Franz (Czech) Metamorphosis
Yep heard of that

I teach my own lit courses on the basis that the following are indicative examples of the range covered by the Magical Realism label, and my immediate colleagues are in general agreement, but they are not sanctified by universal acceptance! I’ve limited myself to one book per author only for brevity and clarity.

* Allende, Isabel (Chile) Of Love and Shadows author but not book

* Aitmatov, Chingiz (USSR) The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years NO

* Doctorov, E L (US) Loon Lake author but not book

* Eco, Umberto (Italy) Foucault’s Pendulum heard but not read

* Fowles, John (UK) A Maggot heard but not read

* Gearhardt, Sally M (US) The Wanderground heard but not read

* Golding, William (UK) The Paper Men author but not book

* Greenland, Colin (UK) Other Voices NO

* Le Guin, Ursula K (US) Threshold author (thought she was scifi / fantasy)

* Hesse, Herman (Germany) Magister Ludi author but not book

* Hoban, Russell (US/UK) The Medusa Frequency NO

* Hoeg, Peter (Denmark) The History of Danish Dreams author but not book

* Hospital, Janette T (Australia) The Last Magician NO

* Lessing, Doris (UK) The Memoirs of a Survivor author but not book

* McEwan, Ian (UK) The Child in Time author but not book

* Read, Herbert (UK) The Green Child YES – READ IT -GOT IT – bought it for the woodcuts!

* Ransmayer, Christoph (Austria) The Last World NO

* Saxton, Josephine (UK/US) Queen of the States NO

Thrilling Moments

I’ve just been reading about wonderful performances experienced by Elaine at Random Jottings and I was immediately reminded of one of the best birthday treats of my life. Back in the very late 1970s I was still living at home, in Bath, but was just about grownup and earning my own living. We were lucky enough to have the wonderful Bath Festival held in the city every year and I had usually been involved in fringe events with my drama group. This particular year, I decided that I would buy a ticket to every single lunchtime performance. As they were short concerts, and in the day, they were much more affordable. I worked as a Civil Servant so I saved up plenty of flexi-time so that I could get myself to and from the concerts as well as allowing time for the performances themselves.

I can hardly remember what I saw and heard except for the concert on my birthday. The performer was a pianist, a dark foreigner with a beard. He played Bartok which I believe is probably not the sort of thing for neophyte concert-goers……. but ….

……….. his hands posed above the piano he played as if his very being depended on the music .. the music was alive and I could feel it. I have never before and never since felt that way about any music. I knew it was something special. As a single entity, the audience was bowled over by his performance and we clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped until our hands ached. He was so unassuming. He humbly stood and bowed at the end of the piece, almost as if he was thanking us. When the applause would not die down he seemed stunned as though he had not known how well he could play and what an experience it was to hear the music that eminated from him.

I was so pleased that I had gone to that performance not knowing anything about the music or the pianist. No one needed to tell me, I just knew he was an amazing pianist, I could feel it. His name was Andre Tchaikowksy and it wasn’t until he died a few years later that I found out that I “should” have thought he was something special. That is probably the mark of true genius. It is obvious even to those who have no idea about such matters.

When my birthday comes round later this year, don’t bother racking your brains for the perfect present because nothing will ever come anywhere near what he gave to me that day. I tremble now when I remember it and I doubt if I will ever feel like that about anything ever, for the rest of my life.

The James Lipton Questionnaire

Goodness me, I’ve never been tagged to do a meme before. Harriet tagged me and as a consequence I now have to answer questions which look easy when you see someone else’s answers but not quite so easy when you are the one in the inquisitor’s chair. I

What is your favorite word?
Lugubrious, but I have yet to use it in normal conversation.

What is your least favorite word?
diffident

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Fresh air, clear skies, birdsong

What turns you off?
Rush hour travel to central London (Thankfully I only do that once or twice a year)

What is your favorite curse word?
Poodles!

What sound or noise do you love?
Breaking waves

What sound or noise do you hate?
The same annoying woman who talks inane chatter on her mobile EVERY morning on MY train. I wouldn’t mind if it was a quick, “shall I pick up some milk on the way in” or “I’m running a bit late……” This woman just witters on and on and on and on and on and says absolutely nothing while her grating voice drills into my brain and spoils any chance of reading a book.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Something to do with textiles.

What profession would you not like to do?
Anthing to do with sport, especially competitive sport.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
“Come on in, this is a TOTALLY smoke free area “.

Now I’m tagging Elaine over at Random Jottings to do this! Can’t wait to see your answers RJ

No other book?

As I suspected, I felt disinclined to have Gilead as my travelling companion for the week. As is often the case I just had to go for whatever was to hand, which happened to be

NO OTHER LIFE by BRIAN MOORE

Another book written by a man. There have been quite a run of those in my recent reading but this is not just any man, this is an old friend. Such an old friend that I know that his name is not pronounced Bry-ann but something like Bree-an. His novels are usually slim, simply written, usually centred around one person in a way that is almost female. He was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic in Northern Ireland and in many of his novels there is no way to get away from the church. In fact the novels go even further and have the main protagonist as a Catholic priest often questioning his own belief.  I have just dipped into the first few pages, far enough to discover that this priest has lived in Ganae, a fictitious Caribbean country, teaching in a school for the elite of the country for thirty years. He has reached retirement and we begin to look back at his life in this poor country.

Over on Anne’s blog, she also has spread her wings for sunnier climes and has been reading a book set on the island of Crete, a place where she lived for several years, and which is the setting of her novel in progress. She confesses that she picked up the book she is reading because of where it is set. I picked up mine because of the author but other recent reads were chosen by the name of the character in the title and the delightful cover design. Is there right or wrong reason to choose a book?

Sunday Salon: Mr Pip has gone

I can’t keep up with all these erudite book reviews and I’m always terrified that anything I do write will act as a spoiler so instead I will just lay a few words on the screen / page:

simple life
fish out of water
trouble and strife

in the water
fish out of water
can life be simple?

That’s all folks – see you next Sunday in the Salon. I’ve picked up Gilead by Marilynne Robinson but I’m not sure if I will stay the course yet. It’s beautifully written and I appreciate the idea of it but I’m not sure it’s the right book for me at the moment.

SUNDAY SALON: Nearly finished – what’s next?

During the past week I have been reading

I was so engrossed with it that just as I stepped off the train at my station, and the automatic doors shut, I realised that I had left my other bag with a file from work and a poster for my son on the seat INSIDE the train. The ticket office was just closing and the chap there tried to call the station at the end of the line, but just as he had expected they had left for the evening. So I had an unexpected 30 mins of reading time, whilst I slowly froze, waiting for my train to come back in the other direction.

I could have kissed the guard when I discovered he had my bag in his guardsvan. He looked extremely uncomfortable when I expressed my feeling of gratitude to him! I still have a few pages left so I will save any comments till later. For now I will just say that it has turned out to be a surprising book.

So what will I turn to next? I’ve just popped over to Harriet’s blog. In fact I still have it open in another tab as I am lapping up the Sonific music she has playing there at the moment. Harriet has tempted me to consider reading Sarah Stovell’s ….

I don’t have the book yet so I may have to read one or two from the tottering TBR heap first. Have a good Sunday Salon everyone.

 

I’ve not read “The Needle in the Blood”

Maybe this will get me in the mood.

Slattern or Seraph?

After my steaming cup of tea, brought to me by MDB (My Dearly Beloved), I made my usual visit to DoveGreyReader. No mention of books this Saturday morning. just domestic stuff about removing cat’s stitches and vacuum cleaner bags. DGR confesses that removed from her appliance she has no idea which bags to buy. Surprisingly that is the sort of info that I do have up my sleeve when out shopping. So that set me thinking. Normally I veer to the slattern end of the domestic manager scale but in a few areas I am fully winged and haloed.

So I thought I might share a few of my virtuous practices with you all, and invite you to pat yourself on the back about your domestic management skills. So without further ado ….

1. I know which vac bags to buy for my dust-guzzler and I write the date that the bag is changed on the new bag.
2. I hang a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook near the kettle and have trained the WHOLE family to write down items BEFORE they run out. Unlike a friend of mine who tried to implement the same scheme, my family do not abuse this notebook by writing items such as Porsche, Viagra for Dad etc.
3. All members of the family have been trained and adhere to my laundry system. Dirty clothes are placed in the correct place. (Training to retrieve correct “person pile” of clean clothes is still in progress).
4. Recycling is well-organised and family adhere to implemented system.
5. Rubbish putting out is organised and involves a 2-member team. To avoid fox scavenging I place bag(s) ready to go out last thing at night before rubbish day & MDB puts bag(s) out as he leaves the house early in the morning. Usually the foxes have gone off to bed before he does this so no mess.
6. A Large HOUSE file/ring binder keeps all appliance purchases & repairs & building works bills & receipts in one place. I can easily look back to see when things were purchased / repaired / installed. This has proved invaluable when dealing with recurring drain problems with our water authority as I have a full log of all my calls to them.
7. A large CAR file / ring binder does the same for road tax, MOT, insurance, services, repairs.
8. Household Address Book. This little book is a treasure trove of trademan’s phone numbers.
9. Composting container on draining board > bucket on patio where mixed with pet rabbit poo > compost bin at bottom of garden.
10. Bulldog clip on back of front door holds letters ready to be posted.

So those are my seraphic ways. I am not going to share my slattern ways with you as they are too numerous.

Now it’s time for you to pat yourself on he back and pass on your ways of good household management.

Hit or Miss?

What is that causes us to warm to a book or not? Why do we like one and not another? Why do we like parts of a book but not all of it? I am having trouble answering all these questions. When someone recommends a book to me I long to love it as they have done but life isn’t like that. I’d heard people waxing lyrical about “Drowning Ruth” but it all sounded a bit weird so I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang “la la la I’m not listening”

Friends and relations noticing I was back in a reading phase tossed titles at me hoping they could get me back in the reading chair permanently. My “baby” sister had just finished “Notes from an Exhibition” and was sure I would love it too. It’s set mainly in Cornwall, has a female artist as one of the main characters with huge dollops of family life, one member of the family at a time looking back. I remember seeing the author’s name on the cover “Patrick Gale” and thinking, “oh, it’s by a man”. Did that influence me? Would it have been better if I didn’t know? I thought that I had immediately sensed a different way of writing. It felt like reportage. Like “best-seller speak”, like those airport books that MDB (My Dearly Beloved) picks up when he is away from home. They are efficiently written and make you have your kit bag all packed and ready for the route march to the end of the book.

 

“But she was awake and her brain was fizzing in a way that would have had Jack Trescothick testing her blood and reviewing her prescription had he known.”

 

 

 

So let me think carefully. I pick up the Gale book and turn to the beginning and read the first page. As I do that, in my head I am writing about me doing just that. Bingo! I’ve got it, possibly. I would have written my actions in the first person and the book is actually written in the third person, so it is reportage. Someone else is doing the telling even though that telling is concentrated on one person. Quickly I cast my mind back to “Drowning Ruth”. Yes, of course, that was in the first person. I remember being mildly annoyed that when the person telling events changed it had a heading of “Amanda” or “Ruth”. I compare it to the book that my baby sister is writing and  which also swaps from one protagonist to another but manages quite well without signposting the fact. I’ll have to have a look at books I have read and enjoyed and books that I didn’t enjoy quite so much to see if a pattern emerges. On the train home tonight I read more of “Notes from ..” This time a description of an insignificant character,

 

 

“She was slight and almost oriental-looking, with very straight dark hair that swung forward across her face whenever she looked down. She had shrugged off her suede coat to reveal a neat subfusc outfit like a woman barrister’s on television. Her silk blouse was undone one button further than she probably realized so that one cup of her bra kept moving in and out of view.”

 

 

Now that’s definitely NOT my sort of book but as if to emphasise the point it became even worse:

 

“When he woke thirsty a few hours later and stumbled to the bathroom for a drink, he found his cock and balls were aching from use in a way he had last experienced in the first solitary frenzies of adolescence.”

 

 

Would a woman have written that? Would she have bothered? After that I need something more innocent to decontaminate my reading area. When I started blogging today I intended to write about “The Battle for Gullywith”. Bloomsbury kindly sent me a proof copy of this and so I feel duty bound to attempt to review it. The problem is that although I had devoured the opening chapters that were posted on Susan Hill’s website I find that I am not running out telling all and sundry to read it. First of all it is a children’s book so perhaps it has to be read in a different way. Personally I don’t think that is the case because I am perfectly eager to be caught up events and taken off to impossible places. At least, that’s what I tell myself but when I think of everything I enjoyed as a child maybe I really do like my feet firmly on this earth. It doesn’t have to be my usual place on this earth. I can happily move in with the Railway Children, Pollyana or the March sisters and pitch camp with the Swallows & Amazons. I also have no objection to time-travelling but I suspect that I have a preference for ordinary life when I live in the past or flit from one time to another. I don’t mind there being one or two people visiting from another place or time but I had trouble with accepting those very tortoises in the Battle with Gullywith that DoveGreyReader enthused over. I suspect that I may become jittery when too many things don’t line up.

 

I have nothing against tortoises. When I was young we had Tommy who appeared to enjoy being carried around the garden by our dog and my next-door neighbours still have two elderly specimens who race up and down parallel to our fence and disturb the silence of our garden when spring comes and the sap rises and their shells crash one against the other. However, I couldn’t cope with the multitude of these creatures in Gullywith. I kept hearing a little voice saying “they are not an indigenous species”. Have I grown up so much that details like that ruin my enjoyment of a jolly good story? I wouldn’t have minded if they were mythical creatures like dragons or griffins or phoenixes or even psammeads but every time they blinked their beady eyes at me that little voice niggled away.

 

The Battle for Gullywith began with Olly, a ten year old boy moving from a perfectly good home in London to a falling down, out of the way ruin of a house. When he encounters a dog and tomboyish girl of course I knew they would become great friends but I was not prepared for the amazing locations that would be visited and events that would ensue. I had difficulty with this split between the real world and the “other” that happened, usually at night. Perhaps I can’t cope with fantasy. I never even attempted Lord of the Rings and dismissed The Hobbit with hardly even a cursory glance. I enjoyed books where amazing things happened but those amazing things were timeshifts or the ability to move into a parallel but just as ordinary world. In Toms’s Midnight Garden, when an old clock strikes thirteen Tom is able to slip from his time into the past but the place is the same, a real place, the garden as it was rather than as it is now. Moondial by Helen Cresswell uses a similar device to transport children back to a prior age. 

 

Maybe I just haven’t got a big enough imagination to deal with these leaps into other worlds  within our world. That’s probably why Lord of the Rings et al never grabbed me. I only ever managed the first Harry Potter. I’m sure that there will be many eager imaginative children out there who  will  totally immerse themselves in the  two worlds of  Olly  & unusual  friend KK but  I’ll stick to simple time shifts in my children’s  books and please don’t  make my adult books too adult.

Sunday Salon: As Sunday draws to a close.. a Gale blows in

Less than an hour to go before Sunday is over and I’ve just read the first six pages of my next book. This one was recommended by my baby sister.

See you all in the salon next Sunday. Happy reading if you manage to get any done in the week. Be strong those of you who are on a book-buying diet.

Sunday Salon: Ruth didn’t drown

So I have done hardly anything today except read. You could say that Ruth has been drowning in “Drowning Ruth”. I’ve already seen a comment from someone who said that the they were annoyed by the book but that it redeemed itself by the twist at the end. Someone else, Ann, I think said that it split her reading group. I seem to remember that a lot of people raved about this book a month or two or a year ago. So where will I place myself or will I just sit on the fence? I can’t explain what it was that kept me reading so avidly. Maybe I just needed a reading day. Maybe I’m just back in a reading phase of my life, after all I did find it difficult to put “The Brief History of the Dead” down or have the really good books just worked their way to the top of the TBR pile? I have a penchant for books that are set in a Noman’s time. You know what I mean. It’s Little House on the Prairie time, Little Women time. Heidi time. We know the characters wear petticoats and don’t drive around in cars and a woman’s place is usually in the home apart from our heroine who is a bit tomboyish or feisty and knows deep in her heart that women are equal to men. So although the book clearly starts just after the end of the Second World War because Amanda tells us that “if I had not gone home that March in 1919, Mathilda my only sister , would not be dead” it is also in my favourite Noman’s time. The way that the protagonists deal with what arises is of course all due to social expectations and mores of the time but it isn’t really what people do but rather the feelings and relationships that feed into the situations that arise.

Initially the “cast list” is small, almost claustrophobic and for the majority of the novel it feels that it will stay that way but as we learn more the doors open up, it feels as though a breeze from the lake will blow some of the stuffiness away but disconcertingly this breath of new air just complicates the truth that we have come to believe or suspect.

Once again it is demonstrated that secrets hardly ever remain so. Once again we learn that a small adjustment of the truth leads to compound untruths and that every action we take is likely to have repercussions that can be good or bad.

This is just the sort of book that I would be pleased to find if I was  on holiday in a remote cottage somewhere and the weather turned nasty. Pile the logs on the fire, heat the milk for the cocoa and be pleased that Aunty Mandy isn’t sending you out to move the sheep.

Sunday Salon: Stickers are bad enough!

Aaaah!

 

I’ve already confessed in a comment on my sister’s blog www.anneholloway.wordpress.com that I bought two books while doing the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. I never look at the books in supermarkets because there is no ambience in those places. The lights do my head in and in some of them (certain branches of Tescos, Safeways + M&S I actually feel sick if I subject myself to more than a few minutes instore. But she tempted me by saying she’d picked up a certain book and couldn’t put it down. So I looked and found .. and was also lured in by the cover of another book. Subliminal recognition and I didn’t even know it! When I got home I realised the cover was by Petra Borner about who I waxed lyrical a post or two ago.

I didn’t need the book, I have a TBR mountain range but I bought the book. But I have been punished. Now that I take the book in my hands I see that the “Richard & Judy’s book 4 club, Galaxy British BOOK awards 2008” sticker is NOT a sticker but is printed ON the book all over my beautiful Petra Borner cover. WHY?????? The words “Mister Pip” and “Lloyd Jones” need no explanation or apology they are after all the title and author of the book. I have no complaints about the discreet “Shortlisted for THE 2007 man BOOKER PRIZE” but I feel that Richard & Judy, Galaxy et al owe me that circle of cover that they have denied me. Please don’t deface my books it’s bad enough that there are so many tacky covers out there.

OK – rant over …… for now.

Sunday Salon: Ruth is Drowning in Books

I’ve made a supreme effort in the last week and a bit to do more reading. It’s not that I don’t love books and reading it’s just that there are never enough hours in the day. Please don’t lecture me about how if I spent less time at the computer reading everyone’s blogs then I would have ample time for books. I don’t want to live in isolation. I enjoy being part of a community. When was at school it was a community that passed around absolutely anything by John Wyndham. Now I can see why I enjoyed his science fiction so much. Of course the central theme of each work was something strange and amazing but the setting and the people were so normal. Take out plants that can walk, children that can control your mind or a beauty product that can make you live for ever and the books are just about people living together and getting on with life.

I don’t enjoy adventure stories or films or rather I don’t unless how the protagonists go about getting through the adventure is an integral part of the novel/film.

So back to today’s reading, Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz. I heard this mentioned on at least one blog months or maybe even a year or so ago. With my name in the two-word title it was inevitable that I should take a look at it sometime.It sounds as though it will be a murder mystery but the simple storyline of one sister returning home, and moving in with her younger sister who never left, promises plenty of the quotidian domesticity that I love.

I am not quite at the halfway mark (page 105 of 276 pages) and the yarn is beginning to untangle but never at a pace too racey for my homely self. I have to get myself back into the book as I received my first ever uncorrected proof and I felt obliged to read that immediately. Luckily I had halted at a natural break in the narrative. So I could waffle on here for a few sentences / paragraphs /pages … or I could go away and READ!

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

Two streams running independently, alternating chapter by chapter. One stream is a large city, the other a lone woman in the Antarctic.

What do we remember and more importantly who do we remember? How many people have you met in your life? Is it fifty, one hundred, several thousand? Write them down and soon you realise it’s like that old puzzle where someone asks the king for one grain of rice to place on the first square on the chessboard and then double the amount for each subsequent square. By the time you get to the other side of the chessboard how many grains of rice will you have?

When does someone really die? Is it when they cease to breathe or is it when there is no one left who remembers them?

The problem with trying to tell someone else about a book is that if you say too much you may spoil their reading of it. Let me just say that I really couldn’t put this book down. So much so that I walked out of the house this morning without my handbag. I was so engrossed in the book on the train that I didn’t notice the ticket inspector asking for tickets and it was only then that I realised I had no ticket and no way of paying for one. To quote DGR, “Caveat Lector”!! Reading can damage your reputation.

To those of you who may be surprised at how quickly I have read this book (for me) let me explain that there are two reasons for this. The first is that I didn’t want to put it down. The second reason is that I was enjoying the book so much, even after the first few pages, that I read most of the first chapter out loud, in bed, to MDB (My Dearly Beloved) and since then he has been trying to booknap it from me.

SUNDAY SALON: Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

OK I’ll have a go at this Sunday Salon thing as well. Let’s hope I’ve done the right techy things to get it to work. I have my doubts.

“We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen. Your mother wants to
see you now.Sophie. She does not want you to forget who your real mother is. When she left you
with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She
left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances
with you.”

The narrator, Sophie has been raised by Tante Atie, her mother’s illiterate elder sister. All she knows of her real mother she has learnt from this mother substitute. She only knows her mother’s voice from the spoken cassettes that are sent several times a year. Then one day the inevitable happens, a ticket is sent and Sophie must join her mother in New York.

“My angel, she said, I would like to know that by word or by example I have taught you love. I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. that is why I could never fight her about keeping you here. I do not want you to go and fight her either. In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children.”

And so it is that Sophie moves from the simple traditional way of living in Haiti to the life of an immigrant in New York, looked down on and called names by classmates. In her luggage she carries not only her few belongings but the weight of the past.

In her mother’s apartment she discovers a photo,

“I moved closer to get a better look at the baby in Tante Atie’s arms. I had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother’s but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that I noticed that I looked like no one in my family. Not my mother. Not my Tantee Atie. I did not look like them when I was a baby and I did not look like them now.”

Though Sophie, her mother and other Haitian friends now live in New York tradition casts a long shadow. The old ways are not easy to leave behind.

“Haitian men, they insist that their women are virgins and have their ten fingers.

According to Aunt Tatie, each finger had a purpose. It was the way she had been taught to prepare herself to become a woman. Mothering. Boiling. Loving. Baking. Nursing. Frying. Healing. Washing. Ironing. Scrubbing. It wasn’t her fault, she said. Her ten fingers had been named for her even before she was born. Sometimes she even wished she had six fingers on each hand so she could have two left for herself.

The strength of women holds the generations together despite what is done in the name of tradition and inheritance. My reading of this book was at a very superficial level, concentrating on the relationships between the generations of women. There is much more to be excavated but first I would need to understand something of the social and political history of Haiti a place where the indigenous population was wiped out, replaced by African slaves under French rule. Ssubsequent interference by a variety of nations followed by a long period of dictatorship in which African roots were emphasied and used against the people by bringing to life the Tonton Macoute or bogeyman of traditional tales.

Don’t be put off by that last paragraph of mine. The book is told through the eyes of the child, Sophie, as she progresses from childhood to womanhood. The warmth of affection between Sophie & Tante Atie manages to keep out the underlying chills.

All about My Mother

Since TLM (The Loom Monkey) went off to uni in Durham I have annexed his room. MDB (My Dearly Beloved) now has a shiny new MAC and so the previous PC has been demoted and resides on a desk in TLM’s room overlooking our back garden and those of our neighbours. So whilst I surf around the web drinking a cup of Earl Grey or Chai tea and nibbling my breakfast I am also looking out on suburbia gardenia.

My immediate neighbour is paranoid and is certain that, under cover of darkness, tree & shrubs, baddies will creep up her garden and ……… who knows what. So their garden is open and bare of large blobs of vegetation. On the sawn-off trunk of one of the removed trees she has what looks like a bird timeshare chalet and a birdfeeder hangs from the sparsely-leaved, thin-trunked, high-canopied tree that is allowed to flourish. So our garden with its three coniferous but doctored giants and various badly behaved shrub/trees acts as Heathrow Airport and her sawn-off trunk stump is a heli-pad. Goodness know how many tribes of birds secrete themselves in the largest of our trees. We see our winged friends fly in and out but the feathery fronds of the branches are so much like an enormous stick of green candy floss (cotton candy) that we have no idea how many of them are in there at one time.

I always think of my mother when I sit here doing my individual census of what flies out of our green giant and on to next-door’s heli-pad. When I was about three and four years old we lived in a bungalow set diagonally on a corner plot with a back garden that measured a third of an acre (so I have been told). All along one boundary line was what I thought was a forest inhabited by witches and princes rescuing princesses from eternal sleeps and tall towers and everything that princes do. In daylight hours that “forest” was a haven for wildlife and my mother taught me the names of common British birds as they emerged from that sylvan paradise to visit us. Sparrow, robin, great tit, blue tit, coal tit, starling, blackbird, wren, wood pigeon, green woodpecker, jay, magpie, pied wagtail (little trotty wagtail). I’m sure we SAW all those but I have my doubts about the yellow hammer. Clutching my ladybird book of birds I was amazed that a bird would utter the phrase “a little bit of bread and no cheese” and I can still see the buff cover embossed with dark brown letters and illustration as it had lost its jacket due to being handled so much. So from my mother I learnt the names of birds. She also passed on the names of trees and garden plants. Nothing fancy just the ability to recognise that wonderfully slim dark green plant that spurts forth its tiny yellow star flowers in the middle of winter – winter jasmine and other regular residents in suburban gardens. I never realised what I knew till I came across school friends who had no idea what the stuff in their gardens was called. I also took it for granted that everyone knew how to make a white sauce even if it did come out lumpy. At least I knew that I should have kept stirring/beating it with a wooden spoon and g r a d u a l l y add the milk. I just took it all for granted while I was growing up and she was alive. Years later when I discovered that not only did some other women not consider their mother their best friend but even hated her it really struck home how lucky I had been with mine. MLD (My Little Darling) can be stroppy and her taste in music is a bit invasive at times but I like to think that there is a glimmer of how I feel about my mother that she feels about me.

How to Remember

I was doing my usual morning hop around my favourite blogs:

Dove Grey Reader, Anne Holloway, Harriet Devine, Stuck in a Book, Living with Dragons, Cornflower and finally Random Jottings where Elaine was talking about a book that would teach you the origin of weird and wonderful words. Pop over there now and have a taste of what the book she talks about is all about.

I recently had to pop into Borders to collect a reserved book for MLD (My Little Darling) and my eye fell upon a volume that had to come home with me.

You can see why I was tempted, can’t you? We all know ” i before e, except after c” and a few of the other handy ways of remembering important info but thanks to this book I will now also be able to remember the chronological order of the three most important Greek philosophers. All I have to do is think of them chilling out together with slices of cucumbers on their eyes being pummelled by a Swedish masseur in a SPA (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle).

Can you name the vital processes of life? Well as soon as I have a quick revision session I should have that under my belt as well. I did get Biology “0” level you know, phew I managed a science and I can still label a herring. Anyway to get back to what the book teaches you – “Mrs Gren”. In other words those VPs of life are: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition.

Pathetique at French? Well don’t worry, as long as you can remember the word ADVENT
you will be able to recall the main etre verbs:
Arriver-Partie
Descendre – Monter
Venir – Aller
Entrer – Sortir
Naitre – Mourir
Tomber – Rester
and the 13th verb all on its own – Retourner

Clever eh?

Never / Always Judge a Book by its Cover?

I have a feeling that a great many of you will have at least seen this book even if you haven’t read it. I had no idea who the cover illustration was by until MLD (my little darling) arrived home with a book of poems by Carol Ann Duffy with this gorgeous cover …

The illustrator is one Petra Borner and you can see her website here. In the same series are several other covers by her

What a treat and I’m tempted to acquire them for my hoard whatever they may contain.

Why is that when books can look so amazing those ghastly metallic, pierced covers are allowed to exist.

There should be a law against ugly books and I should be allowed to be the judge of what passes for good and what should never see the light of day.

Sound cue

“Goodbye then and have a good day” was all he said but the voice he said it with resonated deep in his chest and with the passionate inflections peculiar to the Welsh people.

I was transported back more than forty years. The extended family gathered around a battered upright piano, my Mamgee vamping out the chords while Gramp provided the vocals in his approximation of a performance by a concert singer. “Bless this house, O Lord we pray, make it safe by night …. anddd   d  a  y”, he hammed. “Sh Jim, sh” calmed Mamgee, ever the one to preserve propriety.

Mini rug

Some of you have been supporting me while I try to warp my loom up again and get weaving. Here’s my attempt using some bits and bobs lying around. Next I promise I will listen to you all and plan. Meanwhile here are my strange selvedges and warp-faults for you to give me feed-back on. It is just under A4 in size.

On my 4-shaft counterbalance loom I threaded my heddles up going through shafts 1234,1234
only used the first 4 pedals and treadled 1&2, 2&3, 3&4, 4&1 …..

I have a feeling that this would be an appropriate time to learn about BALANCED WEAVE, & warp-faced & weft-faced.

Can’t work out how I got these “loopy” bits on the selvedge unless I mis-treadled sometimes.
Any ideas?

Winter Lace a pre-Christmas walk

I’m not very good at dragging myself out for a walk but luckily TLM (the loom monkey) is home for Christmas and ever keen to do a bit of mapping for  OpenStreeMap.  So we went for a 3 hour walk in the Teddington direction and then looping back home. The photos were taken in one of the Woodland Gardens in Bushy Park just as the light started to go. It was rather like being in a magical wood, slightly spooky but special. 

Happy Christmas to one and all

Last night I dreamt ……..

…… not that I went to Manderley again but that my mother-in-law gave birth to sextuplets! And this morning I have woken up feeling so refreshed and calm.

Others might have been worried by such an event but to me it is a massive improvement on a recurring theme in my dreams. Every now and again I would wake up remembering a dream in which the central theme was always the same. It was always filmed slightly differently with a different director, set and script writer but the core of it never wavered.

I was always on some form of transport. Sometimes it would be a bus, another time a train or even a plane. I was on a journey and encumbered with vast amounts of luggage and most of it not matching. It was more likely to be odd-shaped packages and bundles than fancy-coloured leather suitcases from a designer range. I knew that I would have to “get off” this transport soon and so I set about gathering my belongings but even as I did so I knew that the task was impossible and either I would have to alight with only some of my stuff or the transport would race on past my stop.

So why does having this new dream make me feel so good? My mother-in-law is faced in old age with having to bath and change the nappies of six assorted offspring. Her house is not equipped for such a task and she now lives so far away from all her children, their spouses and children that we can’t be much help. I grant you that she has miraculously recovered her beautiful figure and skin which I had previously only witnessed in the family album but she has to cope with the daily, well to be realistic hourly, needs of her new family.  The answer to my question is that I feel so elated about all this because it is HER problem and not mine. If I can I’m sure I will visit sporadically and offer a helping hand but I don’t HAVE to. The decision is mine. I can take it or leave it.  Yes I’m, a selfish person. Most of the time I will just leave her to stew in her own juice.

You do remember that this is a dream, don’t you. This isn’t about me and my mother-in-law. It is about me and my life. Most of all it probably relates to work. I have come to the realisation that the baggage/babies aren’t mine. I am currently employed to deal with the baggage/babies but I could in reality just get up from my desk and walk out of the door never to return. All I would lose is a monthly salary but most importantly NOT my sanity.

I am being remarkably calm given that by tonight I have to hand in “something” about how I see my job, what has to be done and what is the best way of doing things and in what areas am I not achieving the necessary etc. Then on Thursday I have a “meeting” with our new MD. So why am I serenely tapping away on my keyboard instead of scribbling away with a scratchy pen trying to justify my own existence? Because it’s not my problem. I didn’t give birth so I don’t have to take the responsibility. I have the luxury of merely being an irresponsible employee who at any point in the day can stand up, go to my window and shout “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more”But I won’t because I’m calm and collected and I am just going to let it all just wash over me while I sit with a serene smile on my face. You bath the baby.

All in pieces

Here’s what I did this weekend. At the moment it is roughly one metre wide and it’s called “At the End of the Day”. I think it needs a widish border of the dark blue and then I must find something to back it with. I don’t have enough of any one of the pinky or yellow fabrics but maybe I can do stripes of all the fabric I have left.

My New Best Friend

 

 

I know. I haven’t posted for a week or two but I have been very busy. I have a new best friend and hanging out with a best friend takes a lot of time not to mention the usual stuff like going to work, washing, shopping, cooking…

So who is she? Well this is an old pic of her. She’s quite grown-up now. rather than eating half the garden with her spade she has achieved her ambition of learning to like olives and now has a much more sophisticated palate.She is MLD (My Little Darling) and we have taken to spending a great deal of time with each other.

 

One of the things we have been doing is watching films. We are on a mission to watch everything that Jared Leto has ever acted in. I first encountered him in what I consider to be the scariest film I have ever watched, Requiem for a Dream. You may have read my post about that film earlier this year.

Never Talk to Strangers

Never talk to strangers. That’s what they tell you and drum into you from when you are tiny. I’m sure it’s very sensible advice but, as I think I may have mentioned in one of my posts, that’s exactly what I didn’t do last Saturday. Whilst hoping to bump into someone we were supposed to be meeting, and with only the knowledge that she was female, black and probably at least forty, we took to accosting anyone who fell anything near that description. Even when I was no longer physically with my virtual friends, I carried on in the forlorn hope that I would meet the elusive Xenobia. When I threw my question, “are you Xenobia?” at her, her reply was “no, but she’s a friend of mine”. So instead of locating my original target I got to know a lovely woman called Dindga (pronounced Ding-gher) McCannon. There she is at the top of this post.

Dindga is an artist from Harlem, New York, USA. From the age of ten she knew she was an artist and fifty years later she is still going strong. She used to be a painter but over the years she morphed into being a fiber artist and now her speciality is art quilts. Her work is available for sale in a range of places and of course she works to commission, often for groups who require a relevant piece of work to match their mission statement.

Our encounter happened at the knitting & Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, right in front of the booth of another textile artist called Hilary Hollingworth. At this stage we need to give our thanks to Hilary. She looked on patiently whilst we stood in the way of her table and chatted away like old friends. There was no tutting, no tsking, no making us feel uncomfortable just the wonderful acceptance that two people were becoming friends right in front of her eyes. Thank you Hilary for your understanding.

Dindga and I got on so well during our chat that when I discovered she was going to be in London for another week, on her own, I mooted the idea of spending the day together. So it was that a week after our chance encounter that we met up at 10 am at Wood Green tube station.

I had planned a lengthy itinerary, starting at The Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch. I have a habit of taking people here. The last time I was at the museum was in November 2005 when I dragged Susie B-W here. After the museum we wondered around Brick Lane, taking time to grab a quick bite of Samosas, Sag Ghosht, veggie curry, rice and nan before looking at the houses in Fournier and surrounding streets. We had hoped to end up at the Eid celebrations in Trafalgar Square but we arrived there just after five o’clock and everyone was packing up to go home. Just time for a last cup of coffee together in Covent Garden before we went our separate ways.

UK Freeform Crochet Meetup at Ally Pally

One group of people that I belong to is the International Freeform Crochet Guild. We are spread across a great many countries including the UK, USA, Brazil, India, Australia, Israel and all the others in between that I can’t remember now. Most of the time we can only get together virtually but now and again we also manage to meet each physically as well. The gals in the US seem to manage quite a few big gatherings. They had an amazing get-together in Australia a few years ago. There was an anniversary conference in Morecambe, Lancs last year and then last week a few of us met up at Alexandra Palace at the Knitting & Stitching Show.

Prudence Mapstone, Australian-based Freeform teacher and author

Pauline and Sheila, two British Freeformers

Close-up of Pauline’s Freeform bag

Freeformers Prudence & Ildi in their colourful and textured Freeform garments

Close-up of British-based, Ildi’s Freeform garment

I heart charity shops!

 

If you know me then you know I can’t resist a charity shop. Well you never know what is sitting in there, waiting for you, do you, and it is all for a good cause, isn’t it. Today it was new territory, somewhere where I have never set foot in a charity shop before, New Malden, Surrey, just outside Kingston-upon-Thames.

Every now and again I have to satisfy My Little Darling’s craving for foreign lands. Wait a minute! I thought she said New Malden. Yes, that’s right, New Malden complete with the largest Korean population outside Korea. When you venture into one of their mini-supermarkets you are venturing into a foreign land. Not only is everything in a foreign language it is in a foreign script as well. It’s very geometric and looks a bit like drawings of little stick people and their TVs. So without a few tiny bits of English written on the edge of shelves you have absolutely no idea what anything is. As far as i can make out the Koreans survive on a diet of soy. Everything has soy in it in one form or another. At least half of each shop we go into must be full of brightly coloured rectangular tubs of variously flavoured soy paste. Oh yes and you can also but “Hello Kitty” crisps and sweets. Apart from that there are huge bags of rice and powdered acorns, indian millet, dried pumpkin slices and pickled radish, the big giant white mooli type, rather than the miniscule red English type.

 

Once we had filled our big shopping till MLD could no longer walk upright with it on her shoulder we made a start on the three charity shops. Just look what I came up with ….

 

 

Obviously someone in this area has been studying fashion recently though I have to admit I think they more or less just bought the books and glanced at them. They are hardly read, let alone read and re-read. no I’m not a dedicated follower of fashion but I have always had an interest in costume and textiles and wider design issues and I couldn’t bear to live this little set of four books to be split up. They need to live together on a shelf.

Fashion as Communication by Malcolm Barnard, 1996, Routledge

The Face of Fashion – Cultural Studies in Fashion by Jennifer Craik, 1994, Routledge

Fashion Theory – The Journal of dress, Body & Culture Vol 1 Issue 1, March 1997, Berg

Dress and Ethnicity (Ethnicity and Identity Series) edited by Joanne B. Eicher, 1995, Berg

I know they are all at least ten years old but even in the academic world they can’t be completely out of date. I’ve already found something that will serve as a useful starting point for a discussion amongst one group of my friends. I consider that I have had excellent value for money with my purchases. Each book cost me £2 and when new the slimmest, cheapest of them was £9.55 with the most expensive being £14.95

 

Booker Prize Congratulations

Congratulatuons to Anne Enrightfor winning The man Booker Prize last night with her novel “Gatherings”.To my knowledge I have not read any of those shortlisted or even entered for this literary award. I’m never very up to date with my reading as I tend to acquire books from  charity shops and jumble sale. It is likely that any book acquired this way has already been read by someone but probably not loved so much that they couldn’t bear to part with it. Or of course there is the distinct possibility that they are just a very tidy, organised person and stick  to that scary rule of “one in – one out”. The third, sad possibility is that they are dead and someone has hurled their personal  possessions wholesale at the local Oxfam outlet.

Been to All Pally for KSS

I spent all day at Alexander Palace at the Knitting and Stitching Show. Too tired to tell anything now.

Are you a party animal?

In “the Club of Queer Trades”, G K Chesterton says of a character:

“He welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds.”

What a wonderful way to describe how I feel. I do like people but I couldn’t eat a whole one!. Seriously, I do enjoy the company of others and meeting new people but it has to be in the right situation and parties just don’t do it for me. They always seem contrived and orchestrated and often “put on” either to impress, keep up or just because it’s the thing to do.

I much prefer impromptu gatherings and when I was a girl I dreamt of having the sort of  home where anyone was welcome to drop in anytime and a corner would be easily found for them, in the plural, to stay a night or four. But life’s not like that and I ended up married to a quiet man who doesn’t find it easy to allow hoards of people into his safe place. You can’t have your cake and eat it. I would have run a mile from anyone who phoned up from work at 4pm announcing “I’ve invited Fred and Ginger round to dinner tonight”. When our eldest was a baby I knew someone whose husband did that all that time and also ran his finger across the top of doors to check for dust. Phew! A lucky escape. I’ll stick with my mildly anti-social spouse and be thankful.

So why GKC  all of a sudden? Many years ago when I was in secondary school I remember reading some of his Fr Brown detective stories but I hadn’t even thought of him until this morning when Stuck-in-a-Book was talking about authors who had initials rather than first names. Then I discovered LIBRIVOX , blogged about it and even had a comment from the project’s founder, Hugh McGuire.  He reassured me about a minor technical query and was kind enough to suggest some audio books that I might enjoy. I browsed a while and then wandered over to Project Gutenberg and came across the words that I decided to share with you my virtual friends. Is there anyone there? Party anybody?

Librivox

I’m sure you’ve heard of Project Gutenberg, haven’t you? That’s right, it’s “a library of 17000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired in the USA”. So you can have a look at an online version of short stories by Edith Wharton before you decide whether or not you want to go rummaging around the online secondhand bookshops to locate a copy.

Librivox appears to be a newborn sibling to that amazing project. It describes itself as “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain”. You can download and listen to books, even burn them to CDs to listen to them in your car or put them on an mp3 player. You can also subscribe to a regular podcast. That way I suppose it will be a bit of a lucky dip or an opportunity to widen your “reading” taste. I have yet to investigate Librivox but I am keeping my fingers crossed that technology will not exclude me from this interesting proposition. I am currently unable to listen again or live to any BBC Radio programme because my dearly beloved has installed 64 bit Windows on our computer and the Beeb hasn’t caught up with us yet.

So, you can be a passive listen to a Librivox recording or more excitingly you can be one of the readers so that others may enjoy these books. Recently Stuck-in-a-Book was pondering on whether you can be prejudiced against an author because of their gender or what you thought was their gender. So what happens when you listen to an audio book and someone of the wrong sex, in your opinion at least, reads the book? Does it matter if the reader is from the wrong side of the Atlantic or has a thick or even slight foreign or regional accent? Who would you most like to read to you. For starters I’m claiming Anthony Hopkins as my personal reader.

In Need of Resuscitation

My Little Darling has been unwell with a heavy cold and the beginnings of a nasty cough. She was a bit pathetic last night and would have been ideal casting for a costume drama about a young girl dying of some incurable disease.

I was rudely awakened at some ungodly hour by MLD shaking me and saying, “you’ll have to take me to hospital”. Luckily I forgot that the Tax Disc for the car hadn’t arrived yet so I didn’t add a guilty look to my “I’m really still asleep” style of driving. I also dumped the car in the blue zone at the hospital car park, which I have later discovered is reserved for consultants, so I could easily have been carted off to prison for a whole cornucopia of car-related offences. We picked the optimum time to arrive at A&E. The drunks and weirdos had all been attended to and we whizzed straight into triage, our feet hardly touched the ground before we were whisked into Major Injuries and straight out again into “Resusc”. It sounds scary, doesn’t ? MLD was hooked up to a very colourful monitor which emitted a loud high-pitched beep all the time we were there because it didn’t like the combination of her levels. The fluourescent lights added to the nightmare scenario and by the time MLD was discharged, when the world had all gone to work for the day, I was on the verge of having to be admitted for damage to my eyes and ears.

As well as being hooked up to the shrieking monitor, MLD had tubes coming out of various limbs and a face mask through which she was continuously nebulised for several hours. We even witnessed the Resusc unit being “cleaned”. If I had applied for this job I think I would have been turned down for being over enthusiatic! For one who is close to being allergic to housework, I came perilously close to grabbing the cleaning materials and shrieking “give that to me, I’ll do it”.

Just in case you are wondering about the invalid, she improved greatly and we were packed off home after a visit to the hospital pharmacy. We snuggled up on the sofa together for a late breakfast of poached eggs on wholemeal and cranberry toast and butternut squash and chickpea soup and then I hopped on the train to do half a days work.

In need of resuscitation? I certainly am and so I am retiring to my boudoir for a very early night.

The Loom Monkey Moves North

I never thought he’d do it, and I don’t actually think he went to bed on Friday night, but somehow TLM (the Loom Monkey) packed his stuff in time for us to leave by 0737 on Saturday morning. I have to confess that Durham is the furthest north I have even been in the UK. My previous northerly record was Lancaster, when I had to dash up there just a few weeks before the TLM was born, because the old man (the TLM’s father) had been rushed into hospital for an emergency operation whilst working away from home. So 285 miles from home we unpacked TLM’s stuff, made his bed, connected up his computer .. walked around Durham together, then we drove home …without him.

Struwwelpeter Strikes Again!

There’s no getting away from him. There I was politely minding my business, being distracted by an online friend who has developed a penchant for Mrs Miniver, or more accurately the writing of her creator Jan Struther, when up popped Struwwelpeter again.

It seems that the original set of cautionary tales was written about 10 boys and one girl. Jan Struther had three children and if you added their cousins to Struther’s three then the total boycount would be 10 plus one girl. Not something a creative person could let pass without comment so, in 1935, JS came up with “The Modern Stuwwelpeter”, illustrated by E H Shepard (of Christopher Robin /Winnie the Pooh fame) and published weekly in Punch.

One of my favourites is Cheeky Charles:

“……No words unfit for him to hear
Had ever reached his sheltered ear–
For instance, such disgusting slang
As “Gosh” and “Golly,” “Blow” and “Hang.”
Imagine, therefore, what a pang
His learned father felt one day
When Charles distinctly said, “Okay.” ….”

Whether or not Charles was any worse than his contemporaries we cannot be sure but Struther’s description of his casual way of speaking shows that even in the 1930s speech was evolving. I recently discovered an American poet, Taylor Mali and his comment on the way young people speak in his poem “Like – You Know”.

 

No Room at the Inn, B & B, Country Club …..

I can’t believe that I spent nearly two hours last night trying to find us a bed for the night of Sat 29 Sept. We are dropping The Loom Monkey off at Durham Uni and as its the longest distance I will ever have driven I have no intention of doing the journey in both directions on the same day.

Slowly I worked my way south from Durham, clicking with my mouse to see if I could find a bed for us for ONE NIGHT only.No room at the inn, hotel, ghastly looking motel. Nothing!

I was 110 miles from Durham, somewhere near Rotherham when I found what must have been the only spare bed in the UK.I can’t say I was ecstatic. Restover Lodge Hotel doesn’t sound TOO bad till you see the picture they were stupid enough to provide online. In its favour was that we could probably just slide down a motorway sliproad straight into the car park. I suppose you keep your eyes closed when you are asleep, so you don’t really have to look where you are staying, do you?

Something stopped me from booking online. I had found a B & B in Richmond, Yorks, about 35 miles south of Durham and it wasn’t possible to check availability online, and I thought that 1015 was just a few minutes too late to call, so I left it till 0815 this morning. Whoops, the delightful Jill was having a lie-on, something she doesn’t usually have the chance to do and muggins here just ruined it. “You won’t believe it, I’ve had to disappoint so many people over that Saturday night”. Oh yes, I would! Something is going on on that date. The government must have passed a new law that obliges everyone to sleep away from home on Sat 29 Sept 2007!!

But guess what? She had just had a cancellation the night before and we have a bed at the top of this very nice looking house in Richmond, Yorks only 35 miles, less than an hours drive, from Durham. Hurrah!

 

 

Great Late Discoveries

Well just in case you hadn’t realised, because you’ve been in Outer Mongolia for a week or two, I have just enjoyed reading Reasons for Being by Clare Dudman. Over on DoveGreyReader the great late discovery is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Now as far as I’m concerned discovering something for yourself far outweighs having it thrust upon you by others. You can still savour a tasty morsel that someone dangles in front of you so many times on the end of their fork that you have to open your mouth and experience it, but how much more sweet is the solitary ingestion of a new flavour of icecream that until now you didn’t even know existed.

So I’m wondering, dear reader(s), is there a book that you finally found, years after everyone else? Stuck-in-Book touches on this subject in his occasional series, 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, though I have the feeling that on the whole most of his books were read by only a few, even when they were first published. So I’m not asking for an elitist find, just something that everyone else had been aware of except you.

 

98 Reasons for keeping quiet

I spent all day Saturday at work from 0935 till 1905 and I was shattered. It’s bad enough doing 5 days but my body complains if I ever do a catch-up day. I fell into a wonderful hot geranium-scented bath, slipped into a cuddly pair of pajamas, made the old man and me (everyone else out till late) cheese & Worcester sauce on toast and a bucket each of hot tea and then …

I settled down to finish the last few pages of 98 Reasons for Being by Clare Dudman. I won’t say anything other than if you felt the slightest bit tempted by my blog entry about a few days ago, then don’t dally any more, grab yourself a copy and get stuck in.

Sea Cabbage

 

Belated birthday wishes to my old school pal, Chris. I decided to make her a scarf from this lovely blue/green two-tone fabric that frays    s o   beautifully when you help it along.

I’ve been commissioned!

I’ve been commissioned! Yes, I’ve been commissioned by the person I made these two items for.

She wants me to make tea cosies for her mother and her sister for their birthdays .. in less than two weeks.
Yikes, I don’t even have the fluffy stuff. Oh drat, I’ll just have to buy some and of course I must buy a bit more than I need .. just to be sure!!

I haven’t done any felting for ages, do you think I will remember what to do?

The Loom Turns

Another weekend gone. Where? TLM (The Loom Monkey) is off to Uni at the end of the month and so he had a farewell barbeque with old school friends, friends from work and friends from church. This involved tidying the garden, removing clutter from the kitchen so it could become a servery area and of course going shopping.

So that was most of Saturday gone. After meeting everyone I thought it best for us to remove ourselves to the piano nobile with only a brief foray down below to provide lighting. I hadn’t realised how dark getting it gets these evenings. Our slinky lights in a tube hadn’t been out of their boxes since we had an impromptu family disco in the kitchen. The cousins from what I consider to be “oop North” but they adamantly insist is the East Midlands were staying with us and there’s a limit to how many Disney films you can watch. Instead we had a really cheesy disco. It was wonderful! If you know me you know how unlikely it is for me to rave about … well a rave. I just don’t do that sort of thing.

I couldn’t sleep on Saturday night so eventually got out of bed at 4 am and finished up the tidying up that TLM had done the night before. It was a bit eerie, all that there was to show that there had been a party was a dishwasher full of brightly coloured garden/picnic plates and bowls, loads of food in the fridge, including a ton of tuna, sweetcorn and pasta salad and the kitchen table turned 90 deg and pushed against a wall. So it only took me about 3o mins to empty dishwasher, turn table and bring the hidden clutter back to its rightful place.

I crept back to bed later and had a little snooze. The sight of tidiness led me to believe that the erroneously named “Dining Room” could really be tackled. This is where my 4-shaft, George Harris floor loom resides and since I acquired it I have desperately been attempting to clear the rest of the room around it. It’s rather like one of those little plastic puzzles. There is one piece empty and you have to keep moving everything around until it is in the correct order. Well now I have more than one piece empty after a trip to the charity shop and the filling of a large bin bag. But still the room is full. if I was brave I would post a pic, but I daren’t. Then I had a brainwave. If I turned the loom it would take up less space! So with great difficulty, I turned it 9o deg so that now it has turned 180 deg from the way we first put it together! So the loom turned. Unfortunately B I G is B I G whichever way, or in whatever light you look at it. I’ll just have to plod on with sorting all the other stuff in the room. Watch this space. What space? That’s the whole problem!!!

Rebel without a clause

Maybe I am a bit of a rebel. When I pick up a book to decide whether or not I like it, I don’t look at the first paragraph, I just dip in. I’m a bit like that with life. I’d rather have a go at it than research what equipment I need and what it will cost me. I want to get started right away with whatever tools or near approximation I have lying about the place. And so I am with books. It’s by a woman, the title is intriguing, I feel drawn to the cover. Go on, open it, slap bang in the middle. Read a sentence or two. Does it flow? Do I enjoy the sound it makes in my head? Do the words make me see something? Oh yes, and I have a fondness for slim books. Is that sizist of me? Alexander Mcall Smith would probably describe me as being of “traditional build” so you would expect me to have an affinity with larger tomes. This is not the case because inside me is a slim, beautifully crafted person trying to escape. Slim is beautiful as far as I am concerned, so much so that I am filled with joy at the sight and thought of what others consider to be anorexic or “not normal”, namely the short story.

Looking at books on my shelf, “The Ha Ha” by Jennifer Dawson pushes all the right buttons. For a start it is an old Virago issue, well-turned out in its 2nd hand but cared for bottle-green school uniform. It is slim, it has a title which immediately conjures up a picture for me. I can see my son’s friend suddenly dsappearing from view because we hadn’t quite reached the end of our explanation of this landscape feature. He fell, we all fell about laughing. He was not amused.

I’ve digressed and that is something that I enjoy in books as much as I do in conversation.

98 Reasons for Reading

As I was heading towards the end of Margaret Foster’s “Private Papers” (see my previous post) I stumbled upon reference to a fictitious account of the life of Heinrich Hoffman during the period when he was doctor in charge of an asylum. Dr Heinrich Hoffman wrote the popular “Struwwelpeter” (Shock-headed Peter) a set of cautionary tales warning of the fate of children who literally played with fire, were Stuck-in-a-book or wouldn’t eat their soup. My mother, born in 1926, was given a copy of the English translation of this wonderfully illustrated volume which was one of the books that my sisters and I inherited from her. The book was published in 1845, over eighty years before my mother was born and I think I understood that it was not of our time but I probably enjoyed it all the more for that very reason. By the time I was born in the late fifties I’m sure that moral tales were not what they once had been, even if they existed at all. So Johnny Head in Air and Fidgety Phillip felt as though they friends of Mrs Do As You Would Be Done By who I believed to be a personal friend of Mamgee, my maternal grandmother. The engraved and coloured-in illustrations thrilled me and there there was no end to the number of times I could have the book read to me whilst I soaked up the pictures.

Once I knew this book, 98 Reasons for Being, by Clare Dudman, existed I had to have it and so I ventured out to Waterstones, in the Bentall centre, Kingston, at lunchtime and luckily they had a copy sitting on the shelf. So far it seems to be tale of poor Hannah who does not talk, rather than poor Harriet who played with matches. Dr Hoffman is asked to take in young Hannah who is probably suffering from severe depression but has been labelled as suffering from Nymphomania. We meet her as she enters the asylum and Hoffman decides upon the best course of treatment.

This is yet another book of alternate accounts. Life in the asylum is recounted with particular reference to the treatment of Hannah. In between are glimpses into Hannah’s thoughts. Far from being simple, her thoughts appear articulate and we begin to see something of her life before the asylum. The treatment she receives encroaches into Hannah’s private world but actions and people are transformed. I may have reached out for this fictitious account for the wrong reasons but I will continue to read because it stands up as a book in its own right even once the Struwwelpeter link is laid to rest.

 

 

 

The Lapsed Reader?

Once upon a time I was a lapsed reader but with the kindness and encouragement of a few good women I was brought back from the brink and felt able to participate all year round and not just on high days and holidays. I was welcomed into a caring group and was shown the way. I was tempted with old familiar themes and stories, words I knew and charming dwelling-places of the word. My old appreciation of virago-green and genteel paintings was rekindled and I could hold my head high and call myself a reader again. I carried the word with me in my bag and in quiet moments I sought solace with lovingly-crafted phrases. I read in public and felt no shame. I was proud to be a reader.

I will never be one of those who will sit in the front row. I am the reading equivalent of one who slinks into the back row of a service and leaves before the priest appears at the door to shake the hand of the worshippers. I have progressed from merely attending at Easter & Christmas and weddings and funerals but my practice is humble. Some days it is only a few words but if the train is delayed and I meet no friends on board I have been known to read more than a chapter a day.

I have just finished “Private Papers” by Margaret Forster which features the alternate voices of a mother and daughter. Rosemary, the daughter is reading what her mother calls her “private papers” which gives the book its title. Her view of events varies considerably from that of her mother ably demonstrating that there is no one version of any story. That is all too common in families. In my own my baby sis’s infamous tantrum in Mevagissey is legendary. Middle sis and I could not understand what set baby sis off. We laid out our reasons for considering her behaviour to be unnacceptable and smugly put her exhibition down to being spoilt. Years, even decades later, baby sis was articulate enough to put her side of events and at long last we had to admit that she had a point. Private papers doesn’t reach any such admissions. Orphaned mother Penelope’s lifelong yearning for a “real family” is never satisfied. Thinking her marriage will bring her wish, Penelope is sorely disappointed as soon after the birth of her third child she is left a young war widow with a disapproving yet demanding mother-in-law. The one daughter who gives her what she most approves of in theory is also the one who disappoints her the most.

Each episode of family life is seen in turns from the viewpoint of the mother and then the daughter. This puts me in mind of the extracts of my baby sis’s novel in progress. She also alternates between mother and daughter though her narrative differs in that mother’s voice tells of the past and daughter’s is more or less in real time. We learn from the daughters account what has become of the young girl in the mother’s account. There is much more to this oeuvre than an alternating voice but as it is very much a work in progress each version I receive via email has shifted to become something slightly different. I can’t wait to read the final version and maybe if you pop over to my baby sis’s blog she will drop the odd hint about this exciting project.

Oh, and if you want to find out what this lapsed yet born-again-reader is consuming now then you will have to look out for my next post. Watch this space.

Back to Nature …. then reality

My monthly travel card ran out on Saturday. I decided not to renew it just yet and cycle to work. I’m lucky my journey to work on my bike is a journey of 3 parts:

A. GETTING INTO BUSHY PARK

Leaving home, leaving Hampton, cycling parallel to the RiverThames, past David Garrick’s house and Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare. Somewhere along this stretch of river the unknown Charlie Chaplin performed for Fred Karno and the rest is history.

B. IN BUSHY PARK

This is the second largest Royal Park and for we townies this is a good dollop of what we think the countryside is like. Don’t laugh at us please, we are sensitive creatures. There is loads of grass, bracken, trees, deer and birds. I half expected to see Mr Heron as I entered the park via the gate by the Stock Yard, fishing for his breakfast. Maybe I was too late or maybe he was having a lie-in. There were plenty of wood pigeons and parakeets but no sign of Mr Heron.

I crossed the central chestnut-lined avenue that runs through the park, nodded to Arethusa/Diana on her fountain in the middle of her pond (both designed by Sir Christopher Wren as a grand approach to Hampton Court Palace) and cycled on past the children’s playground which has delighted many children over the years, including me and my sisters when we visited our Auntie Bernie, later my children and their friends and cousins and recently the daughter of my eldest son’s girlfriend.

Now on my second half of the park stretch I caught a glimpe of someone out of the corner of my eye. He was hanging on to the edge of a tree trunk like a children’s toy and was wearing an outfit of green with a red hat! A green woodpecker! I don’t think I’ve seen one of those since I lived in Horndean, Hampshire and we had a wood at the bottom of our garden. That was BEFORE baby sis was born so probably very very early 1960s.

Reversed into and forwards out of the wrought-iron kissing-gate and past the Bushy Park Allotments. These photos were taken through the railings and haven’t captured the diversity and abundance of growth in there but if you know anything about allotments you can use your imagination to guess at the dahlias, sunflowers, beans, marrow et al that were jostling for breathing room.

Another wrought-iron gate, near the skateboard park, a short ride out of Church Grove and then I mix again with the hoi-polloi who drive in or catch the bus to Kingston.

C. OUT OF BUSHY PARK AND INTO KINGSTON

“Earth has not anything to show more fair”, no, not upon Westminster Bridge but Kingston Bridge and the view is not so inspiring, It mainly consists of ghastly developer-thrown-up (in the vomit sense of the word) “modern” blocks of flats, whoops, I mean apartments and yet more offices of no architectural merit at all.

 

When I catch the train, the view is a little more appealing and includes these two boats, permanently moored. Now that’s what riverlife should be about rather than money-making waterside properties

 

It takes me 40 minutes to cycle and I arrive hot and flustered and in need of a blanket bath because I work in a building that allegedly was used to build parts of Sopwith Camel aircraft and, apart from filling it with computers, I wager the building remains pretty much as it was in those days. We certainly do not have niceties such as showers. We are lucky to have running water.

The problem with cycling to work is that you have to cycle back, on an already sore bottom! Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhh.

I love Freecycle

I subscribe to two Freecycle groups and enjoy seeing what people are chucking out and more amazingly what people ask for. People actually specify the make and model of baby buggy that they are looking for. Remember this is not to buy, this is for someone to give to them. I don’t know, young people these days are so ungrateful .. mutter..mutter..rant rant. When we were first “expecting” we caught a train to buy a McClaren carrycot/pram/buggy from someone for £18. Believe it or not I think the buggy part might actually be lurking in my garage somewhere. This was back in 1982 when shoulder-pads were the height of fashion and buggies were either blue and white stripes or red and white stripes and had hooks for handles to hang several tons (should that be metric tonnes?) of shopping on, against which you used your offspring as counterweight. Anyway, none of this nonsense about cross-country, cross-trainer, 3 wheeled, 4×4 vehicles that babies aspire to these days.

Talking of going cross-country, I have wondered offtrack here. I was about to announce that I had acquired something from a freecycler who lives a stones’s throw away from the Rugby Stadium at Twickenham where last night the Police were giving a concert. The freecycler suggested that I came to his house whilst the Police fans were safely inside the stadium having their eardrums perforated. What is it, I hear you ask. Well, it’s a sewing machine. Haven’t you’ve already got one?

Yes .. but …this is a HAND sewing machine.

There is no electrical power, and consequently no handy lamp placed strategically above the needle to aid elderly eyes with the threading. The other design feature not yet incorporated when this lovely object was manufactured, probably in the 1930s, is REVERSE. It took me a few minutes to work out that all you have to do is to leave the needle in the fabric, lift the presser foot and rotate the fabric so that it faces in the opposite direction. Does that make sense?

My machine is a Jones, even though it says “Kildare” on it. I have been told that these were made for Whiteleys, London’s first department store when it opened in 1863. According to UK Travel Search, London, “Hitler was particularly taken with Whiteley’s during a visit and vowed to make it his headquarters after Britain was brought under the yoke of the Third Reich.”

Togetherness

Just when you think they don’t want to spend any time with you EVER again they surprise you. My little darling couldn’t wait to show me what she had learnt at her guitar lesson.

 

 

 

This is her 5th guitar lesson and I believe she is getting so much out of it because she started her lessons when she was older. We even ended up almost playing together, she playing her newly learnt Led Zeppelin riff and me attempting to play the music from the film Jeux Interdits, on one string!

Giving birth

I’d forgotten how painful and long an experience it is. Things seem to be happening but not quite as you expected and the twinges are not in the place you had anticipated and you are concerned that perhaps you haven’t gathered the right sort of people around you to help with the birth.

Of course I’ve been through it before, more than once but this time it was my sister giving birth and I was only there to hold her hand, mop her brow and whisper encouraging words.

So without more ado, I introduce you to my baby sister’s ………. B L O G

Let’s Get Weaving

To start with, here’s a wall of “stuff”, most of it weaving but with a touch of crochet, knitting, spinning and dyeing thrown in.

And now my first piece of”wide-ish” weaving on my grown-up 4 -shaft George Harris loom.

There are 120 warps on this piece of weaving, all of them one-ply different coloured hemp from The House of Hemp.

The turquoise blue is one-ply hemp (exactly the same as some of the hemp used for the warp). the purple and blue is a ball of space-dyed, or random dubious “yarn” that happened to be lurking. By varying the depth of stripes I hope I have made this small piece of weaving look quite crafty and individual.

Do you remember my Bag for the Bridegroom’s Mother? Well this next piece of weaving uses the same warp as the blue/purple piece above with a weft of the remaining yarn that was four different yarns plied together to make a colour that matched the Bridegroom’s Mum’s outfit.

I really impressed myself here. I started the weaving with about 2cm of tabby weave, then changed to twill and back again for the last couple of cms to tabby. As this weft is thicker but looser, the coloured warps show through slightly so you can see a sort of shadow of coloured vertical stripes.

Finally using the very last of my 120 warp threads I chopped up some manky maroon cotton ties that I think had been made for a school show of some sort and wove tabby till I ran out of warp. This created a lumpy, bumpy, rustic, folksy piece in which the coloured warps are clearly visible.

Do you worry about what your children are doing?

You can’t watch over them all the time, can you? You need to let them have their freedom, to stretch their wings and fly.
So I decided to allow my little darling to travel on her own on Saturday to watch someone she knew take part in…
The World Beard and Moustache Championships

I don’t have a pic of her friend but here is the competition.  In case you are wondering, he didn’t win his category and he celebrated by harvesting his 15 month growth on the beach this morning.

When he brought her home this morning, I wondered who the good-looking young man at the door was, what a transformation!

Birdwatching

On Friday I had to pop up to “Big Grown-up London” as it is known in our family. Even more grown-up it was for “a meeting”. Doesn’t that sound grand? I’m not keen on grown-up things like meetings but luckily it was a small-scale affair and I soon realised that although for most of the other participants this was their 2nd meeting they hadn’t got very far and I even found myself contributing rather a lot to the proceedings.

As this meeting was just north of Oxford Circus I found myself popping into a cut-price bookshop on my way back to the tube and picked up two volumes from the “really cheap –  bet you can’t find anything readable bin”.

This chirpy little volume IS about birdwatching and it ISN’T. If you read between the lines it could be about life as well. Just because you are unable to do something as well as someone else doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it and that you shouldn’t be proud of yourself. So you think you know nothing about birds? Simon Barnes begins by suggesting that you make a list of birds you CAN recognise: swan, duck, robin, magpie, pigeon. OK they’re obvious – anyone and everyone knows those. That’s the whole point. Start with what you know. Wait a minute that sounds like my English teacher speaking… So start with what you know. Once you have become intimate with the ordinary and common you WILL be able to recognise that something is rare. Anyway he doesn’t really approve of the twitcher mentality of ticking the rare off a list. He is more for appreciating bird-life in general.

I’ve almost finished this book and it’s making me want to put on a decent pair of shoes and drag someone out for a walk. Oh yes, that’s another thing, place is important but you’ll have to read the book to hear what he has to say on that subject.

AWOL

Yes, I know. I haven’t posted for months now. I really don’t know where the time has gone. Theoretically it has been summer and I have been away for one week and then doing everyone else’s washing so they can go away and then washing it all again when they come back. The weekends have mainly been spent (in between washing) ferrying people around the M25 to drop-off points and then picking them (and their dirty washing) up a week or two weeks later.

As I have a preference for blogs with pics I have slung up an outside and inside pic of a bag I made for a good friend to wear to her eldest son’s wedding. Our children are all the  same age and we have been friends since the youngest girls were babies. She moved away and then on twice after that but still comes back to see us and drag me out for a walk and a chat. On one of those visits we went for a walk and ended up buying her bridegroom’s Mum outfit. It was quite unusual and with only a week to go to the wedding she hadn’t been able to find a bag to go with it. I’m not quite sure why I agreed but she chose several yarns from my stash and I plied them together to make something that would go with the outfit.

The bag took a while to make with a crochet dc body and a Freeform Crochet flap. then I realised that it needed lining and began to wish that I hadn’t made the flap such a freeform shape. It does have a long crocheted strap but in the photo it is tucked inside, so it could be used as a clutch or a shoulder bag. It took me most of Sunday and every non-working waking and some sleepmaking hours on Monday to finish. I had a very early lunch hour on Tuesday and popped to the Post Office on Tuesday to despatch the bag FIRST CLASS but due to the intermittent postal strike, or maybe just the usual service, thebag only arrived on Friday morning. Phew! Just in time.

How on earth do you say …

Blanaid McKinney?  She’s the author of the collection of short stories that is my current “train read”.

Technical talk – help!

 So, if I have asked you to help TLM and me with assembling the loom, this is the bit where we are stuck.

Q1.Do the chains hang straight down from the sides of this beam  or do they cross over the beam first, as shown in this picture?

Q.2. Do the “wires” from the two smaller rollers/beams hang straight down towards towards the heddles or do they cross over first?

Then we move onto the shafts and heddles, which I have just learnt can also be called healds.
The “eyes” are in different places on each shaft (if the shaft is the “frame” that holds the heddles and moves up an down, rather than the “slot” (like a lift shaft) that it goes up and down in.

The pictures show an oblique view and also a side-on view.

Q.3. Is it possible to put the shafts in upside down? How do you work out which edge should face up and which should face down to the metal lamms?

Q.4. Have these “eyes” just been put in randomly by whoever screwed them in, or are those slight differences in position vital to the working of the loom?

That’s probably enough to be getting on with for now. It’s Monday night so I must gather up the rubbish in the house and  put it out for the bin men. What a shame to be brought down to earth from all this lovely loom talk.

More tales from the Loom Room

Have you ever been faced with a task that looked impossible? Like dismantling a giant loom? Well by now most of you know that that is just what happened to TLM (the loom monkey) and me this weekend. In the corner of someone’s spare bedroom lurked this piece of carpentry and engineering, much of it covered with sheets of antique brown paper and the rest of it sporting a substantial coating of dust that would have made Quentin Crisp proud.

 

It was a gargantuan task trying to decide which part to tackle first, because, as is the nature of the beast, every part is interconnected. I was the brave one. I stood with my feet firmly planted on the floor and said in my most heroic voice, “I think we will have to cut the warp off.” My goodness I sounded as though I might actually know what I was talking about. This skill was honed in a period when I had to field rather a lot of calls from IT salesman and I learnt that if you learn a paragraph of jargon almost parrot-fashion and regurgitate it at the right moment then you can call their bluff and they crumble at your feet as they actually think you know what you are talking about.

 

The seller’s son went off to fetch a pair of scissors and then the cutting began. Out came the roll of masking tape and everything dangling from both warp and cloth beam (see what I mean about the jargon) was bound to within an inch of its life.

 

The next day, when we were reassembling the loom, I made another royal decree, “I think we should undo everything on the warp and cloth beams. Perhaps I should have used my best Captain Picard voice and said, “make it so”. We chopped away again and

 

Abracadabra bimbambazoo

instead of just a few inches of weaving we found…..

 

it must be my lucky week.

…… or not ….

just had a  frantic email from son of loom’s previous owner… please can we return rug that was on loom! I can’t say I am surprised.

 

TLM

TLM. The Loom Monkey. Every home should have one. It does help if you have the body and flexibilty of a praying mantis and the helpful nature of Polyanna. What on earth will I do when he disappears off to uni in the autumn? Not only did he help me dismantle the beast, from where it had been residing since 1979, and bring it back to be adopted by me, but he had a determination that we would have it re-assembled today. That determination may well have sprung from a fear that we would forget anything we thought we ever knew about how it was all put together.

 

So, with the aid of my labels, that had things like “breast beam left” written on them and TLM’s labels that sported such legends as “arrow 10” (sorry haven’t got time to work out out to make the blog print special characters) and photos taken with my digital camera and TLM’s phone, we had what we thought was a fairly good idea of what went where.

 

We managed the pedals and lamms. TLM eventually sussed the brake, wind-on mechanism, pawls, springs and all. But when we got to the shafts and heddles (and possibly the healds, if we could actually work out which bit they were) we couldn’t decide whether or not we had them upside down, inside out, back to front or all of the above.

 

I put out a desperate plea to my “grown-up” virtual weaving friends but they were obviously all tied up in their warps and like Superman II, who was on TV this afternoon, they have given up helping newbie weavers in distress to be with the girl loom of their dreams.

 

Watch this space, or should that be “watch this shed”?

 

 

Mid-life Crisis

I’ve bought a loom ! It was so close to me, about 5 miles away and expert weavers that I asked said it was a good ‘un and I HAVE just had a  big birthday and those of you who know me have probably been speculating for ages about how long it would be before I succumbed.

 

I’ve just been with No.2 son (my personal IT support) to dismantle and collect it. It took three and a half of us nearly two hours to dismantle it and load it into the car. The half person was called Oliver and wasn’t old enough to speak but still did a marvelous job of wielding screwdrivers and spanners and supervising the rest of us.

 

Now the beast is in the car. When I see IN what I mean is it practically IS my car. There was hardly space for G and me to drive the  thing home. As well as the loom I now have a loom bench,  shuttley bits and L O A D S  of yarn. No warping thingy but anyway I have to get it all back together before I can mess around with all that.

 

If you never hear from me again you you wil lknow that my disappearance has something to do with my new acquisition.

 

 

 

I’m famous – sort of!

Dawn of Crafty or Crazy alerted for to the fact that Craftzine had mentioned my pouchy baggy thing that I blogged about on June 7th. You can see the link to my work on Craftzine here. It seems as though people are keen to have more information about how items are made so I will add a few lines about how I achieved my woven pouchy baggy walletty thing.

I can’t remember where I saw the object that set me thinking. I think it was actually made of woven comics which meant that the weft provided by the newspaper was brightly coloured. These days some of the free newspapers, especially those available on the trains into London, are full of photos. This means that newspapers are now longer plain old black and white. I was watching some mindless programme on the television when my eye was caught by the red, blue and yellow that filled the pages of “The London Paper” and I remembered the woven pouch I had seen somewhere.

I used a cheap old picture frame, one of those that’s costs about 99p and then you break the thin glass as you are carrying home and instead of being cheap you have just wasted almost a whole pound. Of course you can’t throw it away, that would be far too tidy, so you just prop it up somewhere where it gets on the nerves of any tidy freaks who dare to cross your threshold. Ten and a half months later when it has gathered its share of dust and dead spiders you have a brainwave that you can use it as a sort of weaving frame and you leap up, thereby missing the arrival of a long-lost step-half brother’s ex-wife’s , presumed dead’s son.

So:

colourful newspaper

improvised “loom”

fine, strong yarn (not actual parcel string as someone thought I had used – though why not)

glue stick (to stick edges of newspaper pages together)

something to BEAT with (what DID I use? – I think it might have been a wooden kebab stick)

I started out using one of those stiff plastic things that allows you to “bind” several sheets of paper together as a loomstick but it didn’t work out so I just stuck to simple over, under, over weaving of the paper.

WHAT I MIGHT DO DIFFERENTLY

I might take up Dawn’s suggestion of folding wider strips of paper so that they are several thicknesses, then I wouldn’t need the glue stick and I wouldn’t have so much paper flying around the room. This would probably also make the edges of the strips straighter and allow me to “beat” the strips/weft closer together.

Now I seem to remember that the original had several “rows” of woven thread/yarn after several “rows” of paper. I think this would also pull it together much tighter.

When I had finished I held all four sides together with masking tape on each side and then cut the weaving off the loom.

Then I machine stitched just inside that masking tape so that all the newspaper couldn’t escape. Then I decided how I was going to fold the pouchy thing and cut up some fabric to make some binding. If I had tough close-woven tape I think it would have worked better and been much tidier but I’m a freeform gal and messy to the core.

My Darling Little Dragonfly

Mouth open as usual to answer back! You wouldn’t expect any more from a teenager, would you? Off to her last exam (for now) Unfortunately she takes after her mother in the Maths dept so I know how excruciating this morning will be for her.

Never mind, Dragonfly then has all summer to fly around. Have a wonderful summer!

I like

washing on the washing line

 

spotty bananas

 

creamy white poppies

 

bright orange poppies

and listening to birds in my garden click to listen

 

 

I have so much “stuff” to do at work that I went in yesterday from 10 to 5.30. Then I came home and did some gardening.

 

Today I have no energy or strength to do anything other than ruminate about a few of my favourite things and all of more or less withing arms length of my armchair. I haven’t even been shopping this week so the family will just have to starve (Note to any health visitors reading this: all members of this household are over 16, apart from Gilman the rabbit and I am feeding him.)

 

I’m almost done with Pelagia now and the book picked up speed. I would have finished it on the way home, yesterday, but travelled with a lovely Parisian “velcro” friend of mine and overtaxed the mind muscles by conversing in French with her. This occupation consists of me moving closer and closer to her lips in the hope that by making the distance between her lips and my ears shorter there will be less chance of words going astray. Last time we journeyed together I was so transfixed by her osculatory muscles that we had gone through three stations before I realised we were on the wrong train.

 

Iin a previous post I likened some elements of the book to a Midsomer Murder but on reflection a comparison with a Poirot episode would be more fitting.

 

 

 

 

Quote of the day

Eric Watt Forste

“Good is the enemy of Excellent.

Talent is not necessary for Excellence.

Persistence is necessary for Excellence.

Discuss.

Pelagia and the Patronymics

Do you remember a while ago that I told you I had paid good money for NEW books. I devoured one immediately but the second one had to wait. I have been doggedly reading “Pelagia & the White Bulldog” by Boris Akunin on my brief train journeys to and from work whenever there is no “trainfriend” present. Consequently this book is taking a long time for me to finish. I’m still not sure about it. Is it because I am so easily confused by those Russian names, so many bits of a name for each person.

 

In case you are a scholarly type, and I’ll have you know I know a few, then maybe this explanation borrowed from Paul Goldschmidt will help:

 

In modern Russian, names consist of a GIVEN NAME (imia), a PATRONYMIC (otchestvo), and a SURNAME (familiia), but as Tumanova notes quite well: “Russian naming conventions for early period are first name (baptismal name, usually that of a Biblical saint), followed by the everyday or common first name, patronymic, and rarely a surname. Russian naming conventions for mid to late period are first name, patronymic, and surname” (1989: 4). More precisely, Russian names started only as a given name, adding the patronymic around the 10th century, and finally the surname (from the patronymic constructions) only in the late 15th or early 16th century. The surname did not become common, in fact, until the 18th century (Tupikov, 1903: 21-22).1

 

So is it the vasy array of names for each person that confuses me or is it that my powers of concentration are so very feeble.

Occasionally I stumble into a room to find “My Little Darling” watching such cultural delights as “The OC”. She has long ago lost all patience with me when I exclaim how they all look alike and that I have no idea which dumb blonde shopaholic tart is which or which tousled-haired hunk is going out with her whilst she is secretly sleeping with his millionaire thrice-divorced steely-haired virile step-grandfather. I have managed to get the settings of the book into my head and have already employed the location finders and props buyers to ensure that my in the head film looks stunning. Casting is not so straightforward as so far I’m not even sure how many actors I need to employ. I rather think that this is not going to be a film but a TV version made in two parts where it doesn’t really matter if you saw Part 1 or not. A bit like Midsummer Murders. More or less the same setting but with a different name. More or less the same characters but with different names.

 

The book is strangely a book of two parts. We have the setting up and our main protagonist arrives and seems to be doing her job and then it is all over and we are only halfway through the book. Maybe all will be made clear but as I have only just ventured into the beginning of Part 2 you will have to wait for my verdict.

 

If this had been one of my usual charity shop purchases I may well have put it aside but as I said I paid good money for this and I don’t want to waste any pages though I do have to confess, and I can probably do that to Sr Pelagia in the absence of the Bishop, that I have been tempted to skip a few.

 

 

 

 

 

A bit “Blue Peter” but not a shred of stickyback plastic in sight

I saw a pouchy/pockety thing somewhere made from woven newspaper and thought I’d give it a go.

Not as easy as it looked!

Me and “My Little Darling”

 

Me and “My Little Darling” on the bank of the Chichester Ship Canal. This photo echoes a similar one taken ten years ago but I’ll need to rummage a bit to find that one.

Making my birthday card

Happy Birthday to me

                               Happy Birthday to me,  Happy Birthday to me!

Here you can see two of my birthday cards. The one on the left from “My Little Darling” and the one on the right from “My Personal IT helpline”.

One of my presents came from “My Baby Sister”, a brooch with three owls sitting side by side “to No.1 Owl from No.3 Owl” and a personally written explanation:

“Once upon a time there were three little owls. they lived on a branch of a tree. Sometimes they jostled for food but most of the time they got on just fine. One was clever, one was pretty, one was hard-working, one was loyal, one was funny, one was creative, one was careful, one was friendly, one was quiet, one could cook, one could sew, one could paint, one could knit, one was … hang on a minute, that’s more than three virtues – but that’s because these little owls were good at all sorts of different things and each one was something different to everyone they met. but the best thing about being an owl is that you can turn your head almost all the way round, so the little owls could always watch out for each other – and even when they were jostling for space or food, even if one of them had flown off somewhere else, they still managed to keep an eye on each other.”

 

Unlikely Friends

Before I move on to the two NEW books that I bought last week I should first clear up previous reading. I think I mentioned that my “baby sister” is doing an MA in creative writing. Someone suggested that her writing was similar in vein to the writing of Anita Shreve and so I did my sisterly duty of rounding up almost all AS’s works and dipping into them before handing them over in the interest of Literature.

Light on Snow was a huge success. I understand that it is one of, if not the latest of her works. At a pinch it could slide into my category of “Unlikely Friends”. Completely overbalanced by the death of his wife and baby, a father takes his surviving child to live at the extreme edge of a small town far away from his former life as an architect in the big city. A single event and the arrival of one person turn their lives upside down again. Replete from a good read I sat down to tuck into another of AS’s offerings. I managed to finish that course but by the time I started on the third I couldn’t be bothered. There wasn’t anything that really grabbed me. Remembering why I had started on this Shreve Fest I couldn’t even begin to imagine how someone could compare my sister’s writing to this.

Other people wax lyrical about Shreve’s writing so don’t be put off by me. I can be very perverse. I persevered with the infamous Pinkerton’s Sister when all around me were abandoning ship at a rate of knots.

These links will give you an idea what others thought:

http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/shreve.htm

http://www.amazon.com/Where-When-Novel-Anita-Shreve/dp/0156006529

After my failed Shreve Fest I picked up “Instances of the Number Three” by Salley Vickers, possibly best known for “Miss Garnett’s Angel”. This is a book which can wear the tag “unlikely friends” with pride. Who would imagine that the death of a man would bring his wife and mistress together? This is not the only unlikely friendship in this book. You will have to read it to discover more. Peter’s widow, Bridget has had a lifelong love affair with literature, especially Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet which was a delightful coincidence because “my little darling” was desperately revising good old H as I read IofNT. John Donne gets more than a passing mention too.

Whether intentional or not, the velcro effect quite often occurs in the transition from one book to the next. Bridget & Frances meet Zahin who claims to have known Peter. He is an exotic flower in this otherwise typically English setting. My geography was never that good and I could easly have assumed that Zahin, from Iran was the same character as Cherif who arrives on Miss Webster’s doorstep one dark night, straight from North Africa, in “Miss Webster and Cherif” by Patricia Duncker. Are these characters angels sent from another dimension to help those in need? Even the young woman in Light on Snow could be considered so as she opens up the previously locked lives of the father and daughter.

These books set me thinking about unlikely friends.

Miss Pettigrew and Miss LaFosse in “Miss Pettigree Lives for a Day” by Winifred Watson which we can look forward to in its film version soon.

Flowers for Mrs Harris by Paul Gallico, in which a London charwoman could be seen perhaps more like a discreet Fairy Godmother than an angel.

What book would you award the tag of “unlikely friends”?

Spending Saturday

 

 

What can be more pleasant than spending Saturday with your daughter? Not a lot except that I would probably be better off financially. I am usually so good about looking in “proper” bookshops but not buying. My philosophy is that if I am “meant” to read a book it will find its way into a charity shop and throw itself at me as I cast my eye along the shelves. But this Saturday I was led astray. Being seventeen my little darling doesn’t share my taste in books. These days her reading matter is likely to be found in the self-help or psychology sections of Borders, our most convenient Book Bazaar. At her age I had a penchant for John Wyndham so maybe all teenagers gravitate to towards tales of “nasty” things.

 

So what tempted me? Please see above. I fell for a book cover and the promise of a nun. The cover of the book has a graphic quality and a bit of a pre-war feel to it. “Pelagia & The White Bulldog” by Boris Akunin is actually translated from Russian and the first page has a list of Dramatis Personae so I wonder if reading it is going to be as confusing as when I tried to tackle “War and Peace” and fell foul of everyone having at least three names. I really thought this looked promising but it had bad reviews but I don’t care because at least it will enable me to tag another book with the words “nun” and “convent” and anyway the book looks good, feels good and smells good.

 

Another of my favourite tags for books is “spinster” and that is how I will be tagging “Miss Webster and Cherif” by Patricia Duncker, along with the word “friendship”. This work of fiction was much better received by the critics. I only hope it will live up to my initial expectations. Oh, and in case you are wondering, my little darling bought “My Friend Leonard” by James Frey. It’s the sequel to a book all about someone in a drug rehab centre and is as equally deserving of the tag “friendship” as is my book.

 

Anne’s Labyrinth

If you want to add some atmosphere while reading this entry may I suggest that you listen to the music from the film by opening another web browser and listening here.

Before it won all the awards I decided I wanted to go and see Pan’s Labyrinth but in my usual “all talk and no do” way I missed it when it was on very briefly at our local cinema. My sister, the Anne in the title of this blog entry is much more of a doer and of course found somewhere with about six seats that was showing the film although she had missed the initial showing. She raved about it so much that when I knew she was bringing her tribe to stay over the Bank Holiday weekend I decided to buy the DVD and watch it with her.

The film is set just after the Spanish Civil War and cleverly intertwines real life with fantasy. I always have difficulty trying to introduce someone to a film without giving away the plot so I will do my usual thing of not saying anything. A friend of mine once said that she would rather watch paint dry than watch a film that I recommended. She complained that I don’t care about plot as long as the film looks good. This film certainly does look good, in a grim way. It is almost monochrome in colouring. All the joy of life has been sucked away and everything is pervaded with grey. We see events through the eyes of a young girl. Her father is dead, her mother has remarried and is now heavily pregnant by her new husband, a captain in the army.

Ofelia is a girl who loves books, especially fairy tales and it is into these that she escapes to deal with her unhappiness at her new situation. You may have as much trouble as Ofelia in distinguishing between the two worlds.

Where I blog

Stuck-in-a-Book has been musing about where people sit when they blog. Well this is where I am, in the left-hand house, in the middle upstairs room. It’s not a room of my own, it’s just where the computer happens to be. I don’t actually sit at the window but my right eye glances out of it now and again.To my left is the door onto the landing at the top of the stairs and behind me are about 10+ years of my my husband’s company’s “books”. At the back of the house I have attempted to take over my eldest son’s room as a room of my own but it is proving harder than climbing Mount Everest.

B*ll*cks to Alton Towers

My usual morning surf around the web and I stumbled across this book. I think this is the hardback cover and I love all that the Morris Minor Traveller implies. It appears to be a best seller but I have have never heard of it and not because I have have been spending too much time at Alton Towers or our local version, Chessington World of Adventures or to the west of us, Thorpe Park and Legoland. When I was a child I was taken a few times to Chessington, when it was a zoo and when our eldest was about three we took him there to marvel at elephants and giraffes and other smaller curiosities. We usually steer clear of theme parks, especially on holiday which for the last million years we have taken in Cornwall.

 

There is however one exception. Just outside Liskeard, an area where my mother-in-law’s family originated from, is a village called Dobwalls.We dragged the children around churchyards and went looking for old family homes with only vague memories of a young child (my mother-in-law) to guide us. The children, all under ten were amazingly patient and when we saw that there was a place with a sit-on model railway we decided they needed a reward. Dobwalls has several different scaled-down steam railways and the remainder of the park (if you ignore the go-kart area) is given over to giant climbing frames and all-weather tepees in the pine forest. The climing frame area is like something out of a surreal nightmare for me. Tunnels and high-level walkways connect one area to the other and I have to admit we lost our youngest on several occasions as you would never be left behind by the boys and could climb with the best of them. Dobwalls has over the years become a bit more commercialised but we always tried to ignore those sides of the place and massaged our puritan sensibilities by suggesting that the place brought much-needed employment to the local population who after all were probably distantly related to the other half.

 

Over on Stuck-in-a-Book Simon asks us to think of a book that only a handful of people know about, their RMH volume. Back here I’m wondering what secret days out people are keeping to themselves, their very own BTAT (Bollocks to Alton Towers) place.

 

 

 

 

 

Where or When

 

I was so caught up in and entranced by “Light on Snow” (see previous post) that despite now having a stack of Shreve’s from which to choose I couldn’t find one that called to me. I read the first few paragraphs of each, flipped to the middle, flipped to the back but, like the person desperate for sleep who tosses and turns all night rather than lying quietly, I just wouldn’t allow myself to settle. Eventually I was so exhausted that I just grabbed the nearest volume and began.

 

“Where or When” is a very different book from “Light on Snow” though we do see parts of the book through the eyes of children. Two middle-aged people who knew each other for barely a week as children, renew their acquaintance and the inevitable happens. It is the way that Shreve writes that draws me to her. She has an eye for small details, her characters are sensitive to the play of light on the landscape, the subtle colours of their world, she makes the ordinary extraordinary.

 

Though plot is important I don’t feel that it is the driving force in her books. Have you ever been to a church fete and had a go on one of those “machines” that are just a wriggly thick wire attached to a battery? You have to manoeuver a metal ring with a wooden handle from one end of the “wire” to the other without allowing contact to be made. If your hand slips a buzzer rings and carries on ringing till you manage to break the connection. Sometimes you are so shocked by the contact that the buzzer sounds continuously as you drag the ring back to the beginning. But things can never be the same, the peace and quiet has been broken by that momentary (or lingering) contact. Whilst the buzzer is sounding you are unaware of anything else, unaware of what was happening before and should have happened afterwards. Everything has changed.

Start of a Shrevefest?

My baby sister is doing an MA in creative writing. Currently she is supposed to be looking at the work of Anita Shreve as people have suggested that their writing has common elements and styles. This set me off on a treasure hunt around the charity shops in my lunchtimes to see if I could gather her some research material. I hit the jackpot and almost dislocated my shoulder carrying home my booty.

My sister and her tribe are heading south to stay with us over the Bank Holiday next week so I will be parting with this newly acquired stack in just under a week. Nothing for it but to get stuck in. Light on Snow bobbed its way to the surface and so I began and I couldn’t put it down. I even resorted to reading in bed before I went to sleep, something I NEVER do. Then yesterday morning, instead of reading DGR, HD and SiaB, something amounting to a cardinal sin as far as I am concerned, at 6 am I made myself a drink and crept back to bed to read. I was at work before anyone else as usual but instead of shuffling papers and attempting to prioritise tasks whilst the computers did their early morning calisthenics, I READ, all the time with one ear cocked for the sound of footsteps at the front door. I didn’t go for a walk at lunchtime, I READ and finally finished Light on Snow.

 

My problem is that I think I may have started with AS’s best book. I have glanced at pages of the others and they don’t sing out to me the way this one did. A seemingly ordinary book that starts:

 

 

Beyond the window of my father’s shop, midwinter light skims the snow. My father stands, straightening his back.

‘How was school?’ he asks.

 

‘Good,’ I say.

 

He puts his sander down and reaches for his jacket on a hook. I run my hand along the surface of the table. The wood is floury with dust, but satin underneath.

 

‘You ready?’ he asks.

 

‘I’m ready,’ I say.

 

My father and I leave his workshop in the barn and walk out into the cold. The air, dry and still, hurts my nose as I breathe. We lace up our snowshoes and bang them hard against the crust. A rust color is on the bark, and the sun is making purple shadows behind the trees. From time to time the light sends up a sheen of pocked glass.

 

Nothing prepares you for the rest of the book that works like a two-ply yarn. Each strand can exist on its own but when combined the two have an incredible strength. The two stories intertwine in a way that some might feel is too contrived at times. Surely events and occurrences ARE more meaningful because of what we ourselves have experienced. Incidents that would pass by another cause us to have eyes filled with tears and to react to others in a particular way. Our experiences give us the skills needed in a particular situation. Our presence in a place, at a particular time can, and quite often does, make a difference. We can be responsible for causing someone else to take a different path, not necessarily a better path, just different.

Most of the time we see events through the eyes of a twelve year old girl, share her acceptance of her way of life. If this book only causes us to momentarily think about how our behaviour and actions influence the way a child has to live then it will be reason enough for it to have been written.

No time to blog – nose in book

A Horror of a Film

Elsewhere in blogland people have been talking about stepping out of their comfort zones and that is what I did last week. My little darling (17) convinced me that I should buy her a DVD about drugtaking. When I expressed concern that she should want to watch such a film she pulled the old “it will be good background for……[insert any appropriate school/college subject” card. Once they’ve played their ace you have no chance and so I found myself in Borders on Friday lunchtime being warned by the nice young man that it “isn’t a “pleasant film”.

Middle child had a half-day off work on Friday and so popped his head into the office on his way home. I was pleased to see him and eagerly thrust a cauliflower, a bag of fruit and the DVD into his hands. When I arrived home later that day he and his sister were watching the final seconds of the film and both were eager to sing its praises to me. I remained somewhat concerned about the subject matter. I prefer to read and watch more pleasant things and watch murder and detective films and programmes for the mise-en-scene rather than the bloodiness and cadaver quota.

Saturday began much earlier than usual as we were expecting the return of Big Daddy after his stint of more than a month in the lone-star state. It took me a while to clear his desk where I had been camping out during his absence and the kitchen table needed some serious surgery to allow more than three to dine at it. So with my brief housewiferly duties accomplished I was persuaded to sit down with with the offspring and experience “Requiem for a Dream”, directed by Darren Aronofsky.

The reason that my little darling wanted this film in the first place was because she had been to a gig, on Tuesday night, to see “30 Seconds To Mars”. The lead singer, Jared Leto. is also an actor and back in 2000 had been one of the main characters in the film. Out there in cyberspace he had been extolling the virtues of the film, urging everyone to view it. Consequently I was expected to observe the first few frames of the film and remark upon how gorgeous JL is. Apparently he had to lose quite a bit of weight for the role of Harry Goldfarb and therefore was a picture of slim slightly-goth youthfulness.

I am partial to films that look good and present me with interesting shapes and Aronofsky certainly does this in “Requiem for a Dream”. If I was better kine-educated there would would a multitude of filmic references on which to pick up. At the very least there are nods to de Sica and Busby Berkely. Like the films of Robert Bresson almost every frame is a work of art and the storyline is almost irrelevent, except of course that is what the whole film is about. My two companions were viewing for a second time and so could pick up on more and were able to absorb all elements of the split screens that occurred whenever drug-taking was involved.

There are brilliant comedic moments in this film and at times some of the protagonists are portrayed as caricatures rather than rounded personalities. Don’t allow this to let you think that the subject matter is not serious. Think of a Punch and Judy performance and you will have some idea of the effect.

I didn’t want to watch this film. I don’t enjoy “nasty” subjects and yet I couldn’t help myself. Just as the people in the movie were drawn into and down by what they started I couldn’t leave the room. The film is divided into acts and by the time we were moving from “Fall” to “Winter” Little Darling was saying, “I don’t want to watch this now, I don’t like this part.” Just like the addictions portrayed, the film has its hold on you and there is no escape. You don’t want to do it but you are there for the duration, whatever the consequences. It’s too late, you no longer have any free will.

Devine covers

No it’s not a typo or a spelling mistake just a nod in the direction of my inspiration for today’s post.

As usual I fell out of bed and turned the computer on before I even boiled the kettle. I used to have just one addiction but my self control is rapidly disappearing. You all know I can’t live without DGR but now my eyes and mind crave Stuck-in-a-book for his charmingly amusing and highly personal cartoons and Harriet Devine for well, I suppose just having the knack of posting about things that will appeal to me.

I popped over to Harriet’s this morning and she presented me with a Barbara Pym book cover in my favourite citrusy colours. You can see it top left in the picture above. Does it really matter what is inside a book when it looks like that? Instead of planning the remainder of my weekend I set off on a treasure hunt to see if I could find any more delightful Pym covers and just look what I found. I WANT THEM! There’s not a glimmer of foiled bling or an embossed aperture a la “Airport Books” in sight. There is no chance of these being mistaken for chicklit or even henlit which is a term I think I heard a certain MF utter on BBC Radio 4. I suppose they may verge on Bluestockinglit or perhaps even “OurVicar’sWifelit” (nod in the direction of SiaB) but I have a penchant for this sort of reading and I’m proud of it. It’s all a bit shabby-chic before it became chic.

There’s something comforting about worn loose covers and flowers from the garden and shopping lists. Its not a life I have ever experienced and I don’t have the relevant housewiferly inclinations but its one of the places I enjoy inhabiting when I allow myself to be wafted away by a good read.

And what about these beauties? Wouldn’t you be content if you had these on a slim bookcase in your study? Tall and slim with a slight Arts & Crafts feel or a touch of Bloomsbury?

Tomorrow – a guest blogger: Weaver from the Sticks

I have persuaded a virtual friend of mine to do a guest spot on this blog. I live within the M25 (London’s orbital motorway), she lives “out in the sticks” and weaves. No mention of weaving in her guest appearance tomorrow though. Watch this space.

What did we do before t’internet?

I finished my working day feeling extremely proud of myself. For a while I’d been aware of a gap in our coverage of the world. Well actually several large holes but as with everything in life you can’t eat the whole elephant at once and you have to nibble away at little bits. So, gap identified and a possible filler, alias a photographer in the right area, identified. It sounds simple enough but sometimes trying to find the contact details for someone is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Try googling your own name and see what happens. Did you find the real you at the top of the list? If your name is unusual and you are Famous, with a capital “F” then possibly you really are top of the heap. With lesser mortals and those with more common names this is not usually the case. Usually you will find a reference to someone who plays some strange team sport out in the mid-west of the US or the runner who came 3rd in a marathon in the north-east of England. Another amazing fact is that of you search for a slightly “foreign” name you will stumble across a fire-fighter of that name. I’m not making this up, I promise.

My target had a short biblical first name and a surname that he shared with a character played by Robin Williams. There was even my proverbial firefighter staring at me from my computer screen. I found plenty of references to his work, several of them on Amazon: photography Fred Bloggs (name changed for privacy). What I couldn’t track down was his webpage or email address or anything that would actually lead me to him. It was time to bring in reinforcements so I decided to approach people who had had their places photographed by him, one was an architect, the other a small music centre. My money was on the architect but I placed my bet too soon and my email bounced back to me “refused”. Obviously the recipient could tell I was an unsavoury character without even accepting my message. I wasn’t going to be thwarted and I typed up my email, don’t you love copy and paste, and faxed it immediately to the practice that had refused my communication. Then I resigned myself to never finding my prey.

Just before I left work I had an email from the outsider in this race, a lovely reply from that musical place laying out all the contact details I could ever wish for.

God bless t’internet and all who surf in her!

Yesterday’s haul

Don’t you just love those charity shops that still have some items at charity shop prices? This from my local Geranium Shop for the Blind. 30p per paperback. Admittedly most of the books were not to my liking but just as well really or I would have needed to buy a wheelbarrow or shopping trolley to take my purchases home.

 

Do you recognise any of the above? Any recommendations for which to read first?

 

 

 

That’s my boy!

No. 2 son has been published! (Actually so has No.1 son but I have yet to see the article.) I was quietly working yesterday making sure that publishers and magazines who need pictures were kept happy when an email with the subject header “I’m famous” landed in my in box. It was from No.2 son and contained a link to HIS article in The New Statesman! If I haven’t already bored you by emailing you personally about his moment of glory then pop over and read all about it.

The photo above shows the whole junior tribe quite a few years ago when a strange arrangement of time caused all three children to start a new school, one infant, one junior and one secondary. Jamie looks eager, Greg uncooperative and poor little Celia decidedly apprehensive. Do you see the potential there? World-famous football coach, national journalist & video star!

We’re going to have a full house this weekend, the other half returns from his second 6-week stint in Houston, Texas and as Hampton are playing this weekend we get to see No.1 son as we are the most reasonably-priced doss-house in the proximity of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC’s home ground.

Lazy Weekend

 A lazy weekend, apart from a bit of a walk with my little darling in the Woodland Gardens at Bushy Park.

The daffodils and crocuses have all died down, of course, but the rhododendrons were wearing their Sunday best even though it was only Saturday.

The light  under the oak trees was magical. I know that Keats (or was it someone else?) is supposed to have made up the word “beechen” for the colour of beech leaves.

Somehow “oaken” will not capture the essence of the colour that we experienced yesterday.

 

Bushy Park is undergoing significant restoration with the aid of a Heritage Lottery grant and as a consequence it has been severely tidied up.

 

The overgrown jungles that served as hiding places for the children when I walked through the gardens with my aunt have been tamed and replanted with young plants that will last for the next generation of weekend visitors.

The house is Bushy House, originally built around 1663 for the extravagant amount of £4000. It is not actually in the Woodland Gardens, but just outside as is the tree stump that yielded me my texture pictures.

 

 

Following in the blogsteps of others

Those of you who know DGR will know that she’s been talking about Penelope Fitzgerald again. This prompted me to burrow around in what I call my house to find a book that I knew I had. I bought it in Cambridge when I spent a weekend there, several years ago with Dovegrey Reader, Random Jottings and a few others. You can see that it is still in its protective plastic covering. That’s right, I haven’t even looked at it.  I think that the collection of Katherine Mansfield was probably bought because a certain young man, the artist now known as Stuck-in-a-Book, waxed lyrical about KM.

I am a product of my age, born in 1957 with parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles who had the thrifty practices of wartime living still coursing through their veins. Again I quote my maternal grandmother, “put it by for later”. This behaviour has its rewards. I am currently attempting to “be sensible” and not spend money on non-essentials but because of past lapses there are treasures to be unearthed on my own territory. All this means that I receive double or even triple pleasure. First comes the slightly guilty delight of buying something that you have absolutely no need of whatsoever. Second comes the joy of finding something you had momentarily allowed to slip from your mental filing system and no doubt there is that third stage, the consumption of the goods.

The KM stories are in an ex-library copy so I will not be the first to have gorged on those fruits. The PF looks almost pristine, so pristine I wonder if it has even been read before.

Garden Patchwork

The garden was so inviting this morning …………………

that I couldn’t resist popping out and grabbing myself some scraps for a garden patchwork.

Such Devoted Sisters – me and mine

Reading the Virago collection of short stories about sisters prompted me to post this photo of me and my two sisters.

I’m the eldest and Clare followed just 16 months behind me. In the few years before this snap was taken we were often mistaken for twins. I’m not sure if my mother dressed us identically because of this or if it was just that it was easier to buy two of the same. Clare and I were born at the end of the fifties, me in 1957 and she in 1958. I think this coupled with our parents being a few years older by the time Anne was born in 1964 has led to us having quite different memories that have been distinctly shaped by the era into which we were born.

 

I remember our parents buying a second-hand record player several years before Anne joined us. It came complete with 2 or 3 records. I’m not sure what the others were but I can still recite some of the words sung by Pat Boone. Wang dang taffy apple tango, ma mo, a cha cha cha. How’s it go? I don’t know. Ooh la la la la la la. Now all night long he did it wrong but still it ended right. They did the wang dang ….. As usual with me, I never remember all the words and just go round in some sort of a manic loop that bears absolutely no resemblance to a piece by Steve Reich.

 

Anne was born in 1964 and I’m sure that was the year that I remember hearing my first Beatles song even though I didn’t know that’s what it was. Our next-door neighbours had some strange habits, or so we thought. They had a teenage daughter who used to listen to the radio IN THE GARDEN!! It wasn’t turned in to the BBC Home service either. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” My mother was constantly telling us that she would not be a slave to fussy eaters like Mrs F next-door who cooked a different meal for each member of the family. We were fascinated by the idea of this whilst being well-behaved children and learning to eat everything on our plates and “cut across the fat”. Don’t get the idea that we were flawless though. I managed to reach adulthood without eating many tomatoes and absolutely NO beetroot. Clare still doesn’t like spaghetti although she has nothing against any other sort of pasta. Where is the logic in that? They are the same thing for goodness sake. This woman has two science degrees, under and post-graduate and yet she doesn’t understand that all pasta is made from the same ingredients until you start bunging in spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and squid-ink.

 

I’ve wondered hugely off the point here, if there ever was one. I think what I am trying to say is that you can never explain to someone who doesn’t have sisters what it is like. It just IS. You love them to bits and yet there are times that some of the old petty jealousies and rivalries rise to the surface even though you are unaware of this till someone points it out to you. The moments that stand out from “Such Devoted Sisters” are the ones where the sisters are arranging their father’s funeral and later sorting out his clothes and possessions and they still feel his presence and disapproval. They regress to the favourite taunts, “You’re the eldest” and “I’m the tallest”. It’s rather like how I feel if I ever eat in the street. I’m sure that someone will telephone my school and the headmistress will be horrified to have to remind us that “young ladies do not eat in the street”.

 

Such Devoted Sisters – the end of the journey

Most of my reading is done to and from work on a South West Trains train from Hampton to Kingston-upon-Thames. The journey takes less than 15 minutes each way so it doesn’t take a genius to work out that I end up with approximately half an hour reading time per day. In a good week that gives me 2.5 hours reading a day. My preferred diet is short stories because I have been known to finish a whole one in one direction. This happy state affairs is usually due to the late arrival of a train. The day that someone was taken ill on a train in the Wimbledon area may not have been good news for the patient but my weekly reading quota went up considerably.

On the track at the moment is the Virago publication, SUCH DEVOTED SISTERS edited by Shena Mackay
The short stories in the collection are:

Jean Stafford, In the Zoo; Edna O’Brien, The Connor Girls; Mary Flanagan, White Places; Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Quality of Mercy; Marilyn Duckworth, A Game of Pretend; Bani Basu, Aunty; Janet Frame, Keel and Kool; Anjana Appachana, Incantations; Nann Morgenstern, Sorority; Cynthia Rich, My Sister’s Marriage; Elizabeth Jolley, Five Acre Virgin; Merle Collins, My Sister Cherish; Fiona Cooper, The Sisters Hood; Dyan Sheldon, Day and Night; Louisa May Alcott, From Little Women and Good Wives; Wajida Tabassum, Hand-me-Downs; Eliabeth Gaskell, from Cranford; Georgina Hammick, Tales from the Spare Room; Marjorie Barnard, habit; Katherine Mansfield, The Daughters of the Late Colonel; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market.

You may spot a few extracts rather than actual short stories and I feel cheated by this. I found that I couldn’t read the Little Women extract. Was this because I KNEW it wasn’t a short story or didn’t it feel complete? The same feeling came upon me with the piece from Cranford. If I hadn’t known they weren’t complete would I have just accepted them and read them without these misgivings?

My bookmark is currently resting in the middle of Katherine Mansfield’s, The Daughters of the Late Colonel. After that there only remains Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” which I have never really read before. I remember my mother’s copy of a book of poems with a sepia and brown swirly cover. I loved the illustrations in that book and that is all I remember about Goblin Market. Will I feel that including a poem in a book of “short stories” is as unethical as printing parts of a “proper” book or will I look on it as an unexpected treat for reaching the end of the line?

 

 

Not just the peacock

 Many years ago I read a detective story about an Indian Inspector who becomes involved in the hunt for a missing person whilst on a visit to England. I wondered if there were any more stories about him so I went looking. If I read one Inspector Ghote book every month it would take me two whole years to read them.

The author is H R F Keating who has written many other crime books, several of them about detective Harriet  Martens. That name seems familiar. I suspect there may have been a TV or radio series at some time. Can anyone enlighten me?

H.R.F. Keating writes about Inspector Ganesh Ghote :

(in reverse date order)

Breaking and Entering 2000
Bribery, Corruption Also 1999
Asking Questions 1996
The Inspector Ghote Mysteries 1996
Doing Wrong 1994
Cheating Death 1992 The Iciest Sin 1990
Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes Short Stories 1989
Dead on Time 1988
The Body in the Billiard Room 1987
Under a Monsoon Cloud 1986
The Sheriff of Bombay 1984
Go West, Inspector Ghote 1981
The Murder of the Maharajah 1980
Inspector Ghote Draws a Line 1979
Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote 1976
Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote 1974
Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart 1972
Inspector Ghote Goes by Train 1971
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg 1970
Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker 1969
Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock 1968
Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes 1967
Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade 1966
The Perfect Murder 1964

The call of the Bush(y)

I have one friend who lives “out in the sticks” and told me that she pops in here for “scrappettes of life-up-town”. I’m more of a suburbanite than an “up-towner” but I suppose all things are relative. I am definitely enjoying the fruits of my planting at the moment. Don’t you just love spring and all things green that shoot and sprout? IT’s great to have some in your own garden but if I want to wander a little further I am so lucky to be close to the second largest of the  Royal Parks, Bushy Park which covers an area of 450 hectares (1,099 acres). The Longford River, an artificial waterway 13 miles long originally created by Charles 1 in 1639 to bring fresh water to Hampton Court, feeds Bushy Park’s many streams and ponds.

I have been known to cycle through the park to work. It takes me about 35 minutes door-to-door with the journey split into convenient thirds. The first third involves getting to the park, the 2nd third cycling through the park and the final third the least pleasant negotiating the periphery of Kingston-upon-Thames by doing dreadful things like riding on the pavement. I’m not a confident road rider and I excuse my transgression by telling myself that I hardly ever see anyone walking on the pavements at the time when I am riding.

My ride to work takes me along the very bottom of the park. I cycle along that lower white path towards the Diana Fountain (the circle of blue surrounded by the orange road). The fountain, the surrounding pond and road bisect the mile long Chestnut Avenue planned by Sir Christopher Wren as a formal approach to Hampton Court Palace for William & Mary. The avenue has a single row of horse chestnuts and four rows of limes. From there I cycle the white path along the bottom right of the map, carefully avoiding the see-saw, the giant “P”, the woman in the puffball skirt, her pot-bellied companion and the wheelchair user!! Our family name for that path is “the rabbit path” for obvious reasons. If I am early enough my initial stage in the park allows me to see a heron and sometimes a flock of green parakeets.

My standard weekend, one-hour, walk takes me into the park at the bottom left of the map (the same entrance I use for cycling to work. From there I head north through the woodland gardens (orangey-brown areas on the map) and out again by Hampton Swimming Pool. Both these journeys only touch the edges of the park but I am a bit of a townie and anything more strenuous would probably be too much for delicate little me. Last year I blogged about this walk but the camera battery packed up halfway round so you can only see half the walk. Maybe I should return and finish the photoshoot?

 

Borrowed frits

 

I’ve had quite a little flurry of visitors due to my posting of the snakeshead fritillary. It even caused an old virtual pal to get in touch again and then send me HIS pics of them in the meadow at at Magdalen College, Oxford. If you enjoy amusing cartoons and books then you must definitely head over to his blog.

 

You never know with the book police visiting me so regularly now I may even be forced to blog about a book.

I can’t believe it’s a real flower!

As promised here is the answer to yesterday’s  puzzle, Snakeshead Fritillary, alias The Guinea-Hen Flower , Leper Lily or Fritillaria meleagris. No one dropped by my blog, let alone guessed the answer.

Can you believe that I have reached the age of 49.75 and never seen one of these in real life? It’s true and when I won the war between me and the pg (see previous posting) I was determined that “one of the things to do before I die” would be to see one. I went one better and planted a couple of bulbs. They were tiny and only 2 or three in a packet at my local garden centre, so obviously they are quite precious. I had forgotten all about them till yesterday when as I stepped out of my car I glanced a couple of feet to my right and lo and behold ……….. my very own snakeshead fritillary.

I can’t remember how old I was when I saw a painting of these by Charles Rennie Mackintosh but I believed he was just doing that arty shading thing that painters do. He wasn’t, they really are just like that and if you have never seen one then I advise you put it on your OOTTTDBID list.

Tulips from Hampton

Just in time for Easter Sunday. I had a battle with my front garden last autumn and wore myself out repelling the hoardes of perennial geranium that looks so wonderful but every year attempts to annexe the crazy paving and encroach on the drive and strangle on our way into the house. It’s my fault. Ground cover, pretty delicate pink flowers, low maintenance. Hah! Only if you don’t mind it taking over the world and smothering everything else. It had to go I was determined that my arum lily and day lilies would be allowed to have their day.

The problem was that I was left with vast areas of bare earth so I thought some forward planning was called for and decided on tulips in “black”, white and pink. I can’t remember how many of each I planted but the pinks were in the lead and as they rounded the first bend the blacks picked up speed. Trailing behind at the moment are the whites. I do hope that I will have the pleasure of seeing them all flowering at once.

To complement the colour scheme I will show you something soon that when I saw a painting didn’t believe were real. I thought the artist had taken artistic licence too far. Can you guess what I planted?

Sixth Time Lucky

Finally I made it to the Sixth Contemporary Textiles Fair at Teddington, just down the road from me. I told the family that I would be away from the house for “about 2 hours”. When I realised that I had been in the place for almost one hour and only seen 3 stalls/booths I realised that I would have to get my skates on. Names that you may be familiar with are: Alison Ellen (knitting) Jenni Stuart-Anderson (rag rugs) and Lizzie Houghton (felt).

The lovely woman picture above is Maggie Martelli who does not have her own website and couldn’t see the benfits of haviing one. I asked if I could photograph her work for my blog and so here is the result. This was her biggest piece and in wonderful earthy colours. The work is a cross between chenille (she has at least four layers of fabric in the hanging and the top and subsequent layers are slashed), quilting, embroidery and sculpture. The springy spirals were formed on her dibber so she obviously has real earthy connections, not just her colour scheme. Her design was inspired by the bark of a tree with her springy spirals representing the knot-holes on the trunk. Viewers of her hanging have told her that they see the ripple marks left on the sand by the retreating tide and her springy spirals, the worm casts left behind.

She takes commissions, especially for bags and decorated boxes. I can’t give you the URL of her website because, as I told you,  she doesn’t have one. Pity.

“I’m ready for my closeup now”

THE ABNER – A Day For Light Refreshments starring my daughter

You can see my little darling underneath the words “filmed in glorious Abernarama”.

School Colours

Over on Harriet Devine’s blog I was reminded, by the colour of her grandson’s jacket, that it often takes quite a while till we can bring ourselves to wear anything the colour of our old school uniform. The colours of mine were maroon and yellow.

Here you can see Class 2x, with form teacher, Miss Cooper (alias Kiss Mooper) in the summer of 1970. The uniform was in the transitionary stages from belted, gatherered, solid yellow dresses to shapeless sacks with a pattern of fine white grid lines on yellow. I can also see the two allowed styles of regulation indoor shoes, for of course no young lady would dare to wear her outdoors, indoors. Rumour had it that two 4th years had been hung, drawn and quartered for such an offence in 1962 during the height of the rule of the tyrant “BX”.

I am horrified to note that several members of the form appear to be flouting the “no more than 3 inches above the knee” rule. Kiss Mooper’s hemline seems dangerously high as well. It is no wonder that by 1972 one or two of the staff began to wear trouser suits.

Can you spot me amongst this motley rabble? In the photo are future:

Doctors x 3, Vet x 1, Fashion Editor of Vogue, Other Journalists x 2, Archeologist, Professional Musician, teacher x 2, Nurse turned Homeopath, Nurse, Local Govt Official, Tax Inspector, me and the rest unknowns.

Have you found me yet and is it sad or wonderful that I can tell you the name of every single girl in the photo, without the slightest hesitation?

Moon shots

Sometimes, don’t you just wish you could take a decent photo?

Bet you didn’t know that I was actually a published photographer, did you? Not a lot of people can lay claim to having one of their photos published in an edition of DHL NEWS. In case you are interested it was issue No.7 and it was a picture of Pulteney Bridge, Bath. My detail, of a wall in Kent, was published, just bigger than a postage stamp, in a summer issue of Country Living Magazine. Finally one of mine was savagely cropped till it was so slim it was anorexic, flipped and then used on the front page of that posh estate agents FPD Savills. Please don’t try to push to the front of the autograph queue, I will make sure everyone gets one.

Wooly spiders

Despite good intentions I haven’t made anything recently or even played with anything. Th elast few days seems to have been filled with drainage and electrical emergencies. After phoning the Thames Water emergency line and reporting tha at the very least we and the next two houses in the road had nowhere for our effluent to flow to it was more than 24 hours before the combi-unit arrived down the road to sort the problem. It’s not the fault of the combi team, it’s just that they cover an area roughly from Gatwick to Reading. Go on get your maps out and SEE how big an area that is!!

On Sunday it was the turn  of the electrics. I was in the kitchen listening to the Archers omnibus with the washing machine doing its thing when suddenly, no more Archers. I got up to push the plug solidly home because sometimes it works its way out of the socket when someone moves the ironing board, when I realised that the washing machine was dead as well. A quick dive under the stairs revealed that that of the circuit breakers had popped so I grabbed my leccy bill and phoned the emergency line to check if there was a power cut.  A young man called David made me stick myhead under the stairs again and tell him the exact posoition of all our leccy bits, up, down etc. His expert diagnosis was that it was just us and to call back in half an hour if we still had no power. Ten minuted later when I phoned again, because he decided not to dspatch an engineer, I couldn’t get through for a few minutes. When I did, guess what? There was an underground fault with over 300 houses without leccy. In other words just what I had told David. No power. I can’t have been the only person listening to the Archers, can I?

Back to crafty things. I thought I ‘d share something I made earlier. You may recognise the brown piece on the left. It is my first piece of weaving on my rigid heddle loom. It was the one that got away. I made the mistake of using some of my own handpun yarn for the warp.  This was before I found out that warps should be tighter spun to give them strength. Ping, pind, several warp threads gave way and so I removed the whole sorry mess from the loom. And so I discoverd a new way of starting a piece of freeform crochet.

WOOLY SPIDER START to FREEFORM CROCHET

1.Cut at least 12, maybe 20 pieces of yarn, each at least one metre long (they should all be the same length).

2. Holding them all together, tie and a knot roughly in the middle with all the threads together. You now have a bunch of thread with a large knot in the middle.

3. Stick your crochet hook into the knot so that it goes under two or three threads. Holding only one of the threads start doing chain stitches. carry on till you have used almost all the thread then pull the thread through th elast chain to finish it off.

4. Now go back to the knot  and using the next thread crochet dc (double crochet or in the US sc, single crochet) into the previous row.

Does that make sense? You can see it best in the purple version. The rows begin to dradiate out from the big fat knot. You can crochet into the front or back loop of teh previous row, depending on whether you want a ridge or not. And of course, remember the first rule of FREEFORM CROCHET – there are no rules. So just do your own thing! How you carry on from there is up to you. You could pick up some of the “outside stitches” of your wooly spider/butterfly/flower with dpns (double pointed needles) and add some freeform knitting to your piece.

Have fun.

Legs uncrossed…finally

I thought all that rain was “a good thing”. It would all help to water our gardens and keep the reservoir levels up.

Unfortunately those sudden extremely heavy downpours two days ago meant that, in the technical terms I have recently acquired, the mains are up as well.

I was beginning to think that I should head over to SURVIVAL BOX and order a few foldable loos.

 

 

Seriously. The tell-tale slow disappearance of fluid down our cloakroom (don’t you love that word) loo caused me to gather up my torch with its obligatory on-its-way out battery and head to the end of the drive to gaze down the storm water drain. Ah ha, if I can see water about half a metre from the top then you can bet that the drains running down the middle of our road are actually not running anywhere. So I called dearly beloved Thames Water and so began the saga of the crossed legs. I love these incidents to be logged so I went next door and asked my neighbours to call TW as well. He can’t resist a look down a manhole so he had a look down the one in his garden – all clear, then the one in our drive . Suffice to say that was not all clear.

I could do my grumpy old woman act on this subject for hours on end but for the sake of my reader I will cut a long story short and just say that it took them just over 24 hours from the original call for TW to give us the luxury of having somewhere for our stuff to go after we had gone!!

 

Just don’t get me started on how many flats a developer wants to build on the land he will have when he knocks down a perfectly decent early 1920s verandah-wrapped bungalow.

 

 

Switched Allegiance

Rather dismal photos but put up t illustrate that I have put Zola’s “Ladies Paradise”  aside at page 266 because of the arrival of “Women and Craft” by Gillian Elinor et al. This book was put together in the 1980s and contains interviews with women about their memories of where and how they learnt ordinary craft skills and what they are doing with them now. The bookis driven by a feminist agenda but is not overtly aggressive. Rather it is a celebration of the continuation of women’s ability to make the most of what they have. Although it dips slightly into feminist theory the book is a light read for those with an interest in the practice of useful art and the place it has in providing an outlet for the drudgeries of life.

Pandora’s Box or “I didn’t know I liked that”

My middle one has just introduced me to www.pandora.com . On this site you can create your own “radio station”. You type in one song or artist and Pandora suggests other music that you would like and starts to play it for you like your very own radio station. You don’t even have to register to try this out, unless you want to save your station to return to at a later date. One small problem is that you have to have a US zipcode to take advantage of this so I’ve moved, well just acquired a zip code that I allowed my fingers to create randomly with my num keys. I wonder where Pandora thinks I live? Judging by my suggested musical taste at the moment, I am somewhere in the mid-west and just about to don my fancy boots and tip my hat on the back of my head.

Pandora came out of The Music Genome Project, a project set up to create “the most comprehensive analysis of music ever”. As far as I can see it doesn’t yet embrace classical, and some other genres, unless I am doing my searching in the wrong way.

Go and have a play with it and let me know what you think. I love it when you leave comments and after all this tidying and redecorating I’m desperate for visitors.

Up on the roof

Usually I only get dressed just before I leave the house but this week I have to get dressed sooner. I can’t wander around the house in my usual selection of nightwear. Finally , after those nasty winds we had last month, the insurance company has stumped up and given the go-ahead for us to repair the roof. We aren’t on a corner but the church next-door to us is set back on its plot of land, leaving our southern extremity exposed to the elements. Most of our rear hip was loosened with a good few tiles ending up on the drive of the church. Thankfully no one was walking or driving underneath when they decided to head earthwards. On inspection the wind had managed to get under most the front hip tiles and the ridge as well so we are currently surrounded by scaffolding and likely to come face to face with a roofer if we glance outside as we open our curtains. No more wandering downstairs scantily-clad to put the kettle on, or wafting into the back garden in my deshabilles, as my grandma called it, to feed the rabbit. There is danger of bumping into the roofer who has drawn the short straw and has to come through the house and turn the garden hose and electric power on.

While they’re up there, do you think they’d do a speedy loft conversion, secretly, and create a reading, spinning, weaving hideaway for me?

Ear Worms

Do you suffer from ear worms? I do and the only way to get rid of one is to introduce a new one into your head. Unfortunately sometimes the replacement worm can be more intrusive than the one it replaced. My colleague with the long-distance German girlfriend alerted me to the name of my affliction. In Germany those little bits of songs that you can’t get out of your head are called colloquily called “ohrwurm” or EAR WORMS. Yesterday it was a phrase from a song at the end of a film that I watched with my daughter, consequently my head was full of “let me play you a waltz”. I’m hoping for a remission today, or at least an intermission

Playing at being techy

I’ve been playing with my blog and experimenting with templates and pages. What I would really like is a 3 column template with a changeable banner not just a “coloriser”. Then I would like to be able to use the LibraryThing widget. I don’t think it is me. I’ve read pseudo-techy posts on the matter and whatever I do it just doesn’t turn up. So I ‘ve consoled myself by starting some pages. See the links to them at the top right of the banner/header.

I’ve also been uploading some of my Virago covers to LibraryThing to share with other Viragophiles. Oh my goodness …look at the time … I’ve got to get up in the morning …

Virago Mosaics

Girly trio

Isn’t it fun rummaging around all those old pics ? Pull the lever on my photo fruit machine and what do you get? Whirrrrr, spin , clunk. Is it three cherries …or three lemons?

Left to right, my mother (c. 1945) me (c.1977), my daughter (c.2006)

Aye, we were that poor (pronounced poo-er) . . .

We only ‘ad one ‘at! I kid you not. This is the same hat that I was sporting in my previous post. The smile seems to have left my face now that sis has it. Notice how she favours the on the back of the head method in contrast to my tipped forward air of mystery methodology. In true sisterly fashion, behind the, ‘I couldn’t care less’ attitude, I know I am thinking my favourite ripost, “well I was born FIRST”.

Not only did the two of us have to share this hat, which anyone belonged to our father (not Our Father who art in heaven but our father who art probably pointingthe camera at us) BUT, if I can find the evidence somewhere you will be able to see that Ms Holloway No.3 will also have a share in it more than ten years later. Really!! They knew ‘ow to make ‘ats in them days.

How to wear a hat

The latest trend in blogland seems to be to post an old photo and confess that you don’t know how to wear a hat. I’m only going to join in with part of this fashion. I have posted the photo, probably taken sometime in the summer of ’59 judging by the inability of my sister to escape on two legs but I will not join those who say they know not how to wear a hat. For someone of such tender years I wear it well AND with a charming smile.

It’s strange how small the garden of our brand-new bungalow looks. To me it always seemed enormous and I was convinced that both lions and tigers lived at the bottom, not to mention the snakes.

Who’s next in the hat parade?

Paradise almost lost

 

Last week when I was gallivanting in “big grown-up London” as the children used to call it, I had the pleasure of meeting up with MLF (my literary friend) . Indeed it was MLF who, way back in early January, put the idea of having a day off work into my head and it was firmly written in our signing-in diary at work. If I had been in possession of the right tools it would have been branded into that inoffensive black book. The plan nearly fell apart when late on Wednesday afternoon it was realised that bodies were going to be rather thin on the ground on MY DAY OFF. One member of staff was off for a long weekend, combining Valentine’s day and his birthday to visit his long-distance (long-suffering?) girlfriend in Berlin. At least two others had meetings away from the office (how dare they!) and our main man and his assistant were due to be off shooting (don’t panic, he’s not a professional hitman).

Those of you who know MLF alias DGR will know that she never has any trouble buying books. She suffers from chronic book-buying whereas my affliction is more acute. As a consequence of this, rather than gathering volumes to my ample bosom and accepting that I will never be cured, I leap around from shelf to pile, picking up and putting down, picking up and putting down and more often than not leaving a story emporium empty-handed. But I didn’t.

MLF, alias DGR, has another persona and I hope I am not blowing her cover when I remind you that she is also the indomitable Nurse Prudence. I was perfectly happy to head for home with a bag no heavier than the one I had brought with me but NP was having none of this. I could hear the starched apron crackling and the whalebone in her corset creaking ….

… and so tail between my legs I crept back to the the stack .. and picked up Emile Zola’s “The Ladies Paradise”. NP assured me in her most authoritative manner that it would be good for me, just what NP orders.

Now my condition is rather more complicated than others. I don’t have simple book-buying sickness, mine is a variant strain. My piles are are not the same as the piles of others. Others have TBR piles but mine are so rare that they haven’t yet been named. Maybe they should be called CPPs (Crafty People Piles) or GCP (Glued to Computer Piles)? Don’t get me wrong, I love books and always have done so, back as far as when crisp new puffins and penguins cost 37p. That can’t be right, can it? I will have to go and check that out. My problem is that I hardly ever read them. My daily routine consists of dashing between kitchen to fold up yesterday’s washing and bung today’s in the machine, various bedrooms to wake various bodies up SEVERAL times and the computer to have my daily fix of DGR and other addictions, and uncovering Gilman, the rabbit, and making sure that he has enough food and drink for the day ahead. I do carry at least one book in my bag to work (isn’t it illegal to leave home without one?) but I have the luck/misfortune to have a wide circle of “train friends” to converse with to and from work. I make a valiant effort to read by standing nonchalantly on the platform with my latest attempt in hand. But there is always someone, either dashing to get on the train just before it leaves (I met her when I overheard her on her mobile phone telling porky-pies to work about how the trains had been delayed) or on the train itself. I came to know my oldest train friend because of the stripey hats and socks she wears. She just looked my kind of person and of course she is. You can’t go wrong with stripes. She’s great fun, an incredible mix of Italian, Greek and French (I can never remember where each bit is from) but luckily for me she also speaks English. Not that we always speak English. Occasionally she will attempt to speak French with me or teach me a phrase in Italian and so our quarter of an hour on the train between where I live and where I work is used up on things other than reading.

At home there are the usual tasks of feeding and clearing and even speaking to other members of the family (including Gilman). A brief consultation with Nurse Prudence led to the discovery that perhaps my reading problem is due to my lack of having a reading place. Maybe if I tidied up the house that problem could be solved.

Whoops, I’ve missed my usual train by writing this and I’m not even dressed yet and Gilman hasn’t been woken up …….. so … to be continued……………………….

Late-night other-wordly sounds . . .

Sometimes I stay up late and watch Jules Holland. He has a knack of filling in pieces of my musical education. He tempts me with sounds I would never go looking for. He makes me feel that he is letting me in on a secret. I heard Corinne Bailey Rae before anyone else. Jules introduced me to her. He is our mutual friend and I look on her success with pride. Jules and I knew she would do well. It’s a talented group of friends.

I was round at Jules’ place once when Anthony and the Johnsons popped in. It is the clarity of voice and the perfect enunciation spread over several octaves that casts a spell over me. I’m not sure about the lyrics though. I think that with my slightly prudish tendencies it is better not to ask for illumination. Definitely music to be listened to by candlight with no questions about what lurks in the shadows. Anthony has always been the lead in this act and he plays the piano while he sings but the overall effect would not be the same without the impressive range of musicians, currently five in number, that have and continue to contribute to the sound.

The latest person I bumped into and felt an affinity with is Vashti Bunyan. You may have heard her “Just Another Diamond Day” in a TV ad for some mobile phone company. I was so taken with her music that I scribbled her name and other names mentioned by her and Jules and then madly googled them all when Jules’ little soiree finished. So now I am the proud owner of two CDS , “Just Another Diamond Day” and Lookaftering”. A clear, simple, breathless, haunting voice. If you can find your way to YouTube you will find several videos of her. I thought I’d share this one with you:

help! what’s happened? I was so proud of myself for getting this youtube video to appear and now it’s disappeared!

– just gone to youtube.com and they have “scheduled downtime” so it’s not my fault!

Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie

Typing up that short extract from the Beryl Bainbridge story in the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories gave me a taste that I couldn’t leave alone. I did something I can’t seem to do these days. I took a book to bed with me. This poignant little tale demonstrated how a man can sometimes be side-lined in his own home. Thinks go on around him, when he is not there, because of him and in spite of him. It is easy to assume that the husband/father figure is too insensitive to realise what is happening. The Charlie in the title role of this tale is all too aware of his situation, “Perish the thought that our Alec should be the one to be excluded. I’m only the blasted bread-winner.”

I hadn’t given much thought to how women and children can shunt a father into the sidings until my “baby” sister sent me a poem she had written about our father.

My father went to work by bus each day,
some office on the other side of town,
to do a job that didn’t have a name.
Refused to raise his voice or make a fuss,
he used to have a temper we’d been told,
perhaps the competition was too much.
Told stupid stories we had heard before.
Weekends gave up his match to watch our film
and taxied us to parties in the car.
He never really seemed to have a say,
or voice his thoughts about our daily life
although we’d never listen anyway.
But at his funeral all these people came
and said they’d never see his like again.

 

Anne Holloway

If you want to read more about Charlie in Beryl Bainbridge’s story then you are in luck because teachingenglish.org.uk, a co-production between the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Council has been kind enough, with the author’s permission, to provide the whole story online.

Old or New?

What are your book-buying habits? Do you prefer pristine, unsullied clinically safe books or do you trawl the charity shops looking for needy and deserving books to take home with you?

I had never given this issue much thought before Thurday when I was with a friend in what should have been book paradise. Five floors of almost ceiling to floor books. So what was the problem? Was the choice too much? Was it the difference between an everlasting smorgasboard and a humble cheeseboard with three carefully selected cheeses? Am I like this with everything in my life? Do I ask too many questions?

My literate, literary friend could not contain her joy and indeed had a mental list of delicacies she wished to peruse, savour and indeed take home with her. I stood near the stairs of this emporium like a startled rabbit frozen in the glare of the oncoming headlights. That’s it, I’m a humble creature unaccustomed to the bright lights and the high living. I prefer the shadowy depths of a secondhand book shop where I can hide timidly behind dusty shelves and piles of rotting books. My favourite position is sitting on the floor near a low shelf of design books or a cluster of old green Viragos. It is this habit that once caused a group of friends to leave me in a bookshop mistakenly believing that I had alrady left the premises.

So I prefer the ambience of dusty old shops to the stark fluourescent-lit souless cloned shops that are to be found in most towns. We have both a Waterstones and a Borders in the town where I work and of the two I prefer Borders. It is housed in the old Army & Navy stores and has at the heart of it an old carved wooden stairase that is several hundred years old, dating from the time when the building was an inn. The building has a feeling of warmth about and not just in a temperature-related way. The vibes are good. The Waterstones in the large shopping centre used to be better than it is now. The black bookcases created room-like areas and it was easy to get lost and sometimes not find a section that had been there the day before. I often wondered if some of those areas were like Brigadoon, only ever appearing every so many days. Some of the black shelves are still there but they have straightened up the higgledy-piggledy arrangment of units and relit the store. I am very susceptible to different light types. I can’t stay in any branch of M& S for more than 5 minutes because of their lighting. I start to feel physically sick.

Enough of lighting and back to books. It’s not just where and how they are sold, it is also the price. I feel bad about parting with money that is not just mine but belongs to the whole family. I know I work for it but I am not alone, we are a family of five and all the others have needs that should be met. I was fine when it was all my money and I did not have to think of anyone else. I have plenty of puffins and penguins that prove I didn’t always think this way. But I always feel bad when I buy several books even if like the three in the picture above they come from a charity shop (in this case Fara Rumanian Orphans Charity) and cost a total of £4.30 for the three books.

Left to right the books are:
A beautiful green Virago to add to my family: Ordinary Families by E. Arnot Robertson (first pub. 1933)

“possibly the first woman novelist to mention the effects of menstruation and pre-menstrual tension on her protagonists”
That all sounds a bit clinical so I shall tempt you with the beginning of Chapter One:

Margaret and I quarrelled because she would not let me sink her makeshift boat in the marsh pool, in which a fine steep sea could be worked up by hand in a few seconds. More exactly, I quarrelled with Margaret about it, for my sister always remained passive in the many disagreements we had when I was getting on eleven and she was nine. It is hard, as it always is with vivid childish memories, to know how much of the incident is recollected from the time of its happening, and how many suitable details the mind has added afterwards in reconstruction. The whole trivial occurrence seems clear in retrospect, but so objectively seen that it might be happening to any two other damp and dirty shrill-voiced children, playing on a strip of marsh ground much bigger than I now know it to be. The Lallie in the picture, who is myself, is as visiible as the Margaret, so that probably most of my memory of what followed hangs on my mother’s re-telling of the story she heard from Margaret two days afterwards . . .

A dark and mysterious Penguin: The Rooms inMy Mother’s House by Olga Lorenzo (first pub. ?1996)

The author mentions her own novel in her article on her doctorate in creative writing. “Shaming in child-rearing and its effects in later life”. The intriguing first few lines of the book read:

There were always more people living with them than they ever encountered, just as there were rooms in the house that they dared not enter. They did not allow themselves to know to what extent their past was there . . .

An anthology: The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories edited by Malcolm Bradbury

The introduction to this volume of 43 stories states that the aim of the book is to show a representive selection of writing since 1945 and demonstrate the general trends and directions since that date.

Two thirds of the way through the book, Beryl Bainbridge’s “Clap Hands, here Comes Charlie” starts:

Two weeks before Christmas, Angela Bisson have Mrs Henderson six tickets for the theatre. Mrs Henderson was Angela Bisson’s cleaning lady. ‘I wanted to avoid giving you money,’ Angela Bisson told her. ‘Anybody can give money. Somehow the whole process is so degrading . . . taking it . . . giving it. They’re reopening the Empire Theatre for a limited season. I wanted to give you a treat. Something you’ll always remember.’  Mrs Henderson said, ‘Thank you very much.’  She had never, when accepting money, felt degraded.

Perhaps this story would make a good companion read to “The Village” by Marghanita Laski considered by many to a fine representation of life in a village in the post-war years complete with the beginnings of the blurring of the class divide.

The sun is shining

The snowdrops are standing proudly above the dark damp earth having just about recovered from the battering of the snow and slush last week. I don’t have to dash off to work so I think I will have a leisurely breakfast. I arrived home late from work last night, opened the front door and had a view through to the kitchen of a lovely vaseful of flowers that colour-co-ordinated beautifully with the citrussy hues of the room. As if that was not enough there was a beautiful card with a Boucher painting of two girls snuggled up together, delighting in each other’s company AND a big bar of chocolate.

So who was my mystery Valentine? None other than my rock-chick typical teenage daughter, the one who goes to bed too late, gets up too late, lives to populate my dirty-washing basket and blames me for everything that goes wrong in the world.

It’s amazing what an out-pouring of words in a card can do. In this case I think they show the real person under all that teenage terror.

Off to London Town tomorrow ….

Yippee! I’ve got the day off work tomorrow. I’m frightfully grown-up and I have a lunch appointment and then another one for tea. It’s tough but I’ve had years of training for this.

Diamonds are . . . for listening to

I have no idea where or why I bought this CD but a recent archaelogical dig, in my alleged dining room, unearthed this shining treasure. THE DIAMOND OF FERRARA Ex Umbris, subtitled “Music from the Court of Ercole I”

Ercole d’Este was born in 1431 and was Duke of Ferrara from 1471 to 1505. His son became the second husband of Lucrezia Borgia and his other connections read like a 15th century Who’s Who. Ercole was a patron of all the arts, a sort of cross between Prince Charles and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The blurb inside the CD case says that Ercole and his rellies had a fancy that they were descended from the legendary hero Rugiero “and even named many of their children after characters in the Carolingian romances”. As far as I can make out, this Carolingian stuff all came about well before 1066 and split three ways into what would later become France, Germany & Italy. It does indeed sound like a version of the archetypal story where the three sons go off to seek their fortune or the kingdom is divided between them . Somewhere in this Carolingian stew is Pepin Heristal, a name I came across years ago in a thin book by John Steinbeck called “The Short Reign of Pippin IV”. For those of you with some knowledge of Carolingian history you may see a joke in the title of the book. Oh by the way “Carolingian” means “descended from Charlemagne”.

“The diamond of the title refers to an insignia of the Este family” and also to one of the oieces on the Cd “O triumphale diamante” a piece commissionned for the wedding of Ercole’s son, Alfonso to Lucretia Borgia. The CD has a varied selectionof pieces, some secular, some religious, some poetry set to music and some dances. This Cd has the power to relax and lift up at the same time. I must confess to turning up the volume so I could and be soothed by it whilst soaking in a luxurious scented bath before floating into a welcoming bed atthe end of a hard day at work. Oh and there is a touch of humour as well as we hear about the exploits of Scaramella, a 15th century lad who swaggers around, falls in love, goes off to war and sails “in a galley so he can kiss a jewess”.

I left a message to say I had moved over here . . . .

I wonder if anyone missed me?

England is not all grey and black

This photo was taken in Wiltshire, just to the west of Stonehenge, in late February 2005 when I was on my way to visit a friend on the Devon/Cornwall border. I just had to stop and record the beautiful subtle colours, the soft blue of the sky and the bare field made milky by the chalk underneath. Uniting the realms of heaven and earth, the bare solitary tree stood sentinel over the expectant land.

I’m glad I just read someone say that England was all grey and black because I remembered this photo and I can immerse myself in the colours and the tranquility again.

Big Daddy & Big Brother

While Big Daddy is away in the Lone Star State for six whole weeks, Big Brother decided to come home for the weekend. So that means meals for four again instead of a rather civilized three that we have been reduced to for just over a week.

Much as I would have liked to avoid the dreaded weekly shop with Big Brother temporarily in residence there was no chance. Big Brother has a B I G appetite. Shopping done, most of it put away and a wonderful surpise, BB cooked dinner for all of us. OK it was his favourite dinner but I’m never one for complaining about the menu if it is someone else’s responsibility.

Are you wondering what the favourite repast is? Cheese and Potaoe Pie. Nothing fancy, nothing exotic, nothing complicated.

INGREDIENTS: Potatoes – tons & Strong Cheddar Cheese – tons OPTIONAL: Cherry Tomatoes

METHOD: Spud bash & mash the tons of potatoes. Mix in 80% of the cheese. Put Cherry toms, cut in half, face up in interesting patterns of top of potato & cheese mash. Sprinkle remaining cheese all over top. Put under pre-heated grill and grill till cheese begins to brown and bubble.

NO PIC – Sorry … all too busy eating…

… and safe inside ….

Snow!

Stash-busting progress

Using this….

I’ve been making this….

with a largish hook I made 130 chain and started randomish stripes using dc (double crochet or single crochet if you are from the USA)

I’ll keep going till I run out of yarn in these colours. It’s a snuggly throw ‘cos some of it is fluffy yarn. Just right for cuddling up with one or two others and watching a film on a rainy day.

DANGER stash-busting in progress

Pics later

Thought for the day

from Jan Struther, the author of “Mrs Miniver”

” HARD words will break no bones:
But more than bones are broken
By the inescapable stones
Of fond words left unspoken.”

Having finished ASH of T in U (see previous posts) I needed to start something quickly so, like a drowning man, I grabbed the nearest object. I suspect that many of you carry out the same good work that I do, I rescue old green Virago books. And so it came to pass that as I was in desperate need , “Try Anything Twice” by Jan Struther lay in reach on a tbr pile on the hall table.

This book is a collection of writings that were published in various places including The New Statesman (where my 2nd son, Greg works), and Punch. If you feel like finding out more, then you can read the whole book online.

This is ideal “train reading” and so I am already halfway through and in very good humour. Who cares if the train is 5 minutes late, it just means that I can get properly started on the next piece and know I will be able to complete it by the time I’m feeding my monthly train pass through the ticket monster. Perhaps the train companies should dole out similar “in transit” books to keep us all smiling. Speaking of going to work by train, I love it most of the time. I have a group of friends that I made because we travel in the same direction at similar times. I even have a lunch date with one of them tomorrow. Mmm can’t wait, we’re off to Giuliano’s in the Apple Market. Pumpkin ravioli here I come.

Good news / bad news ?

The good news is:

Someone loves me enough to send me a book……

BUT the bad news is:
All that arrived was an empty envelope with a huge shark-bite out of it and no contents.

The even BADERER news, as one of my children used to say, is that when I popped down to my local sorting office at the crack of dawn this morning I was told that I would have to phone CUSTOMER SERVICES aaaaghhh!

I wonder if it was this edition?

Oh yes, forgot to tell you – I have finished “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”. If you are in between books at the moment the I can highly recommend it for an entertaining but thought- provoking read.

Ploughing along at full speed now

You will have to forgive me for not posting a pic or anything interesting but I have the final furrow of “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” in my sights now….

Aaahhhh!

Children never listen to what you tell them do they? I told my eldest that he was absolutely NOT to buy us anything for Christmas. Financially things are extremely tough for him at the moment even a penny spent is a penny too much. But…. this is how he disobeyed me – see above. Bought in the Christmas German market, a salt and pepper set, in one of my favourite colour combinations., blue and orange.
Group hug everyone… aaaah!

Yes I am still alive

Life, mainly work, has been so hectic recently but I am still here.
Nothing much made recently apart rom several pairs of socks, including a trial toe-up pair and a real toe-up pair. I appreciate that working this way you won’t run out of yarn, you can just stop when you don’t have any more. The trouble is that I found it required more brain cells per sock.

Meanwhile, I have actually started to read a book this year, see above. So far I’m up to page 80 and thoroughly enjoying it. My mother-in-law married a younger man very soon after she was widowed, though the great age difference was not as big as in “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”. Some of the comments of the two daughters in the book by Marina Lewycka could have been lifted straight from conversations in our family.

EXTRA TIME QUESTIONS

1. If you had an extra hour would you do with it?

2. If you had an extra week what would you do with it?

3. If you had an extra month what would you do with it?

4. If you had an extra year what would you do with it?

The beauty of this experiment is that in the extra time you don’t have any responsibilities, commitments etc so you can do what you want, wish, like, dream of ……

Cosy Times

I’d been wanting to have a felting session every since my Sunday with Dawn down at Dorking with felting queen Gillian Harris. On Saturday I was determined that nothing should get in my way and here is the result. the design is from Gill’s new book and despite my husband thinking it is a jellyfish it is actually a cupcake. This has been made as a present for someone and so I can’t say any more.

Young and slim is beautiful

Saturday morning brought ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ from DGR in deepest darkest Devon so you can guess what I did next. Yes, large mug of tea in hand, and a refill a bit later, I sat down and read SKELLIG by David Almond, cover to cover. By the end my T-shirt was dripping wet and the box of tissues empty. I must be getting soft in my old age. I don’t think I want to read any other books by DA for fear of them not living up to this.

Oh I forgot to say, this is a children’s book, whateverthat means.

Let’s all play BlogTag

Now that I’ve confessed my addiction to the utterings of DGR I can happily trail along behind her blog entry for today. She talks about her son receiving a desperately needed autograph from Gary Lineker. My claim to fame is that I am in possession of a hand-written note from poet Laurie Lee.
One wet and windy westish country evening I turned out to the Bath School of Art to attend a poetry reading by Laurie Lee. I was so overcome with his down-to-earthness and the way he had turned a rather grim day into something special that I wrote and told him so, care of his publishers. Can you imagine my ecstasy when this hand-written IN REAL INK reply arrived on my doormat and survived the teeth of our border collie who was partial to paper?

If you can write you can write

I joined the “Woolf for Dummies” class over on writer Susan Hill’s blog. I bought the books: two biographies and The Voyage Out to start with but of course, as we all know, having the coloured pens and a nice new ruler doesn’t magically mean you can do Maths or Physics or whatever your worst nightmare is. Life is too short. Maybe I will go back to VW, in fact the postman dropped a second-hand copy of Moments of Being through my door yesterday and a cursory glance promises that this will be very readable. So I have been searching around for something to read when I do read, which these days is very little. It’s not that I don’t WANT to read, in fact I gaze admiringly at the “big girls” who plough through piles of books AND manage to write something interesting, instructional and pleasurable about them.

Top of the list of big girls is DoveGreyReader. Other people can’t start the day without a cup of coffee or a cigarette but there is no way I can get on that train to work or do what I should be doing at the weekend without my daily dose of DGR. How she manages it I don’t know although she has recently posted hints about her methodology, much of it involving the sensible use of her spouse’s talents and her own skill of knowing when NOT to interfer (see her comments about staying well clear of the kitchen when the three men in her life are doing manly breakfastly things).

Oh dear, typically me, I’ve wondered off the point. Where was I? Talking about what I am reading now, I think. I dipped into Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I haven’t actually abandoned it because I am enjoying the way it is written. It alternates between the autobiography of a girl from the moment of her conception, mentions trivial objects in the narrator’s life and then procedes to give the backstory of the object. I have a penchant for books that are mainly about women, especially those written in the first person and preferably with nothing TOO nasty in the woodpile. So far An Experiment in Love (see review by Margaret Atwood) is fitting the spec exactly with the added bonus of a touch of convent schools and nuns. Oh my goodness, I’d forgotten about nuns. There are quite a few of us who have a thing about them. What a wonderful blog subject. I feel like going off at a tangent but I must save that for tomorrow or whenever this dilatory blogger gets round to blogging again…

I’m feeling a little like Ronnie Corbett when he sits in his chair at the end of his show and rambles on then gets back to his original point by saying, “anyway, I said to my director…”
I started writing this blog entry because I am so enjoying An Experiment in Love that I thought I would have a look for a review to see what others thought. Up popped Margaret Atwood’s review and that’s what made me realise that… if you can write you can write!

Sunday Never Felt So Good!

Almost half a year since we first met, Dawn and I met up again to play with fibrous stuffs. This time it was at a felt workshop with Gillian Gladrag (alias Gillian Harris).

Her home is a wondrous Aladdin’s Cave of colourful arty stuff. No details here. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise in case you decide to take part in one of her classes. No more than five in a group and lunch provided. Who needs afternoon tea at the Ritz? Who needs a weekend at a spa retreat? This is the stuff for stressed-out souls. Fluffy, soapy colour therapy.

Arranged around the soap dish and small pieces of merino fleece tops are the five items made by the five of us who eagerly lapped up Gillian’s expertise, enthusiasm and tea-making skills.

For those of you who know Dawn and me, can you guess which are our works of art?

The Middle Ages Are Over

Phew! Bed just after 3 am on Friday morning having finished the medieval costume. It was due to be worn last night (Saturday) at a medieval banquet so I hope it was fit for purpose. We had no internet connection here for almost 36 hours. I have no nails and I am bald. Well what else is there to do other than biting nails and pulling hair out when you are disconnected from the world? So, no connection and I couldn’t go out as the engineer was due to drop in “anytime”.

Ta da! I did some more weaving on my rigid heddle loom (pic to follow). Now, you know those instructional books that have diagrams/photos of what NOT to do. Well, that’s what my weaving looks like. Having said that I am still very pleased and know in my heart that I am unlikely to progress much. I am just too impatient but it does keep me out of mischief.

I have learnt several things from this project. It is very important what you choose for your warp. I should NEVER have used that slubby very fragile red yarn, especially not at the edges of the warp. No matter. My “thing” is all mine apart from some input from offspring Greg when I aked “what colour shall I weave next?”

Just left port

Almost reached the 100 page mark in THE VOYAGE OUT (page 93) but not yet steaming along comfortably. I have yet to get my sea legs. I couldn’t read on the train as I was lucky enough to bump into one of “train friends” and chatted with her for the 12 minutes train ride. However, I did catch up as I very stupidly left all my keys at home and so had to wait on the station till middle offspring’s (Greg) train came.
So why didn’t I do some reading last night? Well I had this medieval dress to make… don’t even mention the word tension to me! Those of you who are possessed by a sewing machine will understand. Anyway before I could get on with that I had to be a guinea pig. That elderly wise crone, Ann of Corfe, now has a walking, talking webcam and just had to try it out. Yes, it works and I was able to see the result of Ann of Corfe’s magical powers. She spins yarns about being a hair’s breadth away from owning a bus pass BUT she looks to me as though she has only just moved up to “big school”. As the woman in “When Harry Met Sally” says “I’ll have what she’s having”!!

I need to catch up

with the rest of the class. I decided to join Susan Hill’s WOOLF FOR DUMMIES autumn class.
This involves reading chapters of the Lyndall Gordon biography together with selected VW books. So far I’m still on Chapter 1 of “The Voyage Out”.