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!