Letter from home, not Italy

I had an email from an old school friend this week who is the same age as me - 75. She had exciting news. She lives in the East Midlands like me, but from April to June next year she’s going to rent an apartment in Siena. She’ll be there on her own. Doesn’t that sound adventurous and romantic? 

When I read her email I felt really challenged…could I go and live in a foreign country on my own for three months? It felt exciting, and I like Italy, and Siena looks lovely, but living there on my own felt out of my comfort zone. Then I thought…when did I last do something outside my comfort zone? Should I be challenging myself more, not resting on my laurels?I spent the whole day with thoughts of this nature going round my head. 

The next day I had a chat with Liz about it and realised that if I really wanted to do the same thing as J, I definitely could, but actually… I wouldn’t want to. I love to see new places that are beautiful, but I always, always love to come home. 

I’m lucky to live in such a beautiful area 

with the good health to enjoy walking and cycling in it. I’m lucky to have such a lovely home. I’m lucky to still like living with Dave after 54 years. (That figure is mind blowing 🤯)

I’ve decorated the beautiful tree now:

I love my collection of daffy angels/fairies, especially the one on the top, which my sister Jen gave me.

During the decorating, I twice lost that golden heart (top pic, on the left).

Het gave me the heart when we went to see the Cezanne exhibition and I treasure it. I dropped it and it dived into the amazingly thick branches of the tree. I got out a torch and searched every layer, going up and down twice, and I still couldn’t find it. Eventually, after ten minutes, I happened to flick one of the bottom branches and it fell out. 

And yesterday I made a wreath for the front door:

I’ve been working on this painting for ten days and I’m still trying to get it right: 

I’m happy.

Letter from home

This morning I woke up to a text from the Aging Hippie in California telling me how desperate she feels about the political situation and how deeply worried she is about all our futures, and how bad she feels that she can do nothing about it. 

I know exactly how she feels - I’ve told you often enough -  but this is a rare week when I am not battling against the darkness, despite the rearmament and warmongering going on all over Europe, despite the desperation in Gaza, the West Bank, Ukraine, and in Sudan. If political leaders spent as much time and money on peace making and negotiating as they did on weapons, we’d all be a whole lot safer. 

This week I feel OK, and so as well as responding more personally to the AH, I found myself scrolling through my screenshots of encouraging quotes and sent her a few.

Here are two for you.

The news here is that I have been dithering over whether or not to get a Christmas tree. I bought a small one with roots eight years ago and it’s been inside for Christmas every year since, growing taller in the garden in between, and having to be repotted twice because of its bulky roots. One Christmas I had to rush off to Colorado to help in a crisis, and Liz borrowed it.

This spring Dave insisted - against my wishes - on liberating it and planting it out in the back garden. So this year the question was whether to get a tree when it’s an OFF Christmas*, and when even the OFF Christmas family meal is happening somewhere else and not here. Then there was the question of whether or not to get a tree with roots, if we did buy one.

I was still dithering, when yesterday we went to the large local farm and country store to get some mouse poison. Poison is not our preferred deterrent, but the mouse in question is under the sitting room floor and is not only managing to take the bait from the humane mousetraps but also eating our insulation. 

In the yard of the shop they had some beautiful Christmas trees, some with roots and some without, and I fell for a tall one without. Dave hates all things Christmassy as you know but he knows how I feel about Christmas trees. 

Reader, we brought it home.

Dave erected it and stood back as I was taking this photo and said “It will go straight out that window afterwards! I shan’t be carrying it out like we usually do,” and I said “Don’t say it out loud, you’ll hurt it’s feelings.”

I shall decorate it tomorrow. Dave is out today, so I am free to do whatever I want all day without having to announce it first or say how long it will take or when I will be back. An empty quiet day at home is bliss, and the sky is clear and bright. I’m happy.

*in case you are new to the blog, you may not know what an OFF Christmas refers to. This will explain 

http://www.suehepworth.com/2013/12/this-year-its-off-christmas.html

Grandmothers

I was sitting in bed yesterday morning writing a long newsy email to some old friends of ours, when the family member who declines to be named rang up. It was 7.10. He said MsX was ill and both he and the lovely Jaine had important meetings at work they could not easily miss, and could I go over and look after MsX. 

I said yes, and got out of bed and etc and set off. It takes half an hour to drive to their house. MsX was most unwell. No temperature, but very waxy and completely lacking in energy and her usual vivaciousness. I took over from her dad and he went upstairs to his home office. 

An hour later my poor little granddaughter was violently sick all over me and herself and the sofa. I felt so sorry for her. We cleaned her up and I found clean clothes for her, and I changed into some of her dad’s joggers while my jeans were in the wash.

But the point of this story is that in her clothes drawer I found a cardigan that could only have been knitted by my mother. The style was so distinctive. It must have been made for MsX’s 20 year old cousin and passed along. I put it on her.

My mother died 16 years ago and I loved the connection between my mother and this great granddaughter she had never met. And I also loved being reminded of my wonderful mother.

Later, after MsX had vomited violently for a second time,  I was cuddling her and rocking her to soothe and comfort her and found myself instinctively singing My Bonny lies over the ocean, and then Clementine. These were songs my gran used to sing to me at bedtime when I was little. 

How I love these threads that stretch back through the generations, and that anchor me to my roots.

And here’s a poem by Norah Hanson called Grafters, which I have permission to share with you. It’s from her collection Sparks and is published by Valley Press.

In love with Van Gogh

I just had a 36 hour whirlwind trip to the smoke to grab some culture.

Because of the dire weather warnings and the sheet ice across the width of our lane, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, or even to get home again afterwards, but Dave is the man for extreme weather and he drove me to the train in Chesterfield.

I stayed with Het, my lovely friend and partner in crime. This is the official selfie for the trip.

I wanted to see the National Gallery exhibition of Van Gogh paintings called Poets and Lovers. I decided in September that I wanted to see it, and it has since had five star reviews from all the leading papers. And no wonder it has. It was so uplifting. It was stupendous. And I have come back with great memories and lots of inspiration for my paintings. It’s the most memorable exhibition I’ve seen since I saw the Hockney A Bigger Picture in 2012. (Which incidentally gets a mention in my book Plotting for Grown-ups.)

We also went to see the Monet in London exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, another sell out. I booked those tickets for us, and Het was in charge of the Van Gogh booking at the National Gallery. After a hairy glitch - when we thought we’d be missing it - Het managed to snag slots for us at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. Thank goodness for the glitch! We were the first in the queue when the gallery opened, alongside a couple who had flown in from Canada just to see the exhibition! When they told us that, I thought ‘that’s a bit extreme’ but in retrospect…I’m sure it was worth the trip.

Being there first thing in the morning - an hour earlier that the gallery usually opens - meant it was possible to see all the paintings up close with no crowds. When I’ve been to other major exhibitions there have been so many people milling around it has not been ideal. On Saturday it felt like a private viewing. And there were so many paintings I had never come across before. They’d been flown in from all over the world, a handful even from private collections. Rock on the curators who organised the exhibition. I really was blown away by the paintings. My favourites were of the gardens and this one of the olive trees, 

But I was also taken with The Peasant:

There was interesting quote displayed from Van Gogh’s letters which relates to this (as well as to other paintings.)

The last time I saw Van Gogh it was an immersive experience in Denver, which I did not enjoy at all. I love Van Gogh’s painting, I love his paintings - the colour, the vibrancy, the emotion! I’m still aglow with the experience a day later. I’ll remember it for a long time, and it is going to influence my work.

Letter from home

Yesterday I did it.

I sat down and wrote to my new MP (Labour in our constituency for the first time since 1832 - which has a spuriously accurate ring to it, so I hope I have remembered it correctly.) 

I wrote to protest at the U.K. government’s tolerance of the atrocities of Israel.

I wrote to our old Tory MP many times, by email. Yesterday I wrote in longhand and covered two sides of A4, and paid for a first class stamp. 

I didn’t plan what I was going to write, I just wrote from the heart, and it was very cathartic. It was terrifically cathartic. I recommend it.

Today we have woken up to snow. This is the view from my studio window.

The roads around here are icy and dangerous so I have cancelled my lunch with Chrissie. I hope we’ll have a FaceTime instead.

I went to MsX’s birthday party on Sunday. She was two. Our other grandchildren are 12, 14, 18 and 20 so it’s a big treat to have a little one in the family again.

It was a family party, and she was the only child. Everyone had taken her presents, but for the first two hours all she was interested in was playing with the helium balloons, and then later, spinning round and round until she was so dizzy she fell over, laughing. She’s a sensation seeker, that girl. 

Our two grandsons are now amazing adults, and Cece and Lux will be adults soon and I expect ( although of course I can’t know) I’ll still be here to see how they turn out. 

This is them in 2018:

This is them now:

By the time MsX is an adult I’ll be over 90, and that fact is really and truly the only thing that makes me want to be still around at that age. I’ve had a good life, and 90 years of it will be enough. 

Tired

Here I am, slumped back on the pillows in bed, fully dressed, exhausted.

It is 3.44 pm on Friday afternoon and I am done in. 

I slept well last night and all I have done today so far is:

Talk on the phone to Liz about one of my paintings, do 15 minutes of yoga for the bad back* I got from gardening yesterday, reply to various easy emails, make enough leek and potato soup to feed 10 people tomorrow at an event at Quaker Meeting, (I am sharing the catering), work on a painting while listening to dramatised Rumpole stories on Audible, have an overdue catch up with my sister Jen on the phone, eat lunch (some of the soup) and remember that leeks no longer agree with me, paint some more and feel so tired I go to bed and watch an episode of Gilmore Girls on my iPad, and then do half an hour’s gardening. 

I am soooo tired, too tired to read, and anyway the book on the bedside table is one I am not enjoying, despite the fact that the writing is wonderful.

I sit here and remember that another week has gone by and I have not written to my MP about the genocide. He is a new MP and Dave has not yet managed to get a response from him, though Dave has written to him half a dozen times. And yet it was on my to do list. I know it will not make a blind bit of difference because if Starmer has done nothing thus far he will certainly not be speaking out now.  But what else is there to do?

When I am in or on the bed and all else fails,  I pick up a poetry book. The one on the bedside table today is Being Human, which is a wonderful anthology in the same series as Staying Alive and Being Alive. I open it at random and this is what I find:

* I discovered a wonderful yoga teacher online who does 15 minutes of easy yoga exercises that never fail to cure my lower back pain I get from gardening. It’s like magic. 

Here is a link 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeXz8fIZDCE

Here we are

 Well, I’ve read more than enough articles now on why Trump won and Harris lost. The most convincing explanation to me is that Americans felt richer when Trump was last in power. That was because of all the government’s social and economic programmes laid on because of Covid. People felt better off, more secure, and inflation was low. After lockdown, Biden was unable to continue those programmes, though he tried, and now people feel insecure, poor and they’re coping with high inflation. 

And yet, and yet, how could they vote for someone with so many unpleasant characteristics, someone who threatens democracy as well as the future of the world?

I’ve realised that just like the issue of the current genocide in Gaza…there are two distressing aspects of Trump’s victory - the very fact of it, and the fact that millions and millions of Americans are willing to vote for such a person. 

With the tragedy in Gaza, there’s the fact of it, and then there’s the fact that the world’s leaders are watching it and letting it happen.

But I am not going to read any more about America for a while, and I can currently not bear to go beyond the headlines on Gaza.

“To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” (Jack Gilbert from his poem Brief for the Defence.)

So…

Real life at Hepworth Towers has been good. I have not minded the lack of sunshine because it has been perfect cycling and gardening weather: dry, mild and there’s so far been no frost, which means that there are still some nasturtiums in flower. Yay!

This is one that’s self seeded on the front patio: I love self seeded flowers in awkward places. Perhaps it’s a metaphor: beauty which challenges the orthodoxy. How’s about that for a bit of philosophising on a Monday morning? ( I’m also loving that I used three colons in the last two paragraphs - I love colons and semi colons, and you don’t see a whole lot outside academia.)

The other happy thing is that my daylight lamp has extended my painting time enormously. This means I don’t have to choose between outdoor activities and painting. I can do both. I can start painting at 3 pm for example, when the light is beginning to fade. I no longer dread the dark days of winter. Here is my first painting of the autumn:

I realise it’s Remembrance Day today. We - at Bakewell Quaker Meeting - had our peace vigil last week. Every year the country remembers the soldiers who died in past wars, and every year the country sells billions of pounds worth of arms so more wars can happen. And here at home we waste billions on nuclear weapons, when so many children don’t have enough to eat. 

Our banner last week read:

Darkness

 And today, November 6th 2024, the world became even darker.

Genocide then and now

 When you arrive at Denver airport you walk over a long curved bridge to reach immigration. There is haunting music playing and all along the walls are large portraits of Native American chiefs. The first time I encountered this display I was very moved, though I’ve been there so many times now that the effect has diminished.

Denver International Airport
(Copyright: the above )

A friend of mine has just come back from a work trip to Colorado and he said in an email:

"One of the things I've been perhaps oversensitive to around Denver (and elsewhere in US), is e.g. the pictures of Chiefs on the arrivals wall, and the number of places that say some variant of 'This place used to belong to the indiginous population, but we massacred them and drove them out' (Rocky Mountain National Park leaflet says this, as well as the Univ Colorado lab in Boulder I visited.) I find that all a bit disturbingly close to what's going on in Palestine now, and doesn't bode well for the acceptable end to it."

And still our Prime Minister and so many other western leaders refuse to recognise and condemn the brutal war crimes and genocidal offensives of Israel, or take any actions to stop them. 

It’s no wonder that some poor anguished souls, broken by compassion, feel so powerless in the face of such wilful complicity that they end up setting themselves alight in front of embassy buildings.

Communication

  “For someone who’s just come back from an event on Non-Violent Communication, you’re being remarkably argumentative this morning” Dave said on Monday.

“Really? Am I?” I said.

I was at a foundation course on NVC last weekend which was stimulating, interesting and personally very helpful. I think of it as Empathetic Conversation, but the founders of Non Violent Communication call it the latter because they see it as having uses and ramifications way beyond personal one-to-one conversations. It could be used in all kinds of situations involving conflict and negotiations. 

The other course members were warm, sympathetic and so, so nice. During one of the exercises I was telling the group about why I don’t like aging. The three things I came up with were becoming more anxious, especially about travel, not having enough energy to do all the things I want to do in a day, and losing words - by which I mean being in the middle of a sentence in a conversation and not being able to think of the word I want to use. 

This is absolutely not restricted to losing names, although that did happen very annoyingly yesterday when I was talking to my brother about Margaret Drabble’s rift with her sister and I couldn’t remember the name of her famous sister. (A.S.Byatt)

In a conversation at the weekend with other course members who I didn’t know I used the word insouciant, knowing full well what it meant, but then someone asked me to define it and I was lost for words. It’s this kind of thing that is both disconcerting and worrying.

It reminds me of a scene in a TV drama where a detective is talking to a woman with dementia and she says “I like your - what is that?” pointing to his jacket. She can’t remember the name for it. This is happening to me, but not with something concrete I can actually see - so far.

People still say to me “Aren’t you writing any more?” 

To which I reply “No, I’m a painter now.”

I’m not writing any more because I have said everything I want to say. At the moment, the things that preoccupy me are the continuing genocide in Gaza, and the American election, which are not unrelated. But otherwise I don’t have much to say except that I am pleased to be home for the winter, especially once I’ve put the garden to bed, because now I have my daylight lamp I can paint until teatime every day. 

But if you don’t hear from me very often it’s because I’m following this maxim of Charles Bukowski in his poem So You Want To Be A Writer. Here is the first stanza:

But I can share pictures with you.

Here’s a photo of the Trail from my bike ride yesterday:

And here is a photo of my visible creative mend of a hole in my favourite jeans:

Speechless and Powerless

Something’s been troubling me.

Dave and I wear these bracelets. 

He wears the white one and I wear the black one. But when I arrived at Denver airport I took mine off, because I didn’t want to talk to the girls about what the Israelis are doing - how they are a vicious rogue state, committing genocide, bombing and starving civilians, and how they are doing it with impunity.

I didn’t want to talk to them about it because it’s so awful to contemplate and I know that if I had known what was happening at their age I’d have been traumatised. Knowing about it at the age of 75 is bad enough. Every morning I wake up and see the headlines and feel sick. I think about it during the day and feel sick. 

When I was visiting the Aging Hippie recently - a woman who shares my political views on everything and who hates war as much as I do - I talked to her about this. She said “You talk to them about other things that matter to you - about refugees for instance - why not about this?” And I told her why: because I didn’t want to expose them to the horrors of current world affairs any more than they are already. Should I have worn the bracelet and risked a conversation?

And the fact that Israel can behave the way it does, and has been doing with impunity for over a year is horrific. It’s not as if this began after the hideous and inexcusable Hamas attack in October 2023. Israel has been oppressing the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and besieging Gaza for years and years and years, with intermittent bombing campaigns on Gaza too. 

Israel has been breaking international law for years, and yet the west still sends them arms. What does Israel have to do before the west will finally say “enough is enough” and mean it?

It is a terrible thing to see what is happening and to be powerless to do anything to stop it.

The UK government doesn't care though I am sure the majority of the British people do. What is one supposed to do when one’s government acts against the wishes of its people? They don't respond to letters. They don't respond to demonstrations.

All I can do is give money to Medical Aid for Palestinians:

https://www.map.org.uk/

Or to the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal:

https://www.dec.org.uk/appeal/middle-east-humanitarian-appeal

Coming home

I had a lovely time away in Colorado with the family, and in California with the aging hippie, but I always love coming home.

I left a day of hot bright sunshine at Denver airport and arrived home to a soggy teatime at Hepworth Towers where the autumn colours are just as lovely as in Boulder.

It was so good to see Dave at arrivals, and when I got out of the car at home after 19 hours of travel, the quiet, familiarity, and the freshness of the atmosphere were sublime. 

Two days later I’m excited about getting back to painting. I’ve ordered a daylight lamp so I can paint past three o’ clock on winter days, and I’ve got an idea for my first painting. 

Photo by Isaac

Today I need to order a stack of books for MsX’s second birthday. She can recite The Gruffalo already. She’s not just bright but she’s a madcap, whether it’s diving head first into muddy water in the garden, or painting her head bright yellow. I see her as an avant garde sculptor winning the Turner prize at 20. I can’t wait to see her tomorrow.

How lucky am I to have a lovely home and family, how blessed am I to live somewhere beautiful and safe and to have enough of everything. 

Goodbye Boulder

 These are my pictures of beautiful Boulder

I am leaving the family today and don’t know when I will see them again.

Will sanity reign in the upcoming election?

How many wars will be going on when I see them again?

This is what is on my mind…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWt1Sk51kg

Granting impunity to lawlessness

Dave’s latest letter to our new Labour MP:

The Government is determined to side with Israel, citing Israel’s right to defend itself, and claiming what it knows to be false: that the attack by Hamas was the cause of the current war in the ME.

 

I fully agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, and I condemn whole-heartedly the unjustified attack by Hamas.

 

But what we see, and see daily, is not self-defence by any definition of the term. We are witnessing unbridled and unrestrained aggression across the ME in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, illegal settlements, Lebanon, and stretching out towards Iran. On all fronts, Israeli forces, eagerly supported by your government and the lucrative arms trade, is wreaking total havoc, destroying homes and infrastructure, razing cities and towns to the ground, displacing vast populations, repeatedly ordering further movement of displaced people, attacking the UN, killing journalists, creating starvation and hampering aid, destroying hospitals, creating a generation of orphans, and murdering civilians wherever they are found. Israel is throttling the hopes and aspirations of an entire people

 

In Gaza, Israel has banned Western journalists, and has killed 128 journalists so far, 123 of them Palestinian. It has attacked UN workers and peacekeepers, most recently this week. While it claims all its actions are precisely targeted, this is only a small part of the picture, a tiny part of the truth. Is it not clear to the government, as it is to the people, that Israel takes no account of civilian deaths which are simply seen as unimportant collateral damage ?

 

With our eager support, the Israelis are creating a desert and calling it peace. They are snuffing out Arab lives as if they are of no significance whatsoever.

 

Why is your government happy to support this unrestrained feral lawlessness that no country other than Israel would be allowed to get away with ?

 

Why is your government happy to connive with Israel’s medieval savagery by accepting and promoting Israeli propaganda about defence ?

 

After long, weary and desperate years of Tory rule, I was hoping for a resurgence of honest government, of principled leadership, of respect for equity under the law. It was clear before the election that Starmer could deliver none of these, and this is proving to be the case. During the years of Tory government, I have felt ashamed of being British. Clearly that stain will continue until we have a government which no longer supports the tyrannical impunity currently enjoyed by Israel, and no longer accepts blatant propaganda as true, knowing it to be false. Your government, led by a politician no less venal and mendacious than Johnson, sadly is not up to the task.

Dave Hepworth 

 

  

Obscenity

I cannot post trivia while Israel continues to act like a raging beast and the West does nothing but send arms. I am sick at heart.

The way Israel is behaving is obscene and inhuman. And our country is party to it. 

On being kind

I posted most of this yesterday and then took it down because I thought it mean. I’ll tell you why at the end.

This is the view as I flew from Colorado to California.

I have been in Redwood City, California, for a few days, staying with the Aging Hippie. I first met the AH at a peace vigil in San Francisco in 2006. The last time I came to stay at her house was 12 years ago: I had to check the blog to find out when it was. 

Here we were then, cycling along the San Andreas fault: a passer-by took our picture.

And the last time I saw her was 2019 when we went on a trip to Northumberland and Mull.

Today we went to the beach and it was fab. 

Doesn’t it look just like the beach scenes in Grace and Frankie?

The Pacific Ocean felt warmer than the Atlantic in Pembrokeshire in July but the waves were too scary to brave in a cossie, so I paddled instead.

Later, I was taking a quick snap of Karen on a bridge when a cyclist stopped and asked if we wanted a photo of the two of us together. 

He was old, and he was kitted out as if in England on a January day and he was wearing reflective sunglasses, and he just had the look of someone who would take ages to climb off his bike and prop it up and get himself sorted out, and fuss, and make a big production of it all, do you know what I mean? So I was reluctant, and looked over at Karen, but she gave me the nod. I think she thought we may as well say yes and get it over with. 

So I handed over my phone and went to stand next to Karen who I’d positioned exactly where I wanted her to obscure something behind her on the far cliffs, and he said “I’d like to get you with the sun on your faces,” and I thought ‘here we go’ and said “No, I want the ocean behind us and this is the place I want. Take it here.”

He said “The screen is dark,” and I pointed out he was wearing sunglasses.

He said “I need to compose it.”

“Just click it already,” said Karen, so he did. 

I quickly thanked him and took the phone and we walked away. 

“Do you think I was too brusque with him?” I asked Karen.

“No,” she said, “he needed reining in.” 

Later I looked at his shots. He had taken three, and two had my head cut off. Was that revenge? 

This is the one that was OK.

I thought about this and felt mean.

I had just wanted to take a quick snap of Karen, nothing fancy, just a record.

This chap came along and wanted to be helpful.

I thought I could tell - by looking at him - that he wasn’t in it for a quick snap and so I was reluctant to say thank you, yes, go ahead.

But we did and I had guessed right - he was someone who wasn’t in it for a quick snap, and we hurried him along.

Later it occurred to me that he might be lonely. He might live alone. We might have been the only people he talked to that day, and here was I being mean with our company. We were on holiday…we weren’t on a schedule. 

So I learned something and am going to try to be more patient/more friendly.

Aren’t I the one who is always going on about the importance of interacting with people you don’t know?