Not everything is pants

I don't know about you, but I feel as if I am on a train hurtling inexorably towards a cliff with a thousand foot drop. The train is 'manned' by incompetents with dubious motivations and everyone onboard is powerless to stop the drivers or the train. 

This could be why I had another deep dark blip a week ago and Dave had to give me a good talking to. This is why I haven't blogged for six days. I've been concentrating on the day to day, and soaking up every bit of September sunshine I can. 

Dawn on the bedroom wall

And it's been good. I've not been thinking about the dark days to come when the garden is too cold for entertaining. I've been living in the moment.

It's been especially good because I had some stonking bike rides, and three visitors to the garden on three subsequent days, drinking tea, eating plums, chatting, and looking at the view over the garden wall.

I had another helpful art lesson on Wednesday.

This is what I'm working on:

Acrylic and pastel

It's inspired by this photo I took in Boulder in March:

I'm enjoying drawing and painting but I don't think I'll ever be consumed by it, the way I have been by writing. It could be to do with confidence, though. 

On Thursday I came back to the real world and wrote to my MP twice, both times about refugees. The second letter was to ask her to support Lord Alf Dubs who has written to Priti Patel in the wake of the catastrophic fire on Lesbos. 

The refugee camp on Moria which housed more than 12,000 refugees (though it was built for a quarter of that number) burned down this week. The fire took everything: tents, bedding, clothing, photos, vital documents. 

Everyone is now sleeping out in the open, and this includes 4,000 children, 407 of whom are unaccompanied and vulnerable. Lord Alf Dubs has urged the Home Secretary to relocate and welcome some of these children to the UK. Other countries are doing their bit. We should do  too. Perhaps you'd like to write to Priti Patel and your MP about it? Or donate to the relief effort here?

In the afternoon I helped arrange a room at Bakewell Meeting House so the children at Meeting have a base there. All soft furnishings removed. Everything that could not be moved, covered up. So there are now just tables and chairs and nothing else. They will each have a tray with paper and felt tips and other stationery, but there won't be books, or the big colourful floor cushions they use to make dens while the adults are having coffee and chat after Meeting. Except of course, the adults won't be having coffee and chat after Meeting, because of COVID restrictions. 

I was telling a young person about it all later and she said: 'It's pants, isn't it?' I like that expression: it's such a neat, understated way of summing things up right now.

How are you keeping your spirits up? What are you reading? What are you watching?

I've just worked my way through all 9 series of Call the Midwife, watching an episode a night, last thing before I go to sleep. It's been perfect. Now I'm going to try A Suitable Boy, but after that I'm open to offers. Please, can someone suggest a series or serial that consists of story, that is serious but not dark?

I like Call the Midwife because it combines serious issues with comedy and whimsy and underneath it all is a bedrock of kindness and morality. Plus, of course, there are all those moving births. 

Enough. I'm going to stop bubling on and leave you with a lovely new review of EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW YOU

and also a link to a post on a blog called Clothes in Books, where the blogger reads and comments on my most recent book DAYS ARE WHERE WE LIVE.

Here is the link.

Have a good weekend, friends. Not everything is pants.