What’s been happening here

 

This is what remains of my posies from the lunch tables at the Bakewell Refugee Hospitality Day on Saturday. The ones still fresh are now on our bathroom windowsill.

It was such a good day - friendship, fresh air, games, sunshine, the lovely Bakewell river walk, music, conversations, crafts, and a fabulous lunch. 

Dave was on kitchen duty with someone else (not shown) 

and after seeing how much our guests were enjoying themselves, he said “You should have one every week!”

Yes, Dave. But we’re short of volunteers, and where would we get the £280 for the bus to bring our guests here, if it was every week instead of three times a year?

Now the clearing up has been done and the washing of tablecloths and feedback notes made for the next committee meeting I am trying to get fit. My bike has been neglected since February because I’ve not been well, and the weather has not been great and I’ve been busy with other stuff. But yesterday I went on a sunny ride on the electric bike and it was heavenly.

From April to November I love living here. Nuff said.

I’ve been revelling in the new spring leaves on the trees but they’re not all out yet, and I realised yesterday that if I wanted records (for paintings) of the different structures of the branches on different trees, this is my last chance for photographs for some months.

For example…

I brought three of my paintings back from the framers yesterday. Framing is expensive, and the bigger the painting the more it costs, surprise, surprise.

This one cost a lot:

This one a lot but not as much:

This morning I finished listening to ‘This is not a pity memoir’ on BBC Sounds. It’s there for a year. It’s an account of what happened in the life of the successful screenwriter Abi Morgan (credits include The Split, The Hour, Suffragette and The Iron Lady) when her family life was upended in an instant. It’s gripping and deep, and I really recommend it.

And I’ve just read and enjoyed this.

I had finished what I was reading and looked on our shelves for something fresh and found it. It was brand new, but oddly it had my name written on the fly leaf with the date I acquired it (something I always write in) and the date was my birthday in 2007. But I can’t remember who gave it to me, and it’s bugging me. Was it you, Chrissie?

Mish mash

This is a blog post of several parts. 

One

A young man in Gaza followed me on Instagram yesterday. I looked at his posts and the last few were photographs of people injured by Israeli bombs. 

I am on Instagram solely to show my paintings and to view other people’s art. I don’t use it socially or politically. It’s been a safe space from everything ‘out there.’ However, I did recently follow a protest group called Youth Demand, after I heard about them. They’ve been protesting about the genocide in London in the last month. I guess this is why the Gaza man has found me. You know how I feel about Gaza, but even with normal news I don’t want to look at mutilated bodies. At the same time I want to show support to Gazans. There’s the dilemma. 

Two

A few days ago there was an accident in our kitchen. Here Dave describes it:

Ours is not a house for the timid, or for those startled by a sudden hello. The days are punctuated by the clattering and shattering of falling objects, some of which then ricochet in pieces round your ankles before coming to rest under cupboards, only to be discovered very much later.

 

After a while you get inured to this cacophony of crashing cutlery, crockery and colliding kitchen bric a brac. As long as you are not trying to work on the innards of a clock at the time, or removing a speck from your eye, it doesn’t matter.

 

Why does gravity have such a strong pull here? Are we at some invisible warp in the space-time continuum that grabs things from the tightest grasp and hurls them to the floor?

 

No, no. Sue has always been not so much absent minded as present minded somewhere else, and she has refined this vagueness by cultivating clumsiness and honing it to an art form.

 

This week, she upped the game.

 

I was loading the dishwasher last thing at night – half-past eight, Hepworth time – and everything was going smoothly, and I paid no attention to Sue coming in. There was a sudden discordant clang as her iPad hit the bottom shelf of the dishwasher, and I was hit by a cold tsunami as Sue emptied an entire pint glass of water over my back. The falling iPad might have escaped attention but not the water, and I let out a shocked expletive and possibly a sharp gasp.

 

Hmm. This is a whole new technique. I may be wearing waterproofs around the house in future.

Three

The spring leaves are emerging shyly from their shoots. I LOVE this time of year. The new leaves are so beautiful, like newborns’ fingers - tiny and tender. I’ve taken so many photos of tiny leaves on different trees over the last two weeks, and now I’m attempting a painting on the theme. Here are twiglets on one of our silver birches:

And look at these darling tiny cones on the self seeded larch tree in our back garden (Dave’s hand is to show the scale):

Four

 

Letter from home

I’ve been sitting in bed having breakfast - a home made hot cross bun (thanks Dave) and Yorkshire tea - listening to Dave recount multiple reports from a coroner working in West Yorkshire in the latter part of the 19th century.

Dave was initially looking for the graves of his great grandparents but it’s led him down a long winding road of research, which originally centred on graveyards in Castleford. He has since researched the work of local clerics, child mortality, the Burial Act of 1880, and now he is reading the reports from a coroner who worked in the area for 48 years and kept meticulous notes. So much of what Dave has worked on has nothing to do with the original quest: he is simply captivated by the relevant/irrelevant details.

I completely understand his fascination with social history, but I have to say that hearing a litany of coroners reports ( eg boys killed by runaway coal trucks down the mines, and babies crushed while sleeping with their parents) does not make for a cheerful start to my day. 

He has now left the house to help his sister with a list of practical jobs that need doing around her house. 

I, meanwhile, will be reading the latest daily email bulletin called Letter from an American, written by Heather Cox Richardson, an American historian and academic at Boston College. She writes about current events in the USA in the context of American history. Her bulletin is very readable. And chilling.

At present an innocent man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has been deported to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador and the Trump administration has accepted that it was a mistake, but despite numerous court rulings they are refusing to bring him back.

If detention and deportation to a violent prison can happen to a person who is totally innocent of any crime (and who is married to an American citizen and who has three American children) what might the authorities do to anyone else?

Rebecca Burke, a young British woman travelling between Canada and the USA, was detained for three weeks over a visa mix-up, and the British authorities had to intervene to get her sent home.

Then there is the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian with a green card who has been arrested and detained for organising protests in support of Palestine and against the US support for Israel’s genocide. And the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green card holder who was arrested at his citizenship interview this week for organising protests against the genocide.

Back to the trivia of the home front, do you remember the new expensive Aga Rangemaster cooker we bought 16 months ago? And which Dave hated with a  passion? On Monday the induction hob fused with a loud pop, while I was cooking soup. This does not bode well for the future.

We have to wait two weeks to have it fixed (thankfully under warranty) so I am working hob-less. This is doable when it’s only me I am cooking for (Dave eats yoghurt and other cold foods) but a week tomorrow is our Refugee Hospitality Day and I have some last minute cooking to do for that as part of my contribution. I am so thankful I made the two large veggie lasagnes and froze them much earlier; and Dave boiled some eggs on the top of the log burning stove the other night, so perhaps I will manage.

The only other thing to say is- Aren’t the trees sublime at the moment?

“Spring light”
Large acrylic painting by me

Dress day

When the family member who declines to be named and the lovely Jaine invited me to go on holiday with them and MsX to Portugal I knew nothing about the country. We were going to the Alentejo region and staying in a small village in deep countryside.

Jaine told me how beautiful the countryside was and about the abundance of castles and the amazing sweeps of wild flowers everywhere. 

As we drove from Lisbon airport the first thing to strike me were the storks nesting in pylons, reminiscent of creatures in a Doctor Seuss book. As we drove deeper and deeper into the countryside I was unsettled by the absence of trees I recognised, and cork trees planted as a crop, most of them with the first five feet of bark stripped. I didn’t like that. I felt sorry for the trees. But the family member who declines to be named pointed out that I didn’t object to trees being chopped down as a crop. At least the cork trees survived.

I am already bored by this blog post. I don’t write travelogues.

Suffice it to say that I had a lovely time, and shocking as this may be, spending so much time with MsX and her family was the highlight of the trip for me, not Portugal. 

I loved the wild flowers and the river beaches which gave access to swimming and I loved the day we went to the coast. Jaine and MsX and I went in a river in our cossies, but the pull of the waves at the seaside was far too scary to paddle deeper than our ankles.

Photo by Jaine

Photo by Jaine 

And you recall all that fuss over buying a dress so I’d fit in with the female company? I only managed to wear it once, largely because of the chilly weather. We had four warm days out of ten. I even had to buy a couple of fleeces in the local Decathlon because I had packed for sunshine. 

But here I am on the hottest day. In any case, there was no possibility of matching the glamour of my two accompanying female relations. 

Photo by Jaine

I emailed the above photo to Dave, who said he could only recognise me because of my watch and my feet. 

“What about my plait?” I said.

“The dress is so extraordinary it distracted me from the plait.”

“What?

“Well…you wear trousers a hundred percent of the time so when I saw a woman in an exuberant dress and sunglasses like flying goggles the plait escaped my attention.”

“Dave!”

“The feet were definitely a distinguishing feature. It was like trying to identify a corpse by the teeth.” 

p.s. almost forgot…I had never heard of the (Portuguese) Carnation Revolution until the family explained a little of the history of Portugal. Apparently it was a non violent revolution in 1974. I’m going to read up about it. There could be some useful tips.

Sunday in Portugal

 We have seen the sun occasionally this week, but not a lot. Today looks promising and I’m sitting out on the patio watching birds of prey hovering in the sky, and the breeze ruffling the two olive trees in the garden. The forecast is heavy rain and we’re having a late start in deciding what to do. Being on holiday with a two year old obviously involves constraints.

MsX has a sticker book of the solar system and space exploration and she’s skilled in placing the stickers precisely. She knows the names of the planets and yesterday when I was drawing a picture of her and asked her what pattern she wanted on her dress - stars or flowers - she said “Saturn.” Saturn is her favourite planet and she likes its moon Titan too.

When Lux and Cece were tiny I found a video online called Planets for Kids, which goes through the solar system with an accompanying song. it’s now a a favourite with MsX and we watch it over and over, as you do with toddlers. The tune is not jaunty like so many toddler tunes: it’s measured and rather melancholy, though very attractive.

It begins “I am the sun, I’m a burning ball of fire. I am very big indeed. Life on Earth depends on me. I am the sun.”

Dave has always told me that he finds the immensity of the universe, and Man’s inconsequential existence in the face of it, to be a comfort. I’m beginning - after 50 years - to understand.

When everything “OUT THERE” is so brutal and so threatening, and it’s hard to find hope in politicians or in the future, I’m finding the planets video very comforting. MsX likes Saturn best. I like the sun. The sun might be behind the clouds where we are, but it’s there.

Poem shown here by permission of the poet and his publisher.

Letter from Evora

 I’m sorry for yesterday’s inadequate post.

I am on holiday (check last but one post to find out who with) but I still see the news and I still get emails in my inbox from the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Good Shepherd Collective, the Refuser Solidarity Network (Israeli conscientious objectors) and of course I still see the news.

And while the headlines are full of Trump and his tariffs, as far as I can see no western leaders (including our very own dead loss leader) have condemned what Israel is up to now. Yes they were full of it when there was a ceasefire, but not so much now the IDF are murdering paramedics and bombing babies. Where is the condemnation? And are they going to object to the new incursions into Gaza? No, they’re going to keep on selling them bombs. 

No wonder young people in the shape of Youth Demand are holding planning meetings in rented rooms in Quaker Meeting Houses about ways to stop the genocide (as well as protest about the lack of action to protect the climate.)

Why didn’t the police just knock on the door or ring the bell instead of breaking down the listed building doors? Quakers may be dissenters and demonstrators but they are peaceful, non violent ones. And we are a welcoming and inclusive church. There was no need for the police to act like thugs. Yes, we protest, we hold peace vigils outside arms fairs and nuclear bases and march against genocides, but we are not violent. Look at our history. We do not fight. 

This current UK government cannot tolerate dissent, however. The Tory government brought in laws to stifle it and the current so-called Labour government have let these laws stand.

This is an excerpt from a message to Quaker meetings:

I’m wondering where it’s going to end…The same way things are going in the USA, where someone who wrote a letter protesting about the genocide was arrested by masked officials on the street and taken off to detention away from her home town?

I’m playing with two year old MsX by a lake in Portugal and worrying about the world she is growing up in.

The latest from Palestine

 This is the latest email report from the Good Shepherd Collective, which is an organisation based in Palestine. 

I’m sorry I can’t make the print any bigger without typing it all out myself.