Happiness

 I’m sorry but I’ve just got to say something about Tony Blair’s latest advice to Labour. 

Does he really think anyone cares what he has to say after the Iraq war? after he joined the Gaza “Board of peace”? when he says we should move closer to America? 

My response is PSHAW.

Moving on…on Tuesday I had a wonderful and a hot day in Liverpool, visiting my old university friend, Margaret. It was excellent! We caught up some more on each other’s lives from the last 25 years, I met her husband for the first time (though I’ve been reading his Christmas newsletter for 50 years), and we went on the ferry across the Mersey. I couldn’t have my photo taken next to the statues of the Beatles  because we didn’t have the time to queue.

Margaret’s memory is phenomenal. She even remembers an essay I wrote comparing the poetry of Blake to the songs of Dylan. I have no memory of that whatsoever. She also insists I am not an intellectual lowlife. I need more friends like this!

I did some hard work sorting out the garden yesterday and feel pleased with myself. There is more to do, of course. 

I had all four of my paintings accepted for the Ashbourne Art Festival Exhibition.

It’s going to be another sunny day.

Two small boys are coming to visit.

This is how I feel - William Stafford’s poem Any Morning:

Mish mash

 I knew it was going to be blisteringly hot again yesterday, but I needed some exercise, so I went out on my bike very early. 

“Make sure you shut all the windows,” Dave said, as he set off on his. 

Dave and I agree wholeheartedly about a lot of things - politics, the utter crapness of Starmer, the bliss of cycling, the delightfulness of small children, how funny it is when Joey in Friends says “supposably” - but we don’t agree about windows. On hot days he goes around the house opening every single window, even in rooms we’re not using. I open them selectively.

So anyway, I shut all the windows he had opened, and set off. I’d been cycling for half an hour, when I started worrying. Had I shut them all? I could remember doing the ones upstairs, but what about the kitchen window? No memory at all. Anxiety set in (which it seems to do far too easily these days) and I turned the bike round and cycled home as fast as I could, arriving hot and bothered to a closed kitchen window. 

So I parked my bike and without even going in the house, I walked up the back garden to the seat we have under the plum tree, and drank my flask of coffee there. 

 

It was heavenly, and easy to imagine I was in a wild patch off the Trail, because we do No Mow May on our top back lawn.

After that I planted the sweet peas, repotted some pelargoniums and collapsed because of the heat.

In the afternoon, MsX and family came and I had a lot of fun playing pretend games, while MsX’s parents tried to get us up to date with our technology. First our recalcitrant telly, with no success, and secondly our car. The latter may be a success, but it doesn’t  have a CD player, so the lovely Jaine showed Dave how to use blue tooth to play music from a phone. The trouble is that Dave doesn’t have a phone, and I don’t have music on mine. Life used to be so simple. Buy a CD: stick it in a player. I miss mechanics.

Today, I’m going on a day trip to Liverpool to meet up with a friend from University. More fun.

Letter from home

It has been a quiet week at Hepworth Towers.

The family member who declines to be named rang on Thursday to ask if I’d go over at the weekend with Dave (who was going to help with some landscaping) because on Tuesday MsX had come out of pre-school and said she thought Sue was picking her up.

The lovely Jaine asked her why she thought that, and MsX said “Because I love her and I miss her.”

You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. And of course I said yes, I’ll go. I was missing her too.

Then at half past seven in the morning on Saturday, the family member who declines to be named rang to tell me that he thought I should know that MsX had a nasty cough and the lovely Jaine also had a bit of a cough. If I didn’t want to go because of the risk of catching something worse (as grandparents often do) then they would understand.

Readers, I went. MsX is irresistible, just like all of my other grandchildren.

Our garden has been looking lovely for a month, and now the bluebells are fading, the wallflowers are nearly over, and the honeysuckle is out. 

The cow parsley is at full height along the lane. I’m in heaven. There is nothing that compares to May in the Derbyshire Dales.

View from our lane

Just round the lane from Hepworth Towers

I’m watering my wildflower patches every evening, and they’re certainly germinating, which is encouraging. I’m waiting for Dave to put up the canes so I can plant my sweet peas. Our blackbird has been singing for much of every day and when I go out and hear him I always call up to him on the chimney, or the laburnum tree, or next doors larch, and say hello. I tell him how lovely it is to hear him. I’m an utter soppy date when it comes to our blackbird. 

Today we have to drive over to Ashbourne, 35 minutes away, to deliver some paintings I am submitting to the Ashbourne Art Festival exhibition. We’re allowed to submit up to four paintings. These are they. They are ones I want to sell. We have run out of space on our walls. Wish me luck!

That’s my week. I hope you’ve had a good one, and that you’re free to enjoy this glorious weather.

Old crocks on the road

 If you book something called a ‘private en-suite room’ you expect to be able to step out of bed take a couple of steps and sit on the loo, don’t you? 

Liz and I stayed in a great Youth Hostel last week and I was lucky enough to have a room with a double bed and views of Swaledale and fresh beech leaves.

It was billed as en-suite, which I’d been very pleased about because I need to go to the loo in the middle of the night at least twice. At home, I creep along the landing in the dark and manage to stay semi comatose so I can slip straight back to sleep. But this “en-suite” room was outside my bedroom door and up twelve steep steps. 

When you got to the top there was a cavernous room where a bright light went on automatically. It was palatial and it had the same lovely views…

but it wasn’t exactly what an old crock like me was looking for when she books an en-suite. 😀

Having said all of that, I loved the hostel, and I loved the trip. We had chilly temperatures, sunshine and showers, in which we never got soaked, and that was far preferable to dry weather with a blank grey sky. Swaledale and Wensleydale were looking lovely, and we had some good walks. But when two dopey friends in their seventies go for a five mile hike there are sometimes hiccups…

I missed a footpath sign that was plain to see;

In a churchyard Liz found some unusual flowers “Sue, come and look at these, they’re like a tiny sedum! Oh! They’re plastic!”

Trying to find the way is a palaver when you have to take off your rucksack to find your reading glasses before you can read the map;

We forgot to take our walking poles and really needed them on slippy wet stones;

Photo by Liz. Note my pose.

We forgot to take our mats for coffee break and had to adopt the one buttock pose against a drystone wall;

I thought I was talking to Liz in a visitor centre and looked up to see it was a friendly stranger I’d been discussing a calendar with.

We visited waterfalls which were not very full, though still impressive in their way:

Hardraw Force

Aysgarth Middle Falls

Aysgarth Lower Falls

Now I’m home and have an equally lovely view from the bedroom window. 

I’m getting ready to submit some paintings for an art exhibition. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, here are some extra photos of the holiday…

Photo by Liz

Passing it on

  My sweet pea seedlings have been living on the bedroom windowsill for weeks, but on Friday I decided they were hearty enough to go outside in the cold frame. So now I have regained my lovely uncluttered view of the spring trees.

Yesterday was a Refugee Hospitality Day, for which I prepared five lunch dishes. I also went down to the Meeting House to help set out the crafts and games. And I took these posies for the lunch tables.

Last year, two of the committee resigned for personal and health reasons before I had the chance to say that I wanted to reduce my contribution, because it was getting to be too much. I have been a key member of the small committee for 9 years, since the beginning, and I was finding the days stressful as well as the usual exhausting. I felt very sad, because I still believed in the events we have run. Our guests have loved the days they have spent with us in Bakewell, and we have found them so rewarding. It has felt like such a worthwhile and community-affirming enterprise, and such a positive thing to do in this world rife with hate, particularly against refugees.

But the resignations meant we had insufficient people power to carry on, as only one person was still able to give 100%. He was determined to continue somehow. And then one of our newest volunteers couldn’t believe that such a great initiative should be ending, and said she’d be on the committee, so there were two members, but still not enough.

This was the situation last September. I was feeling sad and concerned. Should I have stepped back? 

But the upshot was that a new committee was formed, with me as background advisor, still providing as much cooking as always, and helping to set up on the day. And yesterday the first one happened. I was there at the beginning and the ending, and it had obviously been another wonderful day. Visitors and volunteers were smiling and happy. They were speaking in a circle about what they had enjoyed most in the day, and there was a lot of laughter.

I helped clear up, and pack away the crafts, and then came home. I am pleased - with all my heart - that this enterprise/project that has been going for so long, and that I have been a key player in, is going to continue. 

Empty space

The longer I leave between blog posts the harder it becomes to write a new one.

Who wants to read about politics these days? It’s all dire.

Who wants to hear me wittering on about being 76 and trying to work out where I fit in the world?

This morning my elder brother suggested I should read through my blog book (Days Are Where We Live) and decide what works, and then write something. But all the posts in the blog book work…that’s why I picked them. They were the best posts from the years 2010 - 2019 (inclusive.) There was a lot of dross left out. 

Talking to him about the blog helped me clarify my thoughts about it. In order to write a successful post, it’s not like writing a diary entry: something has to happen that makes me feel a certain way  - amused or intrigued, puzzled or sad, happy or angry - and it’s the feelings that prompt me to write. 

And the situation right now is this: I feel as though I’ve said everything there is to say about my life from day to day. I am still puzzling about what my role is at this age/stage. And lastly, the feelings I have now about everyday life are generally ones I don’t want to air in public discussion.

For some reason I have not been able to paint for weeks, but today I finished this:

Or perhaps it isn’t finished. I can’t say right now.

And neither can I say if the blog is finished. So keep dropping in to see.

It’s been a bright cold day in May. I’ve felt under par. There’s a refugee hospitality day on Saturday and I am contributing to that in various ways. And next week I’m going to Wensleydale for three days with my friend Liz. After that - who knows?