Happy Friday

The Greens won the by-election! Hooray! There is hope for the future.

And I am well again after being ill since last Saturday.

But we’re still in entertainment fortnight so here is the next instalment…my Times article from 2003 about Dave's addiction to yoghurt.

The history of a habit

If a medical researcher ever discovers that yoghurt is carcinogenic then my husband is doomed.

His passion for yoghurt began in 1971, when he began to dabble in hazelnut yoghurt, made by Ski. He was just becoming hooked on the stuff, and therefore thinking that he ought to stop eating it, when Ski ran a special offer. If you sent them six yoghurt carton lids they would send you a teaspoon with a long handle, a design which enabled the yoghurt fancier to scrape the last trace of yoghurt from the distinctive cartons, which were shaped like miniature cooling towers. Dave cannot resist a bargain, nor can he resist interesting tools, and what is a long handled spoon, after all, but a tool?

Unfortunately he had never heard the saying "He needs a long spoon who sups with the Devil." All too soon we had twelve long handled teaspoons; and Dave was a yogaholic.

When we moved to Sheffield two years later, he switched to natural yoghurt. He says he abandoned the hazelnut variety because it was too fattening, but I know it's because it only comes in 150gram cartons. Longley Farm Natural Yoghurt is available in larger cartons and is powerful stuff - a Class A yoghurt that gives him a high like no other.

At one point he decided he was spending too much money on yoghurt and started to make his own, first in the warming section of our Rayburn and then in a yoghurt maker. But soon he could not make it in sufficient quantities, and we had to supplement it with Longley Farm Natural Yoghurt from the deli down the road. Reintroduced to LFNY, Dave remembered its superiority and he gave up making his own.

By 1979, he was slurping a 450gram carton of LFNY daily. I had to go to the deli every day, because if I bought more than one carton, then more got eaten.

When we went on our annual holiday to Northumberland, the week was taken up in the pursuit of LFNY. Visits to the beach, tours round castles and boat trips to the Farne Islands were interleaved with yoghurt hunts.

We found a source in a Bamburgh greengrocers, and another - though only in small cartons - at a caravan site near Dunstanburgh Castle. But they didn't have enough. There must be dealers in Northumberland with supplies big enough to feed Dave's habit but we never managed to map out a definitive, reliable network. In the end, we resorted to buying a week's supply from the deli and taking it with us.

By 1984 Dave had persuaded the deli to supply him with catering cartons of LFNY. Each of these cartons, made of tough white plastic, with a bright orange screw top lid, has an integral handle. A good job, as these caterers cartons contain 5 kilograms of the stuff.

In 1994, when we moved to the Peak District it was my job to ask the man in the village shop if he could get us two 5 kg cartons every week. He made no comment. He is a discreet man. He gets it from the driver every Tuesday afternoon and stashes it safely in the bottom shelf of his fridge behind the counter, away from prying eyes.

Dave is now consuming three catering cartons of LFNY a week. Every Monday morning the last carton has been cut in half and licked clean (and not by the cat) and he has more than 24 hours to wait for the next delivery on Tuesday afternoon. Sometimes I will make an emergency dash down to Bakewell's Monday market on my bike, where it is possible to buy LFNY, though the price is high.

Sometimes the Tuesday delivery fails to arrive and I scour the Derbyshire Dales for shops that stay open late and have LFNY, an odd 150 gm carton, the normal size for normal people.

 If on a Tuesday we are not home until after the village shop has closed, the shop man swathes a carton in carrier bags and hides it behind the old milk churn outside his shop, for us to collect.

At Christmas when the shop is closed and Dave has to pre-buy his LFNY in bulk, and yet I also need extra fridge space for family entertaining, he keeps his extra cartons cool by floating them in the water barrel behind the shed. This year he put them in the pond, tethering the carton handles to the garden seat.

When he is working away from home and staying in hotels, the LFNY goes with him. The 5 kg carton is too big to fit in the minibar, so he fills the bath with cold water and stands the carton in there to keep it cool.

You might think that I am an indulgent woman. Not true. If you could see Dave on Monday nights vainly searching the fridge for a hidden cache of liquid snow, your heart would melt.

And if you could see his pleasure on a Tuesday afternoon when he unscrews the orange cap and discovers that this week the LFNY is prime vintage, so thick that it is difficult to shake it through the spout, so thick that it comes out with a glug and swirls in the dish, and keeps its shape, just like egg whites whisked for meringue… you would understand.

This spring I planted my sweet pea seeds in catering size LFNY cartons cut in half and filled with compost. As I was drilling the cartons with drainage holes Dave said "Good job I eat yoghurt when you need so many sweet pea pots."

"Yes dear, at £19.80 a week it's a bargain."

p.s. this account is now out of date, as he gets his yoghurt from Aldi these days. It’s not as good as LFNY but it’s much cheaper.

Entertainment fortnight no. 5

 Today's ancient piece from The Times about Dave and me...

Every couple needs one

Just as every newly married couple should have a shed on their wedding list if they want their marriage to survive, so there is something every older couple needs, and I know what it is.

It’s not just retired people who need it, such as those poor wives whose husbands – bereft of work - follow them around all day asking “What are you doing? What are you doing now? Where are you going? What time will you be back?”

It can also be couples who work from home, like my husband and I, who have a room and a computer each and who have, you would think, no need to argue.

Our problem is our different styles of working. He works in short bursts, sharp and efficient, sure footed and sound. He cuts through work like a man with a machete hacking through brambles.

I am slow and woolly headed. I need to go to my room and shut the door and be left alone for hours at a time. I am like the author who, when she was asked if there were words she tended to overuse, said “Yes - two words: go away.”

But machete man does half an hour here, and gets up for a drink; half an hour there, and gets up to stroke the cat. Then as he’s on his feet he will come and ask if I remembered to ring the plumber. He’ll do ten minute’s writing, then look outside the door to see if there’s enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers, so he can go out cycling later. But then as there’s only enough blue sky for one leg, he will come and ask if I think it’s going to rain. Then it’s fifteen minutes on the phone, and a shout to ask where his stapler is. He does half an hour of planning, then feels peckish and slopes into the kitchen for a bowl of yoghurt, and while he’s there he may as well listen to the headlines. Then he comes up to rage about what he’s just heard. Aarghh !

This was all true until a month ago. That’s when he bought the router, which (for the uninitiated) is a power tool used for precise cutting and shaping of timber.

Routers are wonderful. Every couple should have one. The router has revolutionised our lives, which I now divide up into BR and AR ( Before Router and After Router ). Now, in the AR epoch, I have no excuse not to get on with my work, because he sits in his room as if nailed to his chair until all of his work is done: the sooner it’s done, the sooner he can play with his router.

He started with picture frames. Everything in the house that’s vaguely rectangular has now been framed. Luckily, a router isn’t just useful for framing. It can do decorative edging for shelves, cupboard doors, engraved wooden signs, etched patterns and pictures, dovetails – anything in wood that needs shaping or grooving, cutting or profiling.

And in the evening when his back aches from bending over the workbench, and his fingers are numb with vibration, he sits and flicks through his catalogues of router attachments and cutters. All is quiet except for occasional exclamations, such as “I’m going to get some pronged teenuts. They’re a joy.” Or he may read one of his routing magazines - the sort of publication that features in the missing words round on Have I got news for you -  with headlines like “Power up!” or “Beautiful Beast! The new big Bosch router is here.”

 It’s not just my husband who is besotted with his router. Believe me, there is a routing fraternity, with ramifications way beyond woodwork. Last week my brother ( who has a “tasty” Elu router ) asked my husband’s view on some abstruse etymological question and on hearing the reply said “Yes, of course. Anyone with a router talks sense.”

As well as improving domestic harmony, the router has solved the Christmas present problem: from now on I’ll buy presents for his router. There is an infinite variety of cutters: no man could live long enough to try them all. I’ve just been down to get his catalogue to count them, but my husband had gone, and on his study door was a new wooden sign “Gone routing.”

Entertainment fortnight No. 4

Continuing this entertainment fortnight when I'm sharing old pieces I had in The Times, here, by special request from my brother Pete, is this one:

He loves me!

         Here comes Valentine’s Day again. How many of you with long-term partners are expecting to receive a card oozing with loving feelings and brimming with compliments?

         The publication of Ronald Reagan’s letters to Nancy last year prompted a Times reader to write to the paper quoting some of her husband’s offerings in contrast. “You may be an old goat,” he had written, “but you’re my old goat.” Women all over the country must have laughed grimly in recognition. I did.

         Can you top this gem that my husband delivered as we sat in the late summer sunshine ? "You know, sitting there with the light behind you, you look quite attractive. For your age. From this angle." Or this one, said as I was trying on a new jumper: “You look quite slim in that garb – it must be an optical illusion.”

         What is it with long term partners? Do they have an automatic complimentectomy after two years of cohabitation? Being more charitable, maybe they think it undermines the integrity of the relationship to be anything other than completely honest at all times. And if they do find themselves slipping into rave revue mode they feel they have to tone down the comment by qualifying it. Yesterday, I found a note my husband had sent with some flowers when I was in hospital after a mastectomy, and I quote:

These look terrific, but not as terrific as you.

And then he’d written

( This may be overstating the case. )   

He’s not insensitive though. He does realise that ageing is difficult to come to terms with, and that couples should give each other kindly, supportive boosts from time to time. One day, as we sat doing the crossword, he said, "The inside of your eyebrow looks youthful."

"What?" I spluttered. 

"If I squint, the inside of your left eyebrow looks quite youthful. It's wrinkle free." Then he smiled, and his imaginary tact lights started flashing. He thought he’d done so well.

His latest attempt was - “Your back is one of your best remaining bits”- but it just made me feel like an ancient ruin.

Working from home, I rarely have to brave the world of power dressing. Unfortunately, living in an empty nest, I have to depend on my husband’s feeble efforts if I need reassurance about my appearance. On going to a festival where I was due to give a presentation, I asked if I looked OK to stand up in front of a lot of people. He replied rather anxiously: "How far away are they going to be?"

         Last week, when I was going to an important meeting he asked me what I had on my eyes.    "Eye make-up" I explained.

"Why ?" he said.

"So that I don't feel like such an old hag," I said.

"Why aren't you covered in it?"      

         I used to feel sorry for my teenage children when they had unsightly pimples in very obvious places. On coming down to breakfast, mortified at the new blemish, and desperately wondering how to disguise it for a day at school, my daughter would be greeted with: "Did you know you had a huge, nasty spot right on the end of your nose?"

         Living with an incorrigibly candid man can be psychologically bracing, but at least when he says something complimentary you know he means it. In our house we have a game where we go through each member of the family and say, if they were an animal, what animal would they be? Or alternatively, what piece of furniture, or what type of house?

One day we used cars as our reference point, and I was delighted to be described, not as a Morgan, or a Mercedes, but a Land Rover. The pile of magazines my husband keeps under the bed to leaf through last thing at night are well-thumbed back copies of Land Rover International. In his eyes a Land Rover is reliable, versatile, unbeatable, fun and, above all, an object of desire.

P.S.

Me: "What did you think of my article in the Times about your compliments?"

Him: "Well, it wasn't nearly as boring as I was expecting."

 

 

Entertainment fortnight 3

 This is my very favourite piece that I wrote for The Times, in my former life as a writer.

There we were, quaking in our boots

Derbyshire. Monday morning 12.54 a.m. We wake to a sound like a bowling ball rolling across the wooden floorboards of our bedroom. My husband switches on the light and sits up, “What the hell was that?”

“Don’t know,” I say. “Weird. Let’s go back to sleep.”

But he is sitting up, fretting. Is it settlement? Subsidence? Last year we built an extension and now we are sleeping in it. “What the hell was that noise?” says DIY man again.

I want to sleep, but I need a pee. My adult daughter – who is staying with us – hears me out of bed and calls out, petrified: “What’s happening? The walls were shaking. The roof was rumbling. The wardrobe doors came open and now they won’t shut.”

She had been lying in bed unable to sleep, so was writing a to-do list for the following day. I give her a hug, thinking Silly billy, fussing again: she lives her life on the margins of hysteria. Then I remember her ringing me on September 11^th telling me to turn on the telly, and my refusing because I had to post a birthday card.

I return to our bedroom to find DIY man getting up. He has heard daughter speak of the shaking walls, and thinks the house is falling down. He dons a dressing gown and wellington boots (the mission is too urgent to find the beloved boiler suit) and prowls around outside for fifteen minutes with a torch, looking for cracks, subsidence, disaster.

He finds nothing. He comes back inside and engages in anxious discussions with daughter while I retreat under the duvet and long for sleep. The front door opens: it’s our younger son. He has been sitting on the village recreation ground under the full moon, having a philosophical discussion with his friend.

Only on arrival at our garden gate did he become unnerved – not by unusual shakes or rumbles, having felt nothing and heard nothing - but by the freakishness of all the house lights being on after half past ten. A rarer sight is DIY man still up and about. Younger son is phlegmatic, but he is also an X files fan, and suggests to DIY man and sister that the noise was supernatural.

DIY man comes back to bed and props himself up in worry mode, arms tense, head twitching. His next theory is that something has happened to our older son, who was flying to Denver and arriving there in the middle of our night. You hear stories, he says, of people dying and doors opening in family houses miles away. He gets up and leaves a message on our son’s mobile: “Are you safe?”

More effectively, younger son (in the UK) logs onto the internet, gets instant messaging and immediately contacts older son (in the US.)

[01:40] son in UK: isaac. say something

[01:40] son in US: hello. wozzup?

[01:40] son in UK: thank god for that

[01:40] son in US: :S?

[01:40] son in UK: theres some weird shit goin down here

[01:40] son in US: o no... what?

[01:40] son in UK: hang on, let me tell peeps youre ok. brb

 

Younger son tells aged parents that older son is safe, then returns to the computer.

[01:43] son in US: what gives?

[01:44] son in UK: i got back at 130 to find everyone up and wandering around the house looking worried

[01:45] son in US: there's been an earthquake

[01:45] son in UK: where?

[01:45] son in US: uk. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2275158.stm

[01:45] son in UK: haha  coool

 

The lights are off and I am just dropping off – oh bliss - when younger son brings us the printout from BBC news online: an earth tremor shakes the Midlands – 4.8 on the Richter scale.

“Great. Can we go to sleep now?” I say.

“Are we insured for earthquake damage?” says DIY man.

Morning breaks and I go downstairs to find him outside, checking the drains. He has heard of damaged drains and wants no truck with them. 

If something needs fixing he will fix it. If the earth moves, he will steady it. Failing that there’s always the BBC. (But yes. The drains are fine.)

DIY man

 

 

Entertainment Fortnight Episode 2

This is the second offering from my writing annals...published in The Times twenty plus years ago. 

Can spend, won’t spend

I am considering offering up my husband as a guinea pig for trainee salespeople.

He wants a new bicycle, he needs a new bicycle, he can afford a new bicycle. He just cannot bring himself to buy one. The current one has already been rebuilt and resprayed once, but after 120,000 miles the formerly elegant frame is suffering from metal fatigue. If he doesn’t buy a replacement soon, the bottom bracket will snap on a ride and he and the bike will suffer the ignominy of a lift home in the car.

The problem is that whilst he is passionate about cycling, he hates spending money on himself. It’s a puzzle how he managed to buy the bike in the first place. He bought it on the day our younger son  was born, eighteen years ago. I don’t know whether this was by way of a celebration, or a don’t think I’m going to give up cycling and spend more time at home gesture, or a panicky I’d better buy it now while there’s still some money in the bank purchase.

Whichever it was, he needs a new bike now, yet he remains immobile. Thriftiness is a welcome virtue in a family man, but my man is so parsimonious that he would be the only guest ever on Alvin Hall’s Your Money or Your Life programme to be told to go out and spend more money.

         Years ago, the first time he asked if I wanted to go shopping I naively imagined that this would mean entering shops and handing over money for purchases. What it actually meant was walking disconsolately up and down the high street, looking in shop windows. We never stepped over a threshold because, either the desired item wasn’t in the window so they obviously didn’t have it, or, if it was in a display visible from the street it was always too expensive. “They don’t know what to charge” should be embossed on his wallet.

Consequently, for the last thirty years I have done all the shopping. This has definite advantages. It’s easy to smuggle an unjustifiable purchase into the house, hide it in the back of the wardrobe, and get it out to wear a month later. Then when he says “Is that new ?” I can honestly say “No, I’ve had it for ages,” which happily forestalls any questions about price. ( He is not up to date on clothing prices: the last garment he bought for himself was a hippy Afghan coat.)

I have to buy all his clothes as well as anything he actually wants – from guitar strings to books to spare parts for his bike. It only takes two months to rev himself up to shell out £5.99 for a set of new guitar strings, and it’s easy to take written instructions on brand and type. But only he could choose and buy the bike, and it takes more like five years to change into a high enough gear to hand over the money for that.

We have passed the first stage: three months of complaints about the fact that each and every component needs replacing, and three months on how it’s not worth doing because the frame is rusting and the transmission is as slack as his eighteen year old sweatband. We are now into the 2 years of weekend forays to local bike shops. He has weathered the shock at the increase in prices since 1984, but has so far not spotted his platonic ideal of a bike.

When he does, we will enter the period where I try to persuade him to do the deed, and he says no, he wouldn’t get the value out of the purchase because he only has a few years left to live. He is 51 and in good health; his only ailment is pessimism. He used to worry about buying shoes until I suggested that if he died before his Ecco lace-ups did, our son could wear them. (Said son was out of earshot at the time.)

I’m starting to get desperate about this bike business, though. I’ve just remembered that he bought his guitar when our daughter was born. I hope he doesn’t have some strange yet-to-be-labelled syndrome which means he can only buy things when in a new surge of fatherhood. I love him dearly, but if he won’t buy a bike till we have a new baby, he can take up running instead.

Wearing a hand me down cycling jersey - from a generous friend

 

 

 

 

Entertainment fortnight

I recently came across this old article of mine I had in The Times over 20 years ago, and it gave me an idea.

For a couple of weeks I'm going to post a series of these old pieces instead of posting about my quiet life, the things Dave says and does,  my painting travails, petty gripes and difficulties, bad weather, politics, etcetera etcetera.

Here it is.

And below it is a photo my sister Jen took of me in 2008. I used to have it as the header of the blog, and I am fond of it. 

At the beginning of January, as I helped my mother take down her Christmas decorations I asked her what she would like me to do on my next visit, in a few weeks time. “The spring cleaning, please.”

Hadn’t she seen the correspondence in The Times in December, where readers were asking whether the grass they were cutting was the last of the autumn or the first of the spring? Didn’t she realise that as global warming is blurring the seasons into one, spring cleaning can be classed as an outmoded practice, and moved from the conceptual broom cupboard to the conceptual attic?

When I told my husband – a man raised with a lavatory brush in one hand and a bottle of Windolene in the other – that my mother had asked me to do her spring cleaning, he turned the colour of his rubber gloves. He knows I am still working in Key Stage One in dusting the bookshelves. And he blames my mother.

Funny that, because I blame his mother for giving him unreasonable expectations. She would spend all morning every morning, cleaning the house from top to bottom, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays would have a cleaning lady round to mop up the speck she had missed. Hers was the only house I have been where, if you dropped a biscuit under the bed, you could pick it up and eat it without first checking it for fluff.

My mother, on the other hand, had her priorities right. For her, reading the paper, helping us furnish our dolls houses, making us cowboy suits on her sewing machine, or taking us out to fly our kites, were all activities preferable to cleaning. She would clear the kitchen floor not to wash it, but so that we had space for roller skating.

Now she is 84 she has no children to entertain, but she has trophies for bridge, and she is the only granny we know whose bedtime reading includes Stephen Hawking, J.K.Rowling, and Matthew Parris. She is still, like me, a slattern, but she is a wonderful conversationalist.

Slatterns fulfil a socially useful role: they allow others to feel superior, even other slatterns. (“My cooker may need cleaning, but you should see the state of her fridge.”)  I get immense pleasure from eyeing my mother’s bathroom with disgust, and getting out the Jif to clean the washbasin. Similarly, my daughter loves to come home and chide me about the state of my dishcloth.

Admittedly, some of my mother’s housekeeping habits were beyond the pale. Her most memorable misdemeanour was the time she was making breakfast and dropped a bacon rasher on the kitchen floor. She picked it up, dunked it in the washing up water and slung it back in the pan, and then  pooh-poohed our protests with “A bit of dirt will build up your resistance.” Recent research lends weight to her view ( though that specific practice remains dubious. )

          But all this chat does not get the skirting boards washed. However warm the winter, you cannot escape the fact that at this time of year the sun shines low in the sky to expose dirty windows and grimy walls. But how can I do my mother’s spring cleaning when she has never shown me how ?

          I asked my husband to explain the process. Through gritted teeth he spelt out the major rules: everything moveable in the house must be moved; everything must be cleaned; and it is vital you start at the top of the house and work your way down. Also, you throw out a lot of clutter. It sounds to me like a load of old Feng Shui.

          In the last few years, parenting classes have become de rigeur for people struggling with a task that earlier generations launched into without a whimper. Perhaps the next thing to catch on will be courses in housework, with a specialist module in bottoming the bedrooms, and an advanced one in spring cleaning ?

          Maybe not. Those eccentric people who see housework as the new sex won’t need classes in it, and the rest of us won’t want to waste time and money on learning to do something we hate. Personally, I shall rely on the global warming excuse, and take my mother to the library instead.

A trying week at Hepworth Towers

It has been a trying week at Hepworth Towers.

It’s been a bad tempered week - not Dave, but me.

It’s been a dark week - not just the interminable rain, or the horizon to horizon wet grey murk out there, but it’s been like that in my head. I’ve been miserable and bad tempered, and only because I am feeling a little better this morning, am I able to tell you. This long wet winter, coupled with the interminable dreadful news, brought me down so I was intolerable to live with.

Meanwhile Dave has been a patient saint. He knows what it’s like to have wall to wall blackness inside your head, and he couldn’t have been kinder. 

I have not been enthused about painting for weeks and weeks, and I have had no inspiration. That’s why I painted that sickly sweet painting called Cheerfulness. I thought it expressed Cheerfulness perfectly, but I hated it aesthetically.

Yesterday, I did this to it and felt temporarily better.

One of the reasons I’ve been so fed up is that I have had no inspiration for painting. Another is feeling guilty in top of the despair because I have nothing to complain about…I am very fortunate. 

Yesterday Liz came for a coffee and a long walk and she broke the spell of my gloom. After she’d gone I lit the fire, played my sax, tweaked the current, so far unsuccessful, painting, and then lay on the sofa and read my poetry anthology Staying Human.

Dave came home with a bag of my favourite samosas, and we watched The Repair Shop, did a crossword together, and then looked on Google Maps for a photo of the place where we lived when we first got married. Our daughter had asked for the address - I think she is going to look for it (she was a baby there). It looked very different - actually unrecognisable, really - and I had wanted it to look just the same. 

Whatever…I think this poem by Mary Oliver fits the bill this morning:

(It’s not in the anthology I mentioned, btw.)

 

Letter to The Guardian

 

Taking care

In 2011 I went to Paris for a weekend in February with my big sister Kath. 

I like going away with Kath. She likes to walk to places, as I do, and she’s so relaxed and easy to be with.

We went to see the impressionists at Musée d’Orsay, and I can’t remember what else, except the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. 

We approached via the long, long flight of steps in front of it. And I remember a young man carrying a toddler on his shoulders running down those steps - running down them. And I thought at the time how careless and frightening it was. What if he had tripped? Why hadn’t he seen the danger?

I just came across a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, the poet who wrote that wonderful poem called Gate A4 - check it out here - which reminded me of seeing that man on the Montmartre steps:

Attention

 “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

I just came across this quote from Simone Weil, and it made me wonder if I should read every report that comes out of Gaza and the West Bank. I have been reading the headlines and passing on because I can’t bear to read about the suffering there, when I can do so little about it.

For example, this one, in The Guardian this week:

For example, a report from The Good Shepherd Collective sent to my Inbox this week said that 

Actually, I am going to give you a link to the full report.  

Here https://goodshepherdcollective.org/posts/2026/02/06/several-killed-700-displaced-100-000-without-water-in-west-bank

It makes shocking reading. And it is shocking that our press rarely reports any of this.

Just think about it…the U.K. and Europe still trades with the Israelis, even when they behave like this.

I am sick at heart.

Meanderings

 I have not been to America to visit my lovely family since October 2024. I used to go twice a year. I would love to see them but I am not completely sure I’d be welcomed by the powers that be, because of what I have said online. 

So the family came to visit us last summer, and I hope they will do so again this year.

Meanwhile we talk on the phone. Cece FaceTimes to show me the progress of their latest craft activities, which are numerous and impressive.

For example, their crocheted gloves and numerous bead bangles

Sadly I can’t find pictures of their other larger projects. They recently told me they  wanted to crochet a jumper but didn’t have the right size crochet hooks so they 3 D printed them. They will go far. They learn how to do everything from YouTube, so if they bring in a social media ban in the USA, it will be a problem. 

We chat on FaceTime and play Dress to Impress. We both love this Roblox game, and we talk while we’re playing. 

Isaac called for a chat on Sunday, which was lovely, but as soon as I’d put the phone down I missed him. Wendy called yesterday and the same thing happened. It’s strange that after being in touch I sometimes miss them more.

I am still lacking inspiration with my painting and am trying new things in the interim. I had an idea for an abstract called Cheerfulness and I’ve just finished it, but I’m ambivalent about it. 

On the one hand I think it successfully illustrates  Cheerfulness, but on the other hand, I dislike the flat colours. I’ve just noticed that this is a bad photo…the top balloon should be as white as the bottom one. Hey ho.

I’ve started a new abstract now. Perhaps when the spring comes I’ll start painting grasses and flowers and trees again. Like this:

I made the patchwork cheerfulness cushion I mentioned in an earlier post, but decided against embroidering a slogan on it.

If you have a headache, you can turn it over because the back is plain.

Do you ever become hooked on a TV programme that you know is tosh, and often you find annoying, but you can’t stop watching it? I’m currently on Series 7 of Younger on Netflix. It began well and then in series 2 became annoying, and then in series 3 I kept thinking - stop messing us around! …are Liza and Charlie EVER going to get together? I even googled to find out. I won’t give a spoiler. Thankfully, Series 7 is the last. And a friend has told me two other things to try which are more meaningful…if I can just remember what they are. I know they both begin with P. I could ask my fiend again if I could remember which friend it was… oh! It was my daughter, and she Whatsapped the info because she knew I would forget. Bless her.

So it goes. 

Lest you think I am an utter lightweight, I Will tell you I am reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

I’m going to see Hamnet today. That’s my other culture fix for the week.

Stimulation on speed

My weekend in London had a big impact on me. I’ve been thinking about it all week.

On Friday we spent the afternoon and evening at the National Portrait Gallery, beginning with a free guided tour, focusing on fashion and dress. It was fascinating. Did you know, for example, that the empire line came into fashion as a direct result of the French Revolution? Aristocrats who had been parading around in tightly corseted, extravagant dresses, rejected ostentation in favour of simplicity.

We then went to the rooftop bar for a drink. It’s super up there. You get away from the crowds and have a great view over the rooftops, past Nelson’s column to Big Ben in the distance. 

Daughter cropped out, to preserve her privacy.

The only problem is that you can’t just go for a tea or a coffee. You can have a drink and/or a meal. We had the former.

Then it was time for the main event - The Taylor Wessing National Portrait Photo Prize Exhibition. Gosh that’s a mouthful. 

This I loved. It was fascinating and engrossing. The words beside each photo, telling the story of the particular portrait, were fascinating, and so much more meaningful than the often impenetrable and specious intellectual expositions you see about figurative works of art in exhibitions.

One photo moved me to tears. It was ‘Fatima and Ivana’ by the photographer, Giles Duley. Duley was wounded by  bomb in Afghanistan, losing both legs and his left arm, but he has had both a successful and hugely worthwhile career, documenting the impact of war on civilians. And he founded the NGO, Legacy of War Foundation.

This was the photo that moved me - I’m sorry that it was impossible to take a shot of it without reflections:

I found it so affecting because of the smiles and the manifest love on both of the faces, and of course, because of the horrors of war on civilians. And perhaps because my granddaughter MsX is the same age as Ivana.

In reading up about Duley just now, I found another photo of the three year old Ivana, in a hospital bed, after she’d been hit by a bomb, alongside a photo of a child bombed in WW2:

So much to think about. 

We had a stroll around Trafalgar Square to take in some fresh air

and then we went back to the NPG for tea/supper in Larry’s bar, in the basement, where there was a jazz singer and pianist. It was ace. It was fantastic! Here’s my margarita

And that was Friday.

On Saturday we went on a bus 

The Tower of London and the Shard

Crossing Tower Bridge

to Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Anne Ancher exhibition. Ancher (1859-1935) was a successful Danish painter, a household name in her own country, but little known here. I loved her paintings. And I came away inspired, particularly by her interiors and the way she painted light, pouring in through the windows. The Dulwich is always worth the trip out from London, and this exhibition was fabulous.

The last event was going to see The Mousetrap on Saturday evening. It was huge fun.

You’ve heard of The Mousetrap, haven’t you?

I was telling two family aspies about it, saying “It was first staged in 1952, and has been showing non-stop since then,” and one responded - IN ALL SERIOUSNESS - “What? All through the night? 24 hours a day?” This illustrates the hazards of communicating with aspies. 

And now to paint. 

Ooh, forgot to tell you about the squirrel on the balcony (Het’s flat) ten floors up in the Barbican 

Mud, mist and snowdrops

My best Christmas present starts on Friday. I asked my daughter to go to London with me for the weekend in January (as her present to me) and the thought of it has been keeping me going through these dark weeks since Christmas. Dark weeks of mist, rain, mud and disturbing geopolitics.

Last year she gave me the same present but in February, though when the weekend arrived I had the worst cold of my life (a box of Kleenex a day job) and it took the shine off everything. So since New Year I’ve been staying away from anyone with even a trace of a cold, even the captivating 3 year old MsX. 

Thank heavens for the internet. I saw MsX on Facetime on Sunday rather than in person, because she said 'I am not myself.' 

(she had a cough and a runny nose.)

And later that day I played Dress to Impress on Roblox with 13 year old Cece in Colorado, and in one of the rounds I won! I came first! The theme was 'Gym,' and this is my character dressed in what I chose (hairstyle included.) I was so proud coming top against 8 teenyboppers.

Making the most of every single day is more important the older you get. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I had this particular blog post all worked out in my head yesterday afternoon while I was cutting back the buddleia. Now it’s turned to mush. But that is part of what I was thinking about…that everything turns to mush. 

I mean…from your late seventies onwards, nothing is going to improve, is it? I’m on a downward slope. As my body wears out, my health will get worse, my short term memory will decline even more. I was talking to Isaac about this on Monday and in the middle of a sentence a new thought occurred to me and I mentally shelved it, thinking I’d mention it when we’d finished what we were talking about. And then when we’d finished, I couldn’t remember it. 

Yesterday I was filling in an online form which required my driving licence number, and I kept getting the message that what I had entered was not valid. I tried missing out the letters at the beginning, the letters at the end, but still it would not work. I checked it. It looked right but it was not accepted. I rang up the helpline and left a message as they were busy. Then I checked the number again and saw that I had missed out a number in the middle. Durrrh.

This is not a miserable post, not a complaining post. It’s just a post about coming to terms with reality. In the past I’ve always felt there was room for improvement, room to expand, to grow, to develop. I suppose my painting has improved since I started, in lockdown. On the other hand, three of my favourite paintings are from that time, so perhaps I haven’t.

This is my latest, of Dave:

When you're 12, you think - ooh, can't wait to be a teenager.  When you're a teenager you can't wait to leave home so you can do what you want and not what your parents tell you to do. When I was young, things felt as though they were on the up. Now I'm old, it's different. What's to be done? Vive Hodie. (Live today.) Carpe diem. (Seize the day.)

Dave's carvings 

I know full well it's not a new message.

Yesterday afternoon in the garden it felt like spring. And along the lane, the first snowdrops are out. 

I have to learn to enjoy every day, and not rely on beacons of interest and enjoyment scheduled on my future calendar. I am not very good at it.