I am still under par, physically, but I won’t bore you with the details. At least I can paint, at least my beloved 2 year old granddaughter can visit, and above all, I’m thankful for Dave’s patience and loving care.
Here is a letter to be sent to MPs. Please use it if you’d like to.
Below that is my latest painting, almost finished.
This the opening paragraph of an article in the Guardian today written by Sally Rooney. It’s about Palestine Action which is trying to stop the genocide. The majority of the British people want action to stop the genocide.
Writing on Sunday, the Palestine Solidarity Committee reported that in the previous 48 hours, 200 Palestinians had been killed and over 1000 injured. Starving Palestinians are being lured to food distribution sites and then killed.
How do we do it? How do we get Starmer to change course and cut off ties with Israel when we have tried every peaceful method we can think of - writing to our MPs, demonstrating, writing to the papers. There has been a demo in London every month since the war on Gaza began. Last Saturday 350,000 people held a peaceful march through London.
Did you know that:
The U.K. government knows the majority agrees with the marchers, and that their position - complicity with Israel - is a fringe position, out of step with the majority of public opinion.
I am at a loss. Of course, Palestine Action tried something else (as above) and they have been called terrorists and are being threatened with being made a proscribed organisation.
I have just written to my MP again, but I told Dave yesterday I felt like chaining myself to the railings of Downing Street.
I am currently taking an antibiotic, of which a common side effect is insomnia, which means I am awake for several hours in the middle of the night. And I have to say that episodes of Grace and Frankie - which I have already seen twice - are a wonderful comfort. I have also rewatched a couple of episodes of As Time Goes By. They offer similar succour.
Along similar lines, the topic for our next Bakewell Quaker newsletter is “Which three books or authors do you return to and why?” which Chrissie Poulson (also a member of Bakewell Meeting) suggested. She has sent her contribution to me, as the editor, but also put it on her blog to which there is a link at the side of my blog. So I thought I’d follow suit and share my contribution with you.
It was very very hard choosing just three, but here are my choices of books/authors in no particular order :
Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor - because it’s a comfort. The book is insightful and amusing, and it’s about ordinary people. I prefer reading about everyday life and everyday people to reading about ‘important’ people.
The novels of Anne Tyler - because she also writes so well about ordinary people with ordinary lives. Her books are entertaining, hold valuable insights into human nature and human dilemmas, and they are well written in a style I like. I don’t read books that have a writing style I don’t like, no matter how worthy or highly recommended they are. For example I have stopped reading Barbara Kingsolver’s books because although she has a nice style, she uses two pages to express something when two sentences would do, and it drives me nuts. Incidentally, I just listened to one of her earlier books on BBC Radio Sounds, and I enjoyed it, because it was abridged. The title is Holding the line: women in the great Arizona mine strike.
My third choice is a set of three poetry anthologies published by Bloodaxe: Staying Alive, Being Alive, and Being Human - because they offer such a huge and fantastic collection of contemporary poetry. ( I rarely like poetry written before the 20th century, and yes that does include Shakespeare, so sue me.) The poems in these anthologies deal with every aspect of life - birth, death, growing up, family, love life, war and peace, war and survival, living in hope, loss, the daily round, and much much more. These anthologies offer me food for thought, consolation, encouragement, inspiration, explanations, and sometimes humour. Here are two poets’ words on poetry which express how I feel:
Dana Gioa: “Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.”
R.S.Thomas: “Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart.”
Here are three poems I found in one or other of these anthologies:
I just asked Dave how I could possibly write about domestic trivia on here when the world is in such a dire state, with another obscene war begun by the Israelis and western leaders on the brink of assisting them. Oh my God! When will these people see that all war does is create suffering and vast piles of wealth for arms manufacturers and dealers? When will they invest in peace building and negotiation?
Dave said we need distractions and something to laugh about so I should go ahead with something light.
Do you remember when our trusty AEG cooker packed up after 27 years of faithful service ( at Christmas 🙄) and we bought a state of the art cooker with an induction hob? This was 18 months ago. Dave hated that cooker because it was black. I see stainless steel, but he sees black.
He has an irrational but very real hatred of black. He says it’s too looming. It’s a very dark presence sucking the light out of the room. Apparently there is a phobia called melanophobia: he doesn’t have that but he’s on the brink.
I suppose I should tell you that when I am away from home Dave spends a lot of time sitting in the kitchen with the radio on, while he plays his guitar. He also likes to sit in there and read (yes, we do have a sitting room) so the environment matters.
So…he shaped and polished an aluminium sheet to sit on the top of it to get rid of some of the black. It helped, but the problem remained …he hated the cooker.
On April 14 this year, the induction hob on the cooker packed up. It emitted a loud pop and went on strike. Six weeks later it had still not been mended, despite being covered by a full warranty. I won’t bore you with the prolonged and tedious bureaucratic shenanigans that went on between us, the warranty organisers, the repair centre and the manufacturer, Aga Rangemaster. It was awful. 8 weeks after it packed up, Aga agreed we could have a refund from the retailer, or a new cooker from Aga. We got a refund and now own a cooker which has some white on it. Having spent hours trawling the internet I have to tell you that 90% of freestanding cookers are black. Why is that?
Well…Dave has made a white facade that slots over the handles when the oven is not in use, which let’s face it, is usually 23 hours a day.
The aluminium sheet covers the hob when that is not in use, so now there is very little black to disturb anyone.
The problem is that I keep forgetting about the facade and trying to open the oven door and breaking the facade, but you can’t have everything. And frankly,I am just delighted that I can stop thinking about cookers. It’s not as if I liked cooking.
I was going to tell you something funny today but I made the mistake of reading the news first.
Israel has attacked Iran because it didn’t like being criticised over Gaza, and it wanted to deflect the attention of politicians. It worked. Now no politician is talking about Gaza.
I mean…they weren’t actually DOING anything, but at least they were talking about it.
Medical Aid for Palestinians has been working in Gaza for 40 years, and still is.
You can donate to them here
Our last day…perfect.
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| En route to the beach |
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| En route to the beach |
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| The beach! |
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| That’s me in the cossie - yes, I went in. |
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| Goodbye till next year |
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| Afternoon tea at Perennial gardens |
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| Evening walk - going home from the harbour |
We chose a different cliff walk yesterday
and a different bay as our destination.
And when we got back to the car park, a friendly robin was waiting for us…
And he kept coming back!
On the 29th May, a group of people stood outside Parliament and read out the names of every one of the 15,613 children killed by the Israelis in Gaza in this latest conflict.
They spoke their names one by one in front of a banner that listed the names of 1700 babies of 1 and under who have been killed in Gaza.
It took more than 18 hours.
When I read the report of this it made me cry.
Yesterday I sent an article to Dave written by the BBC journalist and editor Jeremy Bowen, who has been working in the Middle East for years and years. It was a long, balanced, rational piece, setting out the reality of what is happening and the history of it. The evidence of war crimes is there for all to see.
I explained to Dave on the phone just now that I couldn’t bear to read it. I can’t bear to read below any headline about Gaza now. It doesn’t mean I am looking away. I care as much as I have always cared, but if I did read below the headlines I couldn’t carry on with my days. I continue to raise money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, I still write to my MP, sign petitions, boycott Israeli goods, do all that I can. Admittedly I can’t do much. Neither, probably, can you.
We have a Prime Minister who is intransigent, and who is deaf to the calls of the majority of the people he was elected to serve.
Part 2
Yesterday both Liz and I were tired and decided we’d have a pottering day. We went to St David’s for a few groceries, and to see some art.
The information centre there has the prettiest car park I have ever been in. The bays are made of banks of earth and massive rocks, with wild flowers growing all over everywhere. (See pic above.)
And a footpath leads you to the centre where there is a shop, a cafe, and exhibitions.
This is the edge of the footpath…
We lapped up the art on show. This was my favourite painting. It’s called The Air We Gratefully Breathe, and is by Rosalyn Sian Evans, a local artist.
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| Liz, setting off |
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| Me being like my lovely Gran, sitting in the car and watching the waves |
We walked the two miles along the cliffs
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| Looking down |
to the same quiet bay, hoping to swim, but the wind was chilly and the water freezing. Still it was lovely.
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| Going for a paddle |
Dear friends,
I am so lucky.
I had five days in Cornwall with my friend Het, and now I’m having six days in Pembrokeshire with Liz. Dave may be averse to holidays but I can still get away.We’re staying in a perfect cottage 1/2 mile outside Porthgain, on the coast.
Six weeks ago I pulled a ligament in my knee, and after careful rest and exercising it’s hugely better, but Dave persuaded me anyway to buy some walking poles and gave me strict instructions to be faithful about using them. I’m glad he did. We managed a long cliff walk yesterday, which included a couple of hours on the beach.
Today we hope to swim! (Or at least go in the sea in our cossies, up to our thighs.)
Love Sue
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| Documentary evidence of pole use for Dave |
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| Liz, identifying the strange grasses - it was Sea Plantain! |
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| Liz, in her element |
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| After my paddle |
I am sick at heart. Starmer does nothing whatsoever in the face of crimes against humanity. Actually, he doesn’t do nothing. He continues to supply arms to Israel, despite the fact that the majority of the British people want an arms embargo.
Protesters formed a red line around Parliament yesterday, though I haven’t seen this reported in the papers, have you?
There will be other domestic posts on here in the future, and I am going on holiday tomorrow with Liz, so I’ll be posting from Pembrokeshire, but this morning all Dave and I can think about is the genocide and the UKs complicity, and the fact that children in Gaza are saying they want to die.
Here is this morning’s letter (from Dave) to our ‘Labour’ MP, in response to what did not happen yesterday in Parliament..
In response to Claire Hanna MP in parliament yesterday, Keir Starmer once again mentioned the possibility of further action. His answer was striking in that he did not mention further action by Israel, the sole perpetrators of the unrestrained and murderous campaign we see daily.
It is clear that Keir Starmer is gas-lighting the nation with his position on Israel, and his words are empty and simply cannot be trusted.
While telling parliament that we are indeed in ‘dark days’, and that Israel’s actions are ‘appalling’ and ‘intolerable’, he takes no effective action to stop Isarel’s extirpation of the Palestinians. The actions he claimed yesterday have self-evidently been wholly ineffective in stopping this genocide.
At this late stage of an asymmetrical war of staggering inhumanity, we daily see the atrocities committed by the IDF. Most recent among these is the murder of Palestinians seeking aid, at least some of whom had suffered shrapnel injuries from shells, which only Israel has the capacity to deliver. In spite of the escalating ferocity and the 60 000 Palestinian deaths, Starmer’s ‘further action’ is always due to come later. He appears to have a very high tolerance for state terrorism, and it is hard to even imagine what line the Israelis could cross which would prompt him into any sort of decisive and effective action.
At the same time, Starmer is colluding and collaborating with the Israelis, effectively facilitating the unspeakable horrors and war crimes being committed against the Palestinians. Supplying armaments, spares for armaments, military intelligence, over-flights, and tacit encouragement makes the UK fully complicit in the inhumanity and illegality of Israel’s feral blood-lust – it can only be described in that way – and puts us firmly on the side of lawlessness.
Sadly, we have a Prime Minister who is untrustworthy, on Gaza as on everything else. He is covertly supporting Israel’s campaign, while telling us another tale altogether. He is continuing to supply Israel with the means to pursue their genocide, and thereby to give the Israeli government moral support.
This is Starmer’s Iraq moment, and history will not forgive his mendacity in putting us on the wrong side of this conflict by supporting the aggressor.
Starmer’s approach makes us all complicit. It is simply wrong, immoral, criminal. It is, to repeat words he used yesterday, appalling and intolerable. None of us voted for this.
with which I wholly concur…
“It is reported today that the government:
John Healey is reported in the Times as suggesting that the public mind-set about defence needs to change.
I am writing to state my absolute opposition to this plan, and to say why it is wholly misguided, and why it is so repugnant.
The government can see, as can we all, that weapons around the world do not solve problems. Weapons in Ukraine, Russia and Israel are not enhancing lives of ordinary people in any way at all. They are creating rubble and corpses, They are creating a generation of grief and resentment. The only people gaining from weapons manufacture are the arms traders and makers, who must be rubbing their corporate hands in glee. People need peace, and a future where lessons from the past are heeded and weapons are not embraced even as a last resort.
The government can also see that there is so much in UK society that needs fixing. After decades of misrule by the Tories, so much of our national life has been hollowed out by economic attrition and right-wing thinking. It is impossible to believe that spending this eye-watering amount on arms is the best way to spend our taxes. If the government’s view is that there are no higher priorities that armaments, then we have a complete failure of imagination, and a criminal disregard for the welfare of ordinary people. Can the government really think of nothing better to spend tax revenues on ?
All war – without exception – is a failure of politics. To create and identify a future adversary and to arm against the imagined foe is maladaptive behaviour. Perhaps if Russia is perceived a threat, we could invest money in dealing with that threat now by diplomatic means, and obviate the use of lethal weapons.
To boost the economy without regard to the morality of the means of increase is unacceptable. If the UK put its money into producing vast quantities of popular illegal substances we might find that very profitable. How is it any more moral to thrive on exporting death and destruction, and the means to cause both ? Why is Labour’s wildly spinning moral compass encouraging the government into bidding to become an exporter of death, and a pariah state ?
On John Healey’s comment, it is not the public’s mind-set which is in need of re-focus. Rather he embodies tired thinking, and recourse to action which he knows does not work, and is a very expensive failure. The public do not want more weapons. There are many things they do need, but the government ignores them, and whines about tough decisions, but which it means unacceptable actions which are useless and unacceptable to the public.
It is Labour that needs a change of mind-set. John Healey – and the government – might do better to listen to the public, and to govern in their interest. Having a government which truly cares about the people it governs would be a pleasant change. Unfortunately Labour shows no sign of being that government, and the people know it. And are rejecting it.
This approach of arming for peace is as daft as fucking for virginity. What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.
Dave Hepworth”
Some mornings when I wake up I feel so dead I ring Dave - who is in his study - and ask if he’ll bring me a cuppa. And being a sweetie, he does.
He gives me the tea, and draws the blinds and the trees look beautiful in the morning sunshine. Then he goes back to his graveyard research, and I can’t face the news, so I read the last few posts on the blog to see if I ever write anything that isn’t about Gaza. I don’t very often and I must try harder. Then I still can’t face the news so I check Garrison Keillor’s blog for a new post. There is something about reading GK first thing in the morning that is ineffably comforting.
This is how he describes someone you can find in the news:
“He’s the man who never told a joke or made fun of himself or petted a dog or put his arm around a friend who wasn’t bought or paid for.”
The other day after I washed my hair I left it loose for a while and Dave exclaimed in surprise “Your hair is so long it would go in a plait!”
Dear reader, I have been wearing it in a plait everyday for four years, and this is what you get when you’ve been married for 54 years and counting. Your spouse does not see you.
Yesterday I saw my tweezers on the dressing table and they reminded me I hadn’t checked for whiskers lately, and when I did I found the most horrific one in full view. OMG I need to live with a friendly female who will point such horrors out.
This weekend is Derbyshire Open Arts, which means local artists - amateurs and professionals - open their homes to show their art, or gather in village halls to do the same. Dave and I spent Saturday morning visiting some.
When we go in, Dave (the asocial introvert ) immediately engages the artist, saying things like “Tell me about your painting” while I (the sociable extrovert) am tongue tied, and hang back and look at each piece with a scrutinising eye.
I am in awe at Dave’s ease in engaging with strangers. On the way home in the car I said “You’re amazing. I never know what to say. If someone said to me Tell me about your paintings I’d be tongue tied. Pretend you don’t know me and ask me a question, just for practice.”
“OK, why did you paint the mugs almost life size?”
“Oh, because my husband made me buy all these huge canvases I didn’t want and I need to use them up.”
Eat your heart out Frida Kahlo.
Well, France, Canada and the UK have finally said something to Nethanyahu and I’m thankful, even if it is a year too late. Let’s pray that concrete action will indeed follow.
My thoughts return to Gaza throughout every day, and I look for every opportunity to sell my cards, with all the profits going to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
A selection…
Dave just told me off for trying to make every occasion a marketing opportunity. I suppose he’s right, and people should be able to visit us without being pounced on.
On Wednesday I went on an ‘introduction to oil painting’ course. It was held at Chatsworth House
…in the old potting shed. It was interesting and enjoyable and convinced me I don’t like oils! They take too long to dry and I am too impatient. I want to get on with my paintings, not do a bit and then wait 24 hours before I can do any more.
Acrylics are my medium. Having said that, I’ve been finding it hard to get started lately. And I’ve discarded my two latest paintings as failures. I don’t know if it’s because my health has been sub-optimal, or what. I feel as though I’ve lost faith in myself.
Maybe it’s the sunny weather making me think I should be doing something more active outside. I find painting outside too distracting. The trees and the flowers are so beautiful. Everything around here is gorgeous right now. May in England is the best month of all. The trees are lush, the cow parsley along the lane is high, the skies have been blue for several weeks.
But now every gardener and farmer is longing for some rain. I’d like it to rain every night and be dry by breakfast time.
The best thing that’s happened on the home front this week is the blackbird. For weeks he’s been somewhere else, and I was pining for him, but now every teatime he sits on the chimney and sings to us in the garden.
Here are two poems that relate to this rambling post…
