What I’m reading…
Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season
What I’m writing…
Plotting for Grown-ups
What I’m listening to…
Ben Webster’s Jazz ‘Round Midnight
What I’m picking…
sweet peas
Where I’m going today…
my sax lesson
Where I’m going tomorrow…
Winchester to see my sister, Jen. Yay!
She is the smaller one; I’m the one with glasses…
This is what I did yesterday morning: I went to Quaker Meeting and helped Rachel and Josh, the two children who were there, (and their parents) build a tent out of newspaper.
They do really interesting things in the Childrens’ Meeting – swimming, cooking a lunch for everyone to share, and they think and talk about the things that concern adult Quakers, such as how to live a good life and be helpful to other people. And they do activities which lead to their thinking about social issues, such as global warming and sustainable living, world poverty, and peace.
As I sometimes mention Quaker Meeting on my blog, I thought I’d tell you a bit about Quakerism – just because I think you might be interested, not for any other reason.
I find Quakerism liberating because there are no creeds. If you are a Quaker you are free to believe what you want. I am in constant discussion with the family member who declines to be named as to whether you even need to be a “Christian” in order to be a Quaker. I don’t think you do.
I believe that if you are a Quaker, it is your attitude to other people, and the way that you live your life, that matters. The nearest Quakers come to a core belief is to say that we believe that there is that of God in every person. But then what/who do Quakers believe God is? Each will have a different answer.
The belief that there is something sacred or good in every person demonstrates that Quakers are positive, life-affirming people, and that they have a default position of accepting everyone. A Bob Dylan song springs to mind here…
I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is Baby, be friends with you.
Quakers may not have a creed, but they do have testimonies which they strive to live by – ideals to guide their lives – simplicity, integrity, equality, peace and social justice.
The heart of Quakerism is the Meeting for Worship where we gather together in silent waiting, seeking after spiritual sustenance and truth. We are all channels for this, and we don’t have a minister, so it is each Friend’s responsibility to minister to the Meeting. i.e. get up and speak if they feel led to do so. It is also each Friend’s responsibility to serve the Meeting in practical ways. There are a lot of responsibilities to being a Quaker, and although I’ve been one for a lot of my life, I still feel like a beginner.
When we first moved here, the garden was unkempt. It was overgrown, and full of nettles, brambles and convolvulus.
Dave made the structural changes to the garden and I was in charge of planting and maintenance. I spent hours and hours in the garden, and for five or six years it rewarded my efforts. That was before I started writing. Since then it’s been a struggle to keep the weeds at bay. It’s not just writing, I have a lot of other things I want to do, and not enough energy, and I neglect the garden. There are parts of it that look disreputable. I lie there on your steamer chair in the sun, working out the scene I’m just about to write, and I can hear the convolvulus chuckling…one of those evil wheezy chuckles, like Griswald makes in the original Top Cat.
The picture above is of our strawberry patch, from which I’ve picked 15 kilos of strawberries during the last month. The tree in the middle of it is a Victoria plum tree, which has always borne a mythically large crop. We love plums, but even so, every September I distribute them to all and sundry because we always have too many. Not this year. This year there won’t be any because there was a frost when the blossom was out.
The shrubs at the top right of the picture are the blackcurrant bushes, famed for their fecundity. I’m showing you this picture so you can see the dreadful state of the path on the right. It should be gravel but is thick with weeds, notably grass and dandelions and alchemilla mollis. Can you make out a path between the tree and the shrubs, behind on the left? Barely? That’s because it is weedy and the shrubs behind are encroaching. That’s because no-one (i.e. me) sorts them out. There are far worse corners of the garden than this, but it pains me to think about them, let alone show you.
Here are some pictures from earlier happier times. (At least they were happier for the garden. I am perfectly happy now: I just need a best-seller so I can afford to employ a gardener.)
The rot started some time ago: this below was in July 2008. There is an arch and a path under here. It doesn’t look as lovely this year, because the honeysuckle is being smothered by a rose that has gone back to the wild. Something drastic is going to happen this autumn. Look at the front hedge, oh rose, and be afraid, be very afraid.
This below is one of my favourite pictures of part of the garden. This was August 2005. It’s just a shame I had to black out the face of the family member who declines to be named.
I’ve just met a new reader via the comments box on Jam Today and it’s been really lovely. I love knowing who reads my blog and how they got here, but it’s not often I find out.
A couple of years ago, I asked regular readers to make de-lurking comments - in other words, to write something – anything - in the comments section below. The result was so encouraging. It was so NICE to hear from people who visit here often.
So, today I am asking for a de-lurking comment from you! Yes, you! You don’t have to tell me your real name.Your comments don’t have to be clever or witty. You could just say “Hello from” wherever you live. Or you could ask me a question – which I will do my best to answer. Something, anything would be nice to get. If you’ve commented before, don’t let that stop you!
Your comment will not be posted until I have seen it – I get an email from Blogger - so don’t think you have failed if nothing appears straightaway.
This post is a “Scary post”because I might get no comments from anyone, and then I’d feel really really stupid.
Bakewell weather report:
It’s sunny again here today! And last night at 9 it was so still and quiet, I walked round the front garden, soaking up the loveliness, and ended up on my slackline. Because it has rained so often lately, on the days when it’s been fine I have spent all my outdoor time either gardening, picking fruit, walking, cycling, or just sitting in my steamer chair soaking up the unfamiliar sun: the slackline has been neglected. I can still do a dozen steps on it. Maybe one day I will get from one end to the other. Maybe I won’t. But I do like trying.
…being able to have breakfast outside – Dave’s oatcakes, our blackcurrant jam, Yorkshire tea, and the new view beyond the wall.
I’m sitting in bed with the window wide open and warm fresh fragrant summer air is wafting in and reminding me what summer days can be like. It seems so long since I’ve felt such air early in the morning; it’s like seeing a dear old friend again. A sunny day is promised after a month of relentless rain.
Last night I was playing internet Scrabble with the aging hippie in Redwood City and trying to explain to her what the weather has been like this summer, but it was tough going. I often carp on to her about heavy overcast skies and rain and lack of sunshine, so it was hard for her to appreciate just how bad it’s been here lately. Then she asked me when the best month is to come here to stay, and I said May, because even if the weather is bad, the vegetation is fabulous. I also said, “Any time between April and October can be lovely but it can also be awful. It’s not like San Francisco where the best time is always mid-September to mid-October.” So, dear reader, when do you think is the best month to come to the UK for a holiday?
Comments/Answers
This is a good time to explain that when you post a comment on my blog, it won’t appear immediately. I am sent an email telling me there is a comment, and then I have to approve it – which I always do, unless it’s obscene or it’s spam. But if I am not checking my email, then there can be a delay in the process.
A July photo taken by Isaac – Dave and me (in the distance) walking down a green lane, half a mile from where we live.
The jam did not set.
And it is my fault.
I do all the measuring and I always reduce the sugar a bit and then forget to reduce the water as well. Then, being the one who tests it and says when it is ready, and being impatient, and getting fed up of standing around (despite the fascinating conversation) tell Dave the jam is ready when it isn’t. So my name is mud, and we’ll be tossing the jam back into the pan for another attempt.
Sometimes jam does take a long time to set.
This happened two years ago (from my blog):
The jam took so long to reach setting point yesterday that we had a game of Scrabble on the kitchen table and watched an episode of American Office while we were stirring.
Meanwhile, back here in July 2012 it rains and it rains and it rains, and I am thinking of bringing my SAD light down from the attic.
Why do Dave and I make jam? He never eats it, and I might eat a jar in two months. And yet every year I pick the blackcurrants, wash them, weigh them, collect and prepare the secondhand jars, and buy the sugar, and we stand around in the kitchen on rainy summer days, and make jam.
By the middle of August we’ll have probably 80 jars of jam, and I will spend the rest of the year giving them away.
Why do we do it? Why do we like it? Don’t know why, don’t care why. Maybe it’s the homeliness of the activity, maybe it’s the conversations we have. Dave usually cracks me up with something he says on a jam-making session.
Three years ago, this happened (from my blog):
I got out the book with the recipe for blackcurrant jam, and in it I found a note in my handwriting - "Our pan holds no more than 6lbs of fruit." I told him, I did. "Never mind that," said the stirrer - "bung it all in."
And guess what? Our pan did hold no more than 6lbs of fruit. So we had to get the old one with the bumpy base down from the top of the dresser, for the overspill.
Last year, it was this (from my blog):
Dave: “I wonder what’s the minimum amount of jam it’s possible to make.”
Sue: “With a pound of fruit I should think.”
Dave: “No, theoretically speaking. Would it be possible, for example, to make jam with only two blackcurrants…in a test tube?”
Sue - thinks: The poor boy’s been watching too many of those Sixty Symbols videos on Youtube.
One year the blackcurrants will be ripe, and one of us won’t be here. I think things like that, these days. That’s why I want jam today.
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse,
Not shaking the grass.
Ezra Pound
Lacklustre – that’s what I am.
I just read through my blog posts from a year ago (for inspiration) at the time when I was bringing out BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU, and I can’t believe how much I did, nor can I imagine where I got the energy from. This month I am wiped out. The new novel – PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS - is progressing just fine, but I don’t have any oomph left for anything else.
For the last three weeks I have been picking strawberries every day (13 Kilos in all, with 2 other kilos lost to slugs). Yesterday I went up the garden to check the blackcurrants and my heart sank. They are ripe and need picking; and if I tell you we made more than 60 jars of jam last year, it will give you an inkling of how many blackcurrants there are. I gave away two bushes last year. I have five now. I must give away another two. You wouldn’t believe how bloody fecund these blackcurrants are. (Sorry about the language – that was a bit of Sally Howe coming out – heroine of PLOTTING FOR BEGINNERS and PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS.)
I am going to keep my daily aspirations modest. Today I am going to have a sax lesson, pick a few blackcurrants while I mull over the current plotting problems in PLOTTING FOR GROWN-UPS ( oh, the irony), and book my September ticket to San Francisco to see this person…
and this person…
OK, those last two were the same person;
and these people…
and this person…
Aren’t I lucky?
Two family members – interestingly, both ones who decline to be named – have emailed to ask if I am OK, as I haven’t been blogging much lately.
When I am quiet, there are a number of possible reasons:
In the present case it is four of these reasons, and being away is not one of them. I’ll be back. Watch this space. Please be patient with me.
You know that disastrous fire in BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU? That happened to Dave and me. And here is a picture of me with half of the things we retrieved from the ashes. I’m showing it to you, not because of the things, but because it’s the only photo I can find which shows how high and dark our front hedge used to be. (Though it doesn’t really show you how high it was.)
Anyway… we put up with that hedge for 15 years, until last autumn we decided the 50 year old escallonia had suffered too much from the last cold winter, and it would not recover, and we would prefer a view.
Dave started work last October…
Today it looks glorious, and we wondered why we didn’t do it years ago. I sit in the sun in front of the house and look at the view and feel like a queen. Well, I would do if it would stop raining…
Isaac just sent me this picture of Lux cuddling a bear that my mother knitted. My mother died four years ago, and we all miss her terribly.
When Lux first came over from San Francisco as a baby, I loved wrapping her in a soft blanket that my Gran had crocheted, I loved the family link.
When I made the quilt for her cot, I used fabrics from clothes of mine, my daughter’s, some curtains from my mother’s house, and I backed it with some fabric from my Gran’s. I liked the idea of four generations of family being represented in the quilt that welcomed her into the world. She won’t know, but I know; and I think it was important to me because she lives so far away from us all - 5,000 miles. That’s sentimental.
__Heartburn(1).jpg)
Still enjoying Heartburn, still feeling sorry that Nora Ephron has died. Here are just a few of my favourite Nora Ephron quotes. The first four are from Sleepless in Seattle. The last is from Heartburn.
1/
Becky: “Verbal ability is a highly over-rated thing in a guy and our pathetic need for it is what gets us into so much trouble.”
2/
Sam: “Even on the news women talk about cute butts. It's really caught on. So how's my butt? “
Sam’s friend: “Not bad.”
Sam: “Is it cute though?”
Sam’s friend (looking at Sam’s trousered butt: “Are we grading on a curve?”
3/
Annie: “Thank God my life is in place.”
4/
Sam: “He’s 8.”
Victoria: “He’s good at it.”
5/
“Vera said: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?”
So I told her why.
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
Wissam Tamimi is 16 and was arrested for stone throwing. He says he was forced to confess in exchange for a shorter sentence of five months in jail.
He told Channel 4 News: "While I was in the jeep, they would beat me. I was held from six in the morning till one at night. At the end they took me to prison.
"When they took me from the car they tied my hands and covered my eyes, and they took me into a checkpoint.
"They grabbed my hands and tied them behind me... And covered my eyes. The cuffs were very tight."
He is talking about the Israeli Defence Force.
Though Israel says violence and threats towards children are forbidden, many child suspects say they have been blindfolded, physically and verbally abused, and forced to sign statements in Hebrew which they cannot understand.
When arrested, Palestinian children are not informed of their right to silence or a lawyer and are routinely held in solitary confinement.
This information comes from a report by a UK delegation of 9 lawyers from the fields of human rights, crime and child welfare, who travelled to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories last September, to assess the treatment of Palestinian children under Israeli military law. The trip was funded by the UK Foreign Office.
They concluded that Israel's treatment of child prisoners breaches both the Geneva conventions and the UN convention on the rights of a child.
The lawyers’ report shows how Israeli settlers and Palestinians are subject to different laws, so a Palestinian child can be held for up to 90 days without access to a lawyer and for 188 days without charge, whereas an Israeli child could only be held for 2 and 40 days respectively.
This is my new grand-daughter, Cecilia.
And this is a thoughtful letter addressed to her when she was seven days old.
So there you are – you are having a weekend away, which has been booked for months and which you have been looking forward to for months…
…so before you go, you finish writing Chapter 4 of Plotting for Grownups, and email it to your co-writer, and really can’t wait to hear what she thinks of it because you have had such a wild time writing it.
So you get in the car and go to stay with your friend in Ilkley and have a really great time putting the world to rights, and on Saturday morning, you set off to drive up Wharfedale to Wensleydale, and after a week of heavy rain, the roads are awash, so you swoosh through puddles that take up half of the road, and eventually stop, because a BMW has pulled up in front of you. Is he going to go on? No. Why? Because the road has disappeared under water for the next twenty yards, and BMWs apparently don’t like water. He turns round and retreats, while you ring your husband and report the conditions and ask for advice and he says – Go for it – don’t stop and don’t take your foot off the accelerator. And test your brakes afterwards. You drive your Polo onwards. It is fine. Yay!
You meet up with your sister at the B&B in Wensleydale, and it’s lovely to see her, and all the time in the back of your mind you’re thinking – Ooh, Ooh, I wonder what Jane thinks of Chapter 4 - and your sister has brought her laptop, so you check your email and Jane has loved Chapter 4, but has also sent a load of suggestions. You reply to her email, and you have a lovely weekend, walking and talking and visiting your brother, and viewing a fabulous exhibition of Judith Bromley paintings at the Hawes museum, and walking to Aysgarth Falls, which are running a full pot because of the rain…
and all the time in the back of your mind you’re mulling over Chapter 4 and wanting to get back home again so you can adjust it and make it perfect.
But when you get home you have to spend a day editing the new edition of your Quaker meeting newsletter.
So the next day, you work on Chapter 4. Phew.
P.S. I have just read of the death of Nora Ephron. This is a sad loss, of course for her family, but also for the millions of people who got so much enjoyment from her films and her books.
As the New York Times said: “all her articles were characterized by humour and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline.”
I am going to Wensleydale for the weekend with my big sister Kath – Yay! – so I shan’t be posting again till Tuesday. Have a nice weekend.
(photo by Isaac Hepworth)
I want to boast!
I made my sax teacher cry yesterday. First I played a good improv on Lady be Good, and she gave me a high five, and then I played Someone to Watch Over Me with the backing on disc, and when I looked round, she was crying - because she thought I’d played it so beautifully! I am so chuffed!
Well, it’s bin day again, and that means another week has gone by, not that I measure out my life in terms of rubbish, don’t get that idea. So what have I got to show for my week?
My Christmas wish came true: Cecilia arrived safe and well, and Wendy is fine. So this week, a load dropped from my heart, Some grandmothers (and I am one of them) become increasingly twitchy the nearer it gets to the birth. This is especially the case when there is some history of difficulty and sadness. We (mothers and grandmothers) hold our family in our hearts and dread something awful happening to them. We would rather go through pain or heartbreak than see one of our children go through it. This isn’t an altruistic thing, it’s a gut thing. And I read some research that showed that when women watch someone suffering pain, the pain centres in their brain are stimulated i.e. it is the same part of the brain that would show activity if they themselves were suffering.The results didn’t show this for men.
I also read about some researchers who found Y chromosomes in the bone marrow of the mothers of boys, which I (not being a scientist) interpret to mean that women are physically changed by their babies, and they retain something of the child within their own bodies. Am I drawing the wrong conclusions?
Whether I’m right or wrong, here is the new arrival, wearing the cardigan I made for her:
Apart from Cecilia arriving, the only thing to mention here is an ongoing email discussion with Jane about the new book, specifically about whether one scene is too long. She thinks it is. I think it isn’t. If there are differences of opinion, she usually wins, because she is the superior editor. But I haven’t given up on this particular argument yet.
In the Guardian on Saturday, the author of the winner of both the Carnegie and the Kate Greenaway medals said of his collaboration with the illustrator: “I didn’t always get my way about things (thank God), and we discussed/argued/debated right up till printing. But that’s how the best creative collaborations go.”
….which I find very heartening. Right, Jane. About this scene in Chapter 3…
*the title of my post is a quote from an e e cummings poem. Look it up!
…Cecilia: the patron saint of music.
I think it’s a lovely name.
(Oh yes. And I know I can announce it now, because I just read Isaac’s tweet.)
I’ve just been chatting with Isaac, 5,000 miles away, and he told me the name of the new baby, and I asked if it was bloggable, and he said they had not announced it yet. “And,” he said, “you broke the news of the baby’s sex yesterday.” I did. It’s true – on here, my blog, and also in a tweet.
I apologised profusely. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the public arena. So with the name, I have been instructed not to blog or tweet about it, yet. I am genuinely sorry I broke his embargo (unwittingly) but at the same time it is rather amusing that the grey-haired mother of a Twitter employee has gone live in the cybersphere with information before said Twitter employee. Think of all that time he wanted me to go on email, then get broadband, then get a blog, then start tweeting, and now he is having to rein me in.
But I can show some photos, as they are on his Flickr account and so are up for grabs.
@thebeean meets @thesprouut
Three Hepworth girls:
