Happy times

It's all Dave's fault.

Or maybe it's ALDI's fault.

Whatever, I went shopping at ALDI for fruit and veg this week and in one of the aisles they had a 'Special Purchase' offer - a huge stack of plastic storage boxes with lids, at a terrific price. 

Having just shoved under the bed an assortment of old cardboard boxes containing all the craft materials for Refugee Days, I though how nice it would be to have the stuff in transparent plastic boxes that clearly showed the contents, but were also airtight. So I bought five boxes, but when I got home Dave said "You should have got more! You know what ALDI are like, they have a great deal in and then when it's gone, it's gone."

I pondered. There was a lot of stuff in the attic in cardboard boxes that flies and wasps and sometimes even mice got into, but storage boxes with lids would be so much better. So I zipped down to the shop again and bought 5 more.

Yesterday I spent an hour sorting out junk in the attic. This was only a start, but it's a hideous job so I'm going to pace myself.

This is one of the boxes I found:

It was full of publicity material,

and congratulations cards, and newspaper cuttings of all the articles about Jane and me and PfB and later, other books, that I'd persuaded local newspapers to give space to.

And here was my typed copy of what appeared in the Times:

(I have not yet found the original.)

There was a friendly letter from Jilly Cooper, who I'd written to, asking for a puff* for the back of the book. No go.

*I had to check with Dave that 'puff' was the word I was looking for....it's shocking how writing and publishing lingo has slipped from my mind.

I also found the quiz we had at the launch party, which I tried to complete  without looking at the book. 

Plotting for Beginners

 LAUNCH PARTY QUIZ with a tiny, but unique, prize

If you would like to join in, please complete the following quotations from the book. The ends of the quotations are printed on orange card and pinned up on shelves around the bookshop. We will decide the winner just before the reading, at around 7.15 p.m.

Spelling and punctuation matter – this is a classy launch, you know.

1/  Carol Vorderman had better watch her…

2/  You can have so much more fun with a multi-position ladder than you can with a…

3/  Not Bloody Blair - he’s not important. He’s a…

4/  What would you like to be in your next life, Mrs Howe?...

5/  Compromise just means at least one person is unhappy…

6/  Champman and Pesto just decided they want…

7/  am brain numb today as a pseudonym has been playing non-stop blondie cd – can only think in…           

 8/  This took the shimmer out of…

 9/  henceforth will personally accompany you as…

10/  Sangria Crew eventually departed at 5 p.m. the next day. Damage: …

I am sad to say I could only do number 1. It's time to read the book again, which is what I'll do in the dark winter months, to cheer myself up. I'm currently reading the Cazalet Chronicles.

The papers in the box brought back such lovely memories, and there were several surprises: newspaper features I'd forgotten all about. 2006 was a happy and exciting year. 

But now I'm embarked on a different course. I hope I keep on painting, and one day have an exhibition of my own.

Blessings

We have hosted three Refugee Hospitality Days this year in Bakewell after two Covid years without. 

There is a lot of organisation required in terms of food and volunteers and activities but what makes them nerve racking is the uncertainties.

First, we never know until the day itself exactly who is going to come. Will the minibus be full and worth the huge expense? Will our visitors be men, women or children? and what activities will appeal to them and therefore what equipment do we need to bring? Lastly, will it be fine or will it rain?

This latter is more important to some groups than others. We once held a day for women and small children when it rained all day, and they were all nevertheless very happy. The women enjoyed the crafts and the social side and the fact that the volunteers played with their toddlers. Some of them also slipped out to look at the charity shops while we occupied the children.

But as our best gift to our visitors apart from the warm welcome and the lovely lunch is Bakewell itself, you'll see that the weather really matters. A walk by the river and across the water meadows is not appealing in pouring rain. So it's been a blessing that this year that the three days were warm and dry when most of our visitors have been adults.

Yesterday one of the crafts was decorating fabric tote bags. Look at these stunners:

The key fobs turned out to be a dud, but two women painted lovely coasters, which I forgot to photograph. 😞

I'm feeling really blessed this morning. It's good to have three successful days under our belts when we'd had two years lying fallow, with the government getting more and more hostile to asylum seekers in the meantime. 

The Home Office is so slow in processing claims that people who have fled their home countries because of war or persecution can be waiting years to be able to settle properly. In the meantime they are not allowed to work and although they are given some kind of accommodation - grotty flat, hotel or hostel - they have to live on £40.85 a week which has to pay for food, clothing and toiletries.

This morning it feels gently autumnal in the garden, but not so autumnal as to make me feel the year outside is over. So I was out in my pyjamas picking flowers - amongst them just 6 sweet peas. I told you they were disappointing this year.

The biggest blessing in the garden in this hot hot summer has been the wild flowers Dave sowed. 

We always have posies on the lunch tables on Hospitality Days and without the wild flowers, it would have been a poor showing this August:

Next week I'm going to paint.

My week

It's not been an easy week since I got home, even though home is a blessed place to be.

On Sunday morning, my first day back, I learned that a good friend was in the local hospice and not expected to live more than a week. It was a horrible shock. She'd been in hospital under investigation when I went away and I wrote to her and said I'd visit as soon as I got back. This was not possible given the situation: understandably, only family were at her bedside. She died that evening. It's a huge loss.

And another friend had died while I was away. She was in her late 90s and it was not a shock, but it was sad.

On Tuesday I had to renew my passport, and taking the required photograph was not pleasant. I look terrible when I'm not smiling. My mouth turns down at the corners and I look mean. So I tried to turn them up without actually smiling.

Not a win.

The online government passport portal gave it a 'Good' rating but I'd rather have submitted this one which Isaac took in Buxton when we went to visit my painting.

photo by Isaac

Now I'm preparing for the next Refugee Hospitality Day on Saturday. My friend who died was instrumental with me and a couple of others in setting up our Refugee Days in 2016, and as a trained masseuse offered hand massages to our visitors - so welcome.

We have a new 'craft' to add to the others on Saturday - decorating coasters and key fobs. So far I have varnished 50 coaster discs so they will take paint or felt tip without smudges:

And painted two examples:

Dave and I have been trying to think of a way to varnish 80 key fobs on both sides - en masse - but so far have drawn a blank. 

NEWS FLASH!

The elder fabulous grandson got the A level results he needed for his top choice of Uni. Oh blessed day.

Now back to the key fobs. 

Home again

I'm happy to say that the Colorado family arrived safely, and so did their luggage and it was wonderful to have them here for a week.

photo by Isaac of four of the Hepworth women - Wendy, me, Cece and Lux

photo by Wendy of me and Lux on the Trail 

After a week we flew to Spain with the elder fabulous grandson to meet the family-member-who-declines-to-be-named and the lovely Jaine, who were holidaying there; and we all stayed together in a a villa for a week on the Costa Brava. 

Isaac and Cece

I was in Spain for the first time and swam in the Mediterranean sea for the first time (fabulous!) and there were various other first times as well.

The first time I tasted (and liked btw):

Spanish Tortilla 

Patatas brava

Alioli

Jamon

A Catalonian rice dish 

Xouxou

Shrimp in its shell

Sangria de Cava

The first time I:

Flew from East Midlands Airport (recommended)

Went on holiday and did not pack a coat 

Snorkelled

Stayed up and photographed a Supermoon

Played Go Fish

Played Liar (an American version of Cheat that my two sons think is superior to Cheat, though I am not convinced)

Saw works by Dali for real (interesting and puzzling)

The Dali museum

My Dali-esque selfie I took in the museum

You have probably gathered from all of the above that I have led a sheltered life.

It was hot. It was very hot. It was too hot for a Sue. 

I would go on holiday with the extended family again but not to somewhere hot. I went this time because the family-member-who-declines-to-be-named wanted me to so much, even though I had found the climate in Croatia (for his wedding) so punishing. I think he is now convinced that I just can't hack heat. They are dreaming of future hols in Greece but they're going to have to do it without me.

                    photo by fabulous grandson taken to show Julie in Bamburgh that her
 hand made bag is still going strong

In conclusion...no matter how much I have loved cavorting in the pool and playing riotous games with my children and grandchildren, I am pleased to be home. I went out on my bike and paid homage to the Trail this morning and I've been tidying up the garden. It's a sensible temperature here in Derbyshire.

I never want to move from Hepworth Towers.

A weird day

I was out of the house early this morning, to buy extra supplies for the Colorado family, arriving tomorrow. I am not a morning person and when I got home again at 9.30 I was bushed, and needed a cuppa before I started the cleaning. 

Dave had kindly washed the kitchen, hall, porch and bathroom floors while I was out, so what should I clean now? The fridge. That done I wondered what next. I am not a natural cleaner, and that is putting it mildly.  

I checked my messages and found one from faithful blog reader Sally. She asked if I'd watched the very last episode of Neighbours. 

You all know I am a big Neighbours fan. I started watching it in 1986 with Isaac when he was a teenager, and I've watched it ever since, apart from a couple of  breaks - the first when the village went digital and we didn't and I had nothing to watch it on. Then last year I had a short break because the plotlines had become circular and they were circling around a couple of characters I couldn't stand. 

But I have loved Neighbours: yes, it was tosh, but it was harmless tosh. And it has been a surefire way for me to relax when I've been mentally exhausted. I would watch the same episode twice when I was stressed. It even featured in the two Plotting books, Plotting for Beginners and Plotting for Grown-ups. 

"Neighbours is fab, and I love all the stupid plotlines – the amnesia, disputed paternity, blackmail, on-off love affairs, business wars, mistaken identities, manipulative ex-girlfriends, violent ex-boyfriends, people stuck down mine shafts, plane crashes that kill off half the street. And the characters – Paul Robinson, Karl Kennedy, Lucas, Jade – they’re like family."       (from Plotting for Grown-ups)

So after cleaning the fridge I watched half of the final episode, and it was mostly dire. The other half I'll save for tomorrow. I'm casting around for something to watch in half hour slots as a replacement and It is likely to be Grace and Frankie, despite the fact that I've already watched it twice.

After that I made brownies, which always cheers me up. And then I had a peanut butter and gooseberry jam sandwich with a glass of wine for lunch. I needed the wine. I'm driving Dave up the wall because he says - and for once he is right about my emotional state - that I am an unhappy mix of excitement and anxiety about the family arriving tomorrow.   Have I made sufficient preparations? Will they get here safely?  How long will it take to pick up their baggage? Will their cases arrive before the end of the week? And if all that is not enough I read in the paper today that car-hire firms are letting customers down because they’re over subscribed. Aaargghh.

So what now? I'm going to paint while listening to the sound track from Out of Africa, a sure fire stress reliever. (It's raining and it's a summer Saturday, so a ride up the Trail on my bike is not a winner.)

I took this picture at the end of the Trail, a place where I sit down and relish the sky and the quiet, the grasses and the flowers.

 

Feeling pleased

Well, the country is still going down the plughole, and the sweet peas are a wash out this year, but there are so many other things to be pleased about. For one, the patch of wild flowers we sowed beside the sweet peas, 

and Dave’s sunflowers doing well behind. 

Also we have another successful Bakewell Refugee Hospitality Day under our belts. Last Saturday was terrific and everyone enjoyed the day - the lunch, the activities, the welcome. 

These are the posies I picked to put on the lunch tables. Note the dearth of sweet peas. 

Our visitors think Bakewell is gorgeous and they’re right. The riverside walk with the humongous trout, the back street mill leat, the surrounding hills, the historic buildings.

And lastly, I’m pleased about my paintings that I collected from the framer on Monday. I look at the still life and the hedgerow painting and think ‘Did I really paint those?’

The dancers

I painted this one above after going to the ballet at the Royal Opera House in London with Het. 

My bedside table, February 2015

Evening light

Feast

Dave is coming to Buxton this morning to see the washing line painting, March Wind, in the gallery. The exhibition it’s in,The Derbyshire Open Exhibition, won the visual arts award in the Buxton Festival Fringe events. You can see it at the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. 

The last and best thing to be pleased about is the family arriving from Colorado on Sunday, airlines permitting.

                Woo-hoo!

Heat and respite

What a relief. I've just had to close the window because the breeze was too chilly for me in my sleeveless nightie. 

How have you found the heat? 

I hated it.

Dave loved it. He was outside most of the day - early on in the sunshine on his 50km bike ride. Later, sitting in the shade with his feet in a plastic box of cold water, reading Lytton Strachey's Cardinal Manning. Dave comes alive in the heat. (What am I saying? He's the most alive person I know and only shrinks into the background in social situations.)  

I, meanwhile, got up early to drive a friend to hospital, then went for an early ride on the Trail and then came back to the north end of the sitting room (south window shut and curtains closed) to paint for the rest of the day.

This is what I was working on and at teatime thought I'd finished

but now I've posted it on Instagram I realise that the left hand side foreground tree leaves need to be slightly darker. 

Dave kept coming in and saying 'Come outside and experience it!' and I kept retorting 'I know what it's like! Hateful! And shut the door! I'm trying to keep out the heat!' Yes, I do mean those four exclamation marks.

Today Dave went out early and is out all morning so I've been lying in bed late, relishing the quiet, and gripped by this:

It's about death and dying. It's written by a palliative care consultant and is educative, challenging and utterly fascinating. It's such a relief to find a book I don't want to chuck in after 28 pages.

Have you heard of this reading rule suggested by someone called Nancy Pearl?

When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, "Age has its privileges."

Now I'm going to pick some sweet peas, then make a coffee and I'm going back to bed with my book. There have to be some perks of being ancient, and freedom to do this is one of them. Friday and Saturday will be full on: Friday cooking for the refugee day and finding flowers that have not wilted to decorate the lunch tables, and Saturday the day itself. 

Enjoy the breeze. I am.

Meditations

I made sixteen jars of blackcurrant jam eight days ago and yesterday I made another eighteen. I only have two blackcurrant bushes now - having given away three - and yet there is loads more fruit to pick. 

I was thinking this month that I had moved past the stage of being excited about picking fruit from my own bushes, that it had become a chore, and jam making another chore. But I came home from a trip out yesterday worried about something and the sorting and washing of the fruit and the making of the jam assumed a meditative, calming quality and I felt a whole lot better by the end of the afternoon.

Today I picked my first bunch of sweet peas and they are sitting on my desk as I write this, smelling heavenly. I will never get tired of growing sweet peas.

It is seven years since Mary died and last week was her birthday and for the first time ever I felt cross with her that she wasn't here to talk to. Grief follows no pattern.

Just wild flowers on the Trail

 

Het rides to the rescue - again

First, let’s get the crap out of the way - ALL the candidates for Tory leadership would keep the obscene programme which trafficks desperate and distressed  refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. And all of them are complicit in the corruption of Johnson's "government." 

Nuff said.

So….there I was on Monday, sitting on the train to London in my FFP2 mask, on my way to Winchester to stay with my sister Jen, when my brother (who was also going) rang up to say that he’d spent the evening with his daughter the night before and she had just rung to say that her friend - with whom she had spent the evening before that - had tested positive for Covid. He thought he should warn me. Jen didn’t mind if we still went to stay, but how did I feel about it? 

Now you might think I'd be as likely to catch Covid from the person sitting next to me on the train as I would from my brother, but said person was wearing a mask and told me she had tested negative that morning. Also, the incubation period for the current strain of Covid is 2-3 days, not 5 as before. And I'd be with him for 4 days.

I have two important events in the next 10 days - one of which is a Refugee Hospitality Day that I absolutely cannot miss, so getting Covid right now would be massively inconvenient. Therefore I told my brother (who lives in Belgium but was already in London) to go, and I'd turn round when I got to St Pancras and catch a train home. I had already arranged to meet Het for a coffee at Waterloo, and that would rescue the day.

But it was better than that because Het invited me to stay for the night, and I did. 

Toasting the demise of Johnson

Plus she was happy to cut my hair for me, which my sister had agreed to do.

Ready for my haircut

What a friend.

We talked and talked and talked, and the next day on the way to the train saw the wild flowers blooming in the grounds of the Tower of London. They looked fabulous.

But I cycled up the Trail yesterday and loved the wild flowers there just as much. I am so so lucky to live here.

Also, I plan to see all of my sibs in October in Wensleydale. Let's hope Covid doesn't have other plans.

Goodbye to a corrupt, shambolic liar

 

Where the blog is heading

Why do I have the same dreams time after time? Is it because I watch so many repeats on Netflix?

Last night I dreamed AGAIN that I was late for school. I am 72 for Pete’s sake. Perhaps it’s my aging brain. I don’t remember ever being late for school, and if you asked my friends and family, they’d say I was a punctual person, so what’s the dream about?

And why did I not mention that the photo that inspired the painting in my last post was taken one dark morning a few days after Mary died? I don’t usually have flowers on my bedside table, but I bought those freesias and genista to cheer myself up. (Blog post here.)

The fact I didn’t mention this shows how my blogging powers have diminished: it’s sad, but it’s real. What should I expect when I tell people I’m not a writer now but a painter?

Last week I got an email from The Society of Authors (which is a kind of writers’ union you’re allowed to join when you’ve had a book published.)  They run courses and events and send out a journal four times a year, and they give you advice on legal matters, copyright, contracts with agents and other heavy duty stuff. The fee this year for my membership category is £83, and I’m dithering about whether to renew it.  If I’m not writing there seems little point. The only reason for staying in is if a legal issue comes up with one of my books, or if I am finally discovered and someone wants to be my agent, or if Hollywood comes knocking. We all know how likely the last two are.

The only membership benefit relevant to me these days is a 10% deduction on the price of books bought from Waterstones, and I go there perhaps twice a year. Yes, there’s a certain frisson from waving the card around in a bookshop quite apart from the 10%, but £83 is a big price to pay for said frisson. After all, £83 will go towards the tank of heating oil we’re currently not buying because of the cost.

So. What’s what on this summer Tuesday which has a cloudy sky and an annoying breeze that interferes with outdoor table tennis?

For one thing the moonpennies are going from strength to strength.

And the meadow cranesbill is out on the Trail and looking lovely

but this year's sweet peas are pathetic and I will not shame them by showing you a photo.

The fabulous grandsons have finished their exams and left school. I am not allowed to say anything else, more's the pity.

The fabulous granddaughters are well

and they're coming over with Isaac and Wendy at the end of the month. Yay!

The girls are currently engaged on an art project to fix to their back garden fence:

Dave is still busy making three Adirondack chairs like these

for a friend. 

The family member who declines to be named and the lovely Jaine are moving house, and we have Peanut to stay for the duration

The house needs cleaning.

I am painting.

We have a new microwave and yesterday I tried making jam in it because the booklet says it’s possible. Unfortunately I got distracted and I think you can imagine what happened. But I shall try again. Also yesterday I made a roast vegetable lasagne to freeze for the next refugee hospitality day.

But what about the blog?

Well, you’ll have noticed that politics is rarely mentioned. If I started on politics these days when would I stop? We live in a rogue state that breaks international law. Our government is corrupt and sleazy. It’s led by a man with no morals. Enough. Most of you live here and you know.

So what about the blog? 

I used to be devoted to a certain blog, and then the blogger turned her focus away from everyday life and turned to her art. And I didn’t like her art. Besides which, I wasn’t reading the blog for her art I was reading it for her insights into life. I don’t want to go down that same road on my blog and it feels as though it’s heading that way.

I am proud of the blog. It’s been going a long time, and of all my books, I think the collection of the blog’s best posts in DAYS ARE WHERE WE LIVE is probably my favourite. So I don't want the blog to peter out in a string of less-than-entertaining posts. 

Therefore, if you don't hear from me for a while, you'll know the reason why. But I have been here so many times before that I fully expect to be back...next week or next month or next season.

Thank you, dear friends, for visiting. 

p.s. I also forgot to tell you that when I recently teased Dave about his awful baggy stripey shorts he said snootily "I am an inexplicably unregarded sartorial cynosure."