The simple life

Life is so simple when you live on a barge.

In love

It’s official. Dave and I are in love with barging. That’s where we’ve been for the last week. We liked it so much when we went with our friends two weeks ago, that we got a last minute cut price week on the same canal for just the two of us. This is me at the tiller.

And below, I am steering across the 127 foot high Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. It is easier than it looks but just as scary.

And here I am coming back…

OK, that’s enough holiday snaps. I shan’t bore you with any more. It’s back to reality now.

Out of reach

I shall be away from the net for a while and unable to blog. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Finally

It has been going on for years. My younger son has been trying to get me to watch a Coen brothers film – all the way through. First, I tried with The Big Lebowski and gave up after half an hour because of the swearing. I swear myself. I have no objection to swearing in moderation. But it seemed as though every other word in The Big L was a curse. I tried The Hudsucker Proxy and gave up because it was weird and I felt alienated from the characters and the setting. I tried another one I have forgotten the name of  - The man who wasn’t there? – and gave up on that. It was cold and weird. A few years later I tried The Big L again and got to an hour into the film. Yes, it was funny, but oh, the swearing.

Last night I managed to watch Burn After Reading all the way through. Yay! I did it! It was funny. The dialogue, characterisation and acting were great. Overall feelings about the film the morning after? I like a better ratio of sympathetic characters to unsympathetic ones in my fiction. I like people. I think that most people are likeable. I want my fiction to reflect that. Also, I had to cover my eyes so I didn’t see the two gory scenes. I knew they were coming because I was warned by my son sitting next to me.

Will I watch another Coen brothers film? Maybe – yes – if my son (who knows my taste) recommends one, and as long as he is sitting next to me telling me when to hide my eyes. I am lily livered. I would never watch a film that was rated higher than a 15. Yes, I’m a baby - So bite me, blondie!

(I love that expression – Phoebe used it once in a Friends episode, and I made a mental note. I bring it out just occasionally.)

Thoughts at six o’clock in the morning

1/ Maybe I will be able to learn to recognise bird songs: I’ve only listened to the first track of the Collins Garden Bird Songs and Calls and I could tell it was a blackbird that just woke me up. 

2/ The only bad thing about the barge holiday was the God-awful beds. I was so tired when I got home (and it was a lovely holiday) that I couldn’t play my saxophone for two days.

3/ The keys for the barge had a giant cork ball on the key ring so that if you dropped them in the canal they floated. This did not help when someone (no names no pack drill) dropped them on the tow path in the twilight, and didn’t realise until half an hour’s walk further up the towpath, so that someone on a bike had to cycle up and down in the dusk asking everyone she came across if they had found some keys. Fortunately, someone had.

A Hepworth tutorial on how to go through a canal lock

This is for people who don’t know how locks work. Everyone else can ignore the post and come back tomorrow.

If you want to go up a lock that is full, the first thing to do is make sure no-one is approaching from the top and wants to come down. If they are, you must wait for them to come through, so you aren’t emptying a lock and wasting water for just one boat (yours.)

2/ Open the paddles (shutters) in each of the gates at the bottom of the lock, by winding up the mechanism (huge heavy cog thingy) at the side. You can just about see Dave doing this on this picture, and the water churning out.

3/ When the lock has emptied and the water levels on both sides of the bottom gate are the same height, open the lock gates. Then close the paddles in these bottom gates.

4/  Sail in.

5/ Close the gates behind you, and open the paddles in the top gate. You can see Dave winding the cog with a windlass (below).

6/ Here he is opening the paddle on the right.

7/ The water in the lock begins to churn and your level begins to rise as the water comes through the opened paddles in the top gate.

8/ Now the water levels each side are just about equal in height.

9/ Open the top gates  when you can, by leaning on the end of the beam.

10/ The gate opens.

11/ Sail out the top.

12/ Close the top paddles, and shut the gates.

13/ Sail away.

14/ Don’t forget to wait for your glamorous assistant.

I love aqueducts

The most exciting thing on our canal holiday was sailing over the 100 foot high Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, above the trees, over the river Dee, with just an iron edge between us and death.

It was as exciting as I was expecting, but I was impressed to the nth degree by the fantastic engineering of this aqueduct built by Thomas Telford 200 years ago. Go and see it! Go and walk on it! You won’t be disappointed!

 

 

Unwound

This is where I have been living for the past week.

When I went away, I worried about not being able to write my blog. But I have wound down so far (travelling at 4 mph) that it will take me a couple of days to wind myself back up again and write a proper post.

AAARRGGHH

I just woke up from a long, disturbing nightmare in which I was stranded in a strange city (Nottingham) with a one year old baby and had no babyfood and no nappies and I had left the car in Lincoln and forgotten which car park. The baby got up to all kinds of mischief but remained cheerful, but then it nearly fell off a moving truck and was rescued by Jack Straw – not a man I like or trust (for overseas readers – one of the ex-Prime Minister’s henchmen.)

When I woke up I was exhausted and disturbed, and I didn’t feel better until I’d had two separate hugs a from Dave, a cup of tea, and a cheery email from my Little Red Hen. I am sitting in bed recovering. I may just watch Neighbours on the net as a pick-me-up, or listen to the Birdsong CD I was given for Christmas, as the birds are singing outside the window and I am supposed to be learning to identify them.
Then I will get up and finish my packing.
Goodbye again.

4 m.p.h.

I’m going away to a place where the speed limit is 4 m.p.h. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.

Happy Easter!

My hero

My answer to my last post – Foxed - was…

…ring up Dave. He was born with a screwdriver in one hand and a chisel in the other. He is practicality personified.

It should, in theory,have been possible for him to talk me through what I should do about the door knob, the fused circuit and the dodgy light fitting (neither of which I mentioned to you) but as T.S.Eliot would say – Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. When Dave and I are talking about practical matters, all communication fails. I do not understand him and he does not understand me. (As Wendy from Plotting for Beginners would say -it’s because I have Mercury – the planet of communication - in Libra, and he has Mercury in Cancer, and they are in hard aspect.) Oh yes, we span the literary universe on this blog – from Eliot to Hepworth and Linfoot.

So Dave said…”Make sure the front door is locked and I will drive up on Tuesday and fix everything.”

My hero.

p.s. I can sew, knit, patchwork, cook, garden, write books, balance on a slackline and play the sax, and I have tried and tried to become accomplished in DIY, but to no avail. So don’t start telling me I am a pathetic loser. I have a fluffy brain and there is no doing anything about it.

Foxed

So there you are. It is a Sunday teatime. You have waved goodbye to your sister, with whom you have just spent a great weekend in your mother’s house. You have packed your car to drive the 100 miles home. You go round the house one last time to check that everything is in order, because the  house is on the market and the estate agent has a viewing later in the week.
You pull the front door to, and the door handle breaks off in your hand. You are not a practical woman - you find wheelbarrows complicated – what do you do?

Weekend off

I am off to Wensleydale for the weekend with my big sister Kath.

Here is something to read while I’m gone…

The Comfort of Siblings

I am a late developer, and so it is no great wonder that it has taken me fifty years, and my father's death, to appreciate fully the worth of my brothers and sisters.

I don't deny that siblings can be some of the most annoying of God's creations, especially when young. Sisters are apt to borrow your opal ring, wear it to clean the hen-house, and then come and tell you they’ve lost it. Brothers are apt to lean from their bedroom window and give a running commentary while you kiss your boyfriend goodnight, or write in the cream on your wedding reception trifle "Wot, no shotgun?"

Siblings may also out-perform you at school, or in my case, something worse: be seen as having more common sense, so that when in the middle of my degree course I told my mother I was pregnant, she said "Oh Sue, I always said it would be you."

I know that in some families the death of a parent brings out the worst in those left behind, with scrabbling over legacies, and recriminations about how little this one or that one has contributed. Or there are arguments over the gravestone or where to scatter the ashes.

In my family it has been the opposite. During my father's last illness we combined efforts to support my mother in her caring role. Then when my father was in hospital we shared the visiting.

When I left my father at the hospital, I would drive disconsolately back up the dale to my mother's house. Wanting to share my distress at my father’s deteriorating condition before I saw my mother, I'd ring my younger brother (a gardener) and he would tell me which village and in which garden he was working. I'd meet him at the gate for a hug and a chat, so I was sufficiently restored not to burden my mother with my tears.

In my father's last week we took turns to sit by his bed - sometimes alone, sometimes in twos or threes. And between his death and his burial we stayed at my parents' house. All through the days we spent together with my mother we lurched between tears and laughter in a way that was both comforting and liberating. We all knew that each was upset, and we didn't have to be proper, or to make any kind of pretence. The closeness, the intimacy, the warmth and the comfort from being all there together, with no hangers on in the shape of spouses or children, felt special. We had not been assembled like that, with no-one else, since we were children. In the worst of times I found the best of times.

When other family members appeared on the scene for the burial at the end of the week this cocoon of ease-amid-grief evaporated.

Siblings, more than others, can understand why one is grieving for someone who in his latter years was grumpy and often less than loveable, because they too remember him as a fine and handsome hero.

Having so many siblings, I have one for every season of grief. There's one to be practical and effective, one to be sensitive, one to listen, one who, while missing the missing father, remains cheerful and good humoured and insists on looking to the future.

I can share family in-jokes and memories of my father with all of them. I can see my father's eyes in my brother's and my father's character traits in the others. And the fact that not all these characteristics are attractive helps me to be realistic about the father I have lost.

Last month I went on holiday with my elder brother and sister, something we haven't done before. It was as easy as being with close friends, but better.

At dinner we toasted my father. And during the meal my brother winked at me for no reason other than affection - just as my father used to do. After dinner he offered me some chocolate, giving me instructions on how to open the packet and tear the wrapper - just as my father would tell me how to cut the stilton.

published here with kind permission of The Times.

copyright Sue Hepworth/Times Newspapers

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Courage

courage - the state or quality of mind that enables one to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence and resolution; bravery

from the Latin cor, meaning heart.

Because I am thick, I only recently realised that encouraging means that you give someone courage. I really like that. I feel as if my life has required a great deal of courage, not because I have faced danger or been in frightening situations, but because I am a softy and take the “vicissitudes” so very hard. That is one of the reasons I miss my mother so much – she embodied encouragement.

Yes!

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

The Big S

Has it come? (whisper it) Is it here?

Daffs are three bunches for £1, so I can have them everywhere...

And my first sweet pea is up. Can you see it?

Frogs

I went up to the pond every day last week to check on the frogs, because I was worried the awful winter had killed them off. Finally on Saturday, I found  three mounds of frogspawn, and a seething mass of mating frogs. I checked on last year’s blog, and guess what? The third week of March I posted about how late the frogs were. If you want to see my video of them, follow this link.

Pet hates

When we were playing Scrabble last night I asked Dave about my pet hates, and he said that I have so many they would fill a book. But he was confusing pet hates with pet preferences. e.g. I would prefer him not to whistle the first few phrases of Rachel and the Boys over and over and over again, all the way through a game of Scrabble.

I hate…

1/ ringing up a business at half past ten in the morning and getting an answering machine message that tells me “Our opening hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.”

2/ shop assistants who carry on a conversation with a colleague all the time they are serving me and don’t even flash me one second’s eye contact.

3/ people in call centres who pick up the phone and say “How are you today?” as if they know me, as if they care, as if it it is at all relevant to the call. The Co-op Bank staff get ten gold stars on this count as they say “How can I help you today?” and proceed to be helpful and friendly and human, without that inane question at the outset.

4/ people who put their hiking boots on in the kitchen and don’t notice when they stand up that all the dried bits of mud fall out of their soles, all over the floor. (You know who you are.)

There – four pet hates – that wasn’t so very many, was it, Dave?

Day four and I am stumped

I said I was going to do lists on the blog this week. I have done three lists and now I can’t think of a list that I have in my head that could possibly interest you. There aren’t even any post-its on the front door. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Actually, this gives me the perfect opportunity to explain that you don’t have to have a Google account in order to comment on my blog. If you want to comment, click on Comments under this post and then write your comment in the box and click on Anonymous at the bottom. You could still tell us who you are (in the comment box)if you want to.

I am agog!

Beachcombing

When Dave is out on his bike he rides with his eyes cast down. When I am on my bike I ride with my head up a la Fotherington-Thomas – Hullo clouds, hullo sky. Dave’s riding position means he sees flotsam and jetsam on the roads and the verges. This he loves. He brings home treasures. Here is a list of the ones I can remember this morning:

a pair of pliers

a wallet containing a five pound note and some ecstasy tablets

a pair of six inch long nuts and bolts

a huge loader strap from a lorry

the huge spring clip from a loader strap from a lorry

a crow bar

a yard brush – see below.

A list of moments

I’ve decided that this week the blog will consist of lists. Yesterday was a list of comfort reading.

Today - a list of moments from yesterday that I enjoyed:

eating a bacon sandwich;

my big sister ringing to check up on me because she had read my blog and was concerned;

watching a flock of gulls wheeling over the field at the back of the house;

chatting to my housebound neighbour – he is very funny;

encountering the two little girls from next door ( 7 and 10) – so fresh, so sparkling, so full of life;

lying on the sofa in front of the fire, watching a DVD of As Time Goes By, that my younger son gave me for Mother’s Day;

Dave coming home from work.

Comfort reading

I’ve not been feeling too chipper lately, and reading Home by Marilynne Robinson didn’t help. It was beautifully written, but far too sad for me. Fortunately, when I was in the Bakewell Bookshop on Friday looking for a map of the Llangollen Canal (but that’s another story)  I found The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I am a quarter of the way in, and finding it delightful.

I have certain books I return to when I am feeling in need of a warm blanket for my bruised soul, or when I am ill, and these are a few of them:

Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor

Homestead by Rosina Lippi

Part of the furniture by Mary Wesley (the only one of Mary Wesley’s books I like)

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M.Delafield

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

I have more but I am going to stop. If the list gets any longer you will realise how often my soul gets bruised.

p.s. Jane always maintains that we wrote Plotting for Beginners to cheer me up. But then Jane is very good at fiction.

Author Blog Award

I just found out about the Author Blog Award. If you would like to nominate me for it, dear reader, follow this link.

You will need to know my url. It is http://suehepworth.com/

The map of grief

In the last year I have progressed from intense grief for the loss of my mother, to a place on the map that is not so bleak. I miss my mother and think of her often, but now when I go to stay at her house with brothers or sisters, I enjoy the visit. Eleven months ago, I felt differently and wrote this…

Losing my mother

Sometimes, it’s a comfort having my mother’s things around me - her Austrian jug on the windowsill, her mahogany chest in the bedroom, her Piers Browne painting on the wall. Sometimes I hate to look at them.

Sometimes I like to see her photograph – her smiling, strong, straightforward face. Sometimes I can’t abide it on my desk. I never had her photo on display before she died, so if I have it here now, she must be dead. And I don’t want her dead. I don’t like the new dispensation.

We have been clearing out her house in monthly weekend bursts, ever since she died at the end of last October. It’s April now, and I’ve just spent a weekend there. The weather was achingly beautiful – clear blue skies and sunshine, the full bright light of early spring skies, lambs in the fields, daffodils in the gardens and on the verges - and a brother and sister to keep me company.

Over the months we’ve been denuding the house of personal, sentimental and valuable items, and now it’s like the holiday cottage it was when our parents bought it, 50 years ago. It no longer feels like our mother’s home, but like a cottage we all feel comfortable in. We know how everything works – that there are two immersion heater switches, and both of them must be on for the heater to work, that the draught for the fire points to the right, that you have to thump the washing machine in the middle of the door at the top to get it going. But it does not feel like the place where I took my babies, my children, my teenagers, to visit their grandparents, and latterly went on my own to visit my mother.

We have a lovely photo of her, taken 6 weeks before she died. When we visit the house, we take it out from behind the bookshelf curtain and stand it on the shelf, and see her wise, healthy, loving face, and when we drink our wine at meals we toast her.

It was good to be with my brother and sister at the weekend, comforting to have a hug and a laugh, to share memories and to miss our mother together. But the only time I got that rush of the safe, the cosy, the familiar, was when I was standing at my mother’s sink, washing up. At that moment, she might have been still alive, sitting in front of the fire, doing the codewords puzzle from the Telegraph, turning on the radio for a cricket update.

When Peter and Jen set off on the Sunday morning for their long drive south, I waved them off, and sat under the front wall on the bench that Ma put there (to catch the last of the setting sun) and I looked at the house.

Behind me on the road, two hikers were walking down the lane and when they saw the estate agent’s sign, the woman said, “I could live there,” and her partner agreed.

“It’s a tidy garden.”

“A very tidy garden.”

“And look, it’s big – there’s an extension at the back.”

They walked out of earshot.

I didn’t feel sad at the thought of someone else living there, or outraged at the thought of someone talking about my mother’s house as if it was on the open market – after all, it was! I ached because she wasn’t there. No matter how many times I go up to stay with a brother or sister, she won’t be there. It wasn’t a chore to visit her, a woman in her nineties. She was vivacious, alert and chatty and she had a great sense of humour, a ready laugh. She was good company, and easy. And she was a rock.

Not one of my siblings – and I love them all – is a substitute for her. She wasn’t there on that bright spring day and she won’t be there in May for my nephew’s wedding, when the May blossom is out and the verges are thick with sweet cicely and cow parsley. She won’t be there to smell the Arthur Bell roses in June, or the lavender in July. She won’t be there to enjoy the colours of Crocosmia Lucifer in August, or the Michaelmas daisies in September.

I have to get used to losing her. To having her missing from my life. To have her gone, out of reach, unavailable for hugs or chats or encouragement, to live without that unfailing love that made the world feel safe.