Screenshots come to the rescue

I was sitting in bed with my first mug of tea this morning feeling gloomy because of the laissez-faire, look-after-yourself-and-screw-everyone-else-attitude emerging from No 10, as well as the let's-be-as-brutal-as-we-can-to-refugees attitude emerging from the Home Office.

I was also sitting there thinking it was time for another blog post and I had NO IDEA what to say except that the current painting is still not finished, though yesterday I kidded myself it was because I am so tired of working on it.

So then I did what I often do in bed on gloomy mornings, I started looking at my screenshots for good cheer/inspiration.

Here's one to start with:

and another, less personal, 

from New Collected Poems (2011), published here by kind permission of The Gallery Press

This quote above is from the Diary of Anne Frank. What a challenge.

But there's harsh reality amongst my screenshots too:

excerpt from the poem Home by Warsan Shire

Photo from the Guardian

And lovely things that Lux has said in previous years:

and quotes from books:

taken from Charlie Mackesy's book  The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

not a screenshot, but from my walk above the village yesterday

from Keep Moving by Maggie Smith

Yes, I admit that last one was not a screenshot but it was already in my picture file.

Right.

I hope you have a good day today. I am going to have a rest from the window painting and work on a birthday card for my grandson who is tall and bright and who has the signature Hepworth curly hair inherited from his mother and his grandfather and who will be 17 next week. One day you will know his name. 

Letter from home

Here is the news from Hepworth Towers.

1/   I have been working on a painting of this.

It's the midsummer sun setting behind the house and lighting up my study. I was outside on the patio watering my pots one evening and looked up and saw the loveliness of the light embedded in the dark house wall. So I took a photo, and now I am struggling to paint it. 

This is the progress so far. As you can see - there is a long way to go. 'It's challenging' is a mild way to express how I feel. It's a come-uppance because I am always telling people I like the challenge in painting. Although I have to say that painting endless clematis leaves is more of a bore than a challenge. Thankfully, the dire spring weather led to the leaves being rather sparse this year.

2/   I picked 3.5 kilos of gooseberries from my one and only bush. This was two days ago and they are still waiting to be topped and tailed. I HATE topping and tailing. I think I'll do it in front of Last Tango in Halifax to kill the boredom.

3/  I have finished the patch for the back of the quilt I made last year:

4/  I went for an exhausting and wonderful ride to the end of the Trail one afternoon and collapsed on the grass amongst the wildflowers:

It was so blissful there, it was hard to leave and come home.

5/  I got to page 80 in a novel and gave up. And that was after spending £12.99 on it. I had been looking for something to read and picked up this book that I bought secondhand in Colorado.

Whatever is troubling you - lethargy, being a control freak, neediness, man flu, apathy, constipation, losing your job, being tired and emotional, death of a loved one, etc etc...the authors will suggest a couple of books that will cure you. I was feeling sad about something and was leafing through the book and found this:

and as I recognised Niall Williams' name from a lovely quote I had recently found

and having checked out his literary credentials, I decided to give As it is in Heaven a go. It began well and the writing was good, but Williams is very wordy and I do not like wordiness. Also he is prone to fanciful and baffling imagery such as:

Pollini was twenty-eight and looked like a man who had fire for breakfast.

What????

My conclusion is that while The Novel Cure itself is an entertaining and informative read, book recommendations such as these do not take into account the style of the writing. And I am very picky about style. So bite me. (I have no idea what that saying means but Phoebe says it in Friends and it always makes me laugh.)

Thankfully a friend came to my rescue and lent me this:

which has a simpatico style and is also hilarious. A reviewer described it as a cross between Nora Ephron and Maria Semple (both of whom I like) but I'd describe it as more like a naughty Anne Tyler. Whatever, I am racing through it and will have finished it by bedtime and then I will be distraught, waiting for the author's latest book to arrive in the post.

Meanwhile, Dave has been railing against the regulations which forbid him to buy a Dado stack for use in carpentry. They are legal in the USA but illegal here. I foolishly asked him to explain what a dado stack is and why they are illegal and he spent half an hour five minutes explaining what one is and why there is a misconception about their safety/lack of safety which is why they are banned in the UK.

And then i went on reading Standard Deviation and came across this:

and it made me howl with laughter.

I just went in the kitchen to check the name of the dado stack and Dave said:

"Why do you want to know about it?"

"Because it's something I want to put on the blog."

"Can I show you a picture of one? Explain it some more?"

"No!"

That, dear friends, is the news from Hepworth Towers.

Wishing you a super weekend.

Technology, eh?

I have had problems formatting my header but Isaac is working on a solution for me. What would I do without him?

Technology, eh?

Yesterday, Liz and I were supposed to be going for a long walk but it was raining and chilly, and we opted instead to walk down the Trail for a mile and go to Hassop Station - where I have not been in 15 months. They now have a giant marquee outside. Here I am underneath it

attempting to order two coffees and two scones on my phone, as instructed by signs stuck up around the place. It's a good job there isn't a sound track to this photo as the payment app/gizmo that they are using wants to know your phone number, date of birth (!) etc, etc, and I was getting crosser and crosser, expecting the next question to be about the colour of my knickers. Finally I got to a yellow 'button' saying SAVE CARD, with a tick box above it asking you to tick if you wanted them to save your card for future transactions. Basically, the two options were the same. As I didn't want them to save my card, and I was so annoyed I was thinking of going home and making the scones myself, I stopped. 

Fortunately a waitress (am I allowed to say that now?) passed by and I asked her if there was any other way of getting an order, and she said "Oh yes, you can just go to the kiosk."

Thank God.

Liz and I stayed, and talked and talked, as if we haven't seen each other for six weeks. Then we walked back.

Photo by Liz

The grasses weighed down by the rain looked lovely:

Photo by Liz

So lovely I took a close up...

And as one or two of you have commented on loving to see the stiles round here, my brother Pete sent me this photo he once took of me tackling a stile in Wensleydale, that still remains though the fence has been removed.

And now, after an hour spent wrestling with Blogger I am going to get dressed and do something more fulfilling: paint.

Mixed bag

N.B. Blogger is behaving really oddly this morning and I cannot configure my header. I hope things will be resolved soon.

I've realised this morning that it's not just the continuing pandemic and its restrictions which get me down, it's also reading the daily news about the shambles of our shoddy and shabby 'government.' These two combined create in me an underlying low-level depression which I have to put energy into dealing with, by ignoring things I can do nothing about, and focussing on something else with everything I've got.

I did have a wonderful day on Wednesday, seeing two old friends for lunch (inside) and extended chat in the garden all afternoon. Having felt socially starved before I went, i came back sated, as if from a good, tasty, nourishing meal.

It's hard to keep it up, though. So this morning I got out Keep Moving by Maggie Smith and read a few pages, and I'd like to share them with you.

Trust that everything will be okay, but that doesn't mean that everything will be restored. Start making yourself at home in your life as it is. Look around and ahead. Keep moving.

and

All you need to do today is live the best you can. Even if in this difficult time your best doesn't feel like enough, it is enough. And trust that your best tomorrow will be even better than today's: that is healing. Keep moving.

and 

Stop rewinding and replaying the past in your mind. Live here now. Give the present the gift of your full attention. Keep moving.

I like that sentence - Give the present the gift of your full attention.

This is a painting I finished yesterday. It's called 'Break in the clouds.'

Wishing you all a break in your clouds.

Sunshine

The sun is shining today, thank goodness.

Sunshine makes such a difference to me and my mood. I know it shouldn't but it does. I've been feeling a bit low lately. There are family troubles, but it's not all about that. This never-never land of Covid seems to go on forever. Yes, we are free to go out and about and to go away (within reason - the USA won't let me in) but group gatherings indoors are not wise even if they were allowed, so it means we can't have a normal Quaker Meeting, and nothing social feels free and easy. I feel as if I am living in some kind of filmy cage, the barriers of which I am never sure about. A friend recently said 'It still feels like we are waiting, in hibernation/half life.' I feel that too.

Yesterday a man on the Trail asked me if the stepping stones were 'down there.' And could you walk on them? 

I said 'Yes, I've just been, do you want to see a photo?' 

I found one on my phone and he stood right next to me to see it, 

and afterwards as I cycled off I thought 'Should we have been standing side by side, so close? Neither of us had masks on because he was hiking and I was walking and cycling. He was my age so had probably been fully vaccinated, but on the other hand he could still be carrying the Delta variant, and anyway, he had an Australian accent so was he a visitor who had NOT been vaccinated? Next time I will ask the person to step away and I will hold my phone at arms length for them to see. All of this crap ran through my head. When will I stop thinking this kind of stuff? Next year? Ever?

At least I am free in my dreams. I dreamed about Mary and it was lovely. She was happy and smiling and we had three hugs just because we could. (It was rather weird, though - she had had her hair 'set', she was wearing a bra and a twin set, she had just pulled out the cooker to clean behind it, she had a double barrelled name, and she was cracking jokes in the Labour party meeting she was hosting at her house. You didn't know her so I need to explain that only ONE of these characteristics is anywhere near the truth. And even then it would have been the Green party.) She died six years ago and I still miss her a lot.

At least I got to Facetime my girls yesterday - both of them. Cece (Cecilia) has taught me how to use filters, and I took a photo of her in comic book mode which I really like:

This is her in monchrome:

 and this is the birthday card I painted for her:

Do you know what the notes say?

The other good news is that my sweet peas are looking healthier than they have in years. This is just one wigwam of three:

Right... now I am going to get showered and dressed and head to the garden centre because my cosmos seedlings are ready to be planted out and I need some sharp grit to protect them from slugs.

And the sun is still shining. I hope it is for you too, and that you have a lovely day.

Breaking news and riverside walk

I live such a quiet life these days that this is the only news from Hepworth Towers: after 35 years I have given up on Neighbours.

I have told you about why I liked this soapy soap on the blog before - here, for example.

It was 20 minutes of the day - usually late afternoon -  when I could switch off and relax. But I can't relax with it any more because there are so many characters I find so irritating I want to throw things at the screen, the plots are so circular and repetitive and boring, and the dastardly antics of the resident villain Paul Robinson (my favourite character) have been reduced to petty family meddling. Or has it always been like that and I have finally, at 71, grown up - culture wise?

I realised I needed something to fill the gap and turned to watching Last Tango in Halifax again on BBCiplayer. I intended to watch it in 20 minute bursts, but it is so good that yesterday it slipped into a whole hour-long episode. And last night I dreamed I was acting in it and discussing with a fellow actor why the script felt so natural - was it because it was written by a northern writer and set in the north? 

This quote creased me up yesterday...

[Alan and Gillian are looking at one of Alan's old school photographs]

Alan:
[wistfully] He's dead... And he's dead... She died... He went down south.

Anyway, that is the news.

But so many of you commented on the photo walk I put on the blog last post that I did another.

And if you want to do it too, cycle up the Monsal Trail from Bakewell or Hassop to Miller's Dale Station. Or you could drive and park at Miller's Dale station. Head north east along the Trail towards Buxton and stop at the first bridge over the river you come to. Lock up your bike and head down the steps to the river.

Turn right at the bottom of the steps. You could turn left - and it's lovely - but the path only goes for half a mile in that direction till you get to the road. 

So, turn right and walk as far as you like. It's best to do it when there has not been torrential rain because in some places that makes the path dicey or even impassable. 

Because I have already ridden there and don't want to be out all day I don't go far before I stop.

I stop at the first bridge

and sit on the bridge and drink my coffee.

This has been my magic place this week where nothing can touch me. 

Enjoy...

Tracks

 

I've been thinking that if you have just one person who knows you and loves you for who you are, it is such a comfort. And if you have more than one then how blessed you are.

Yesterday I didn't have much zip so I went on a shortened version of my favourite local walk. 

Here is some of it...

When you have nothing to say

just drive

for a day all around the peninsula ...

Seamus Heaney