Just quotes

 

Altering the face of the world

Well, they've seen off the liar, thank goodness, but, but...

We cannot rest easy. 

One reason to start you off? Sunak's put Suella Braverman back in the Home Office - the woman who dreams of refugees being flown to Rwanda. She's got plans for other horrors too such as draconian punishments for protesters, but I won't go on.

Here instead is this:

And here is some graffiti from the Berlin Wall:

I am not resigned

A good friend of mine died in August and I was ill and couldn't go to her cremation. Yesterday we held a memorial service for her at Meeting, and I came home feeling flat. And today I've been trying to engage myself in some meaningful activity that is satisfying. I've been doing usual stuff that makes me happy but it hasn't, and I've just felt cross.

I discussed it all with Dave and said that a 50 minute Quaker meeting in which perhaps 9 people spoke very briefly about our F/friend did not feel adequate. How can you pay tribute to a multi-faceted person and their very rich life in such a short space of time?  You'd need a lengthy essay.

We carried on discussing the problem and how sad I am about Chris's death and  that I didn't get to say goodbye to her, and then Dave said; "The truth is that you just don't like it when people die, do you? That's what the problem is."

He was right. 

"That's it. I don't think death is acceptable. I don't agree with it." 

So... here is my favourite poem about death.

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains, - but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

 

 Edna St. Vincent Millay

Batten down the hatches

I'm coasting to the end of a favourite good-time read - Mary Wesley's Part of the Furniture - before moving onto something more serious (Do not say we have nothing by Madeleine Thien). 

The Wesley book is set in WW2 and it's reminded me of all those non-fiction books about life at the home front in WW2 that I read at the start of lockdown. I was reading them to see how ordinary people coped during desperate times. I thought they might have some tips for me.

We are still in desperate times. 

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 

22% of the UK population are living in poverty

Of these, 8.1 million are working age adults, 4.3 million are children, and 2.1 million are pensioners.

31% of children in the UK are living in poverty.

Raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers and our coastal areas, the NHS is collapsing through lack of funding, public services are threadbare because of austerity cuts, 90% of schools say they will run out of money within a year, the economy has shrunk because of Brexit, millions of people are having to choose between heating and eating, and the government is bringing in draconian, authoritarian measures to stop the public from protesting.

Yes, the country is falling apart and the Tories are about to bring back the shambles of a leader who left in disgrace in July. 

What's to be done?

Up donations to food banks and to refugee charities, protest as much as you have the energy for, and batten down the hatches until we finally get a General Election. I am not a fan of the current incarnation of the Labour party under Starmer but anything has to be better than the chaotic shambles of the nasty  party in power at present.

And...I refuse to be miserable. The Trail is as lovely as ever:

The Monsal Trail this morning

Painting continues to be an engrossing occupation:

Acrylic on canvas board 42 x57 cms

Yes - I am still obsessed with grasses. 

And I don't care if people think:  

"the grasses are too much in the foreground "in your face", for want of a better expression, with no depth to the picture and secondly, the whole painting draws the eye to the bottom right hand part and out of the picture.  Everything is leaning to the right - the hill in the background, the grasses behind the wall, the wall and the grasses in front of the wall."

which is what a talented artist said when I asked for his honest opinion of the panting above. I don't care because I like the grasses and I like the light and the energy and I think the fact that it's all moving right and downhill emphasises the energy. And I am pleased he could be honest and will always be honest when I ask his opinion. What's the point of anything else?

He likes this painting I finished recently, and I'm rather 'meh' about it, though it was huge fun to paint.

Acrylic on canvas board
46 x72 cms

I'll leave you with this, which I saw on Twitter

Family

"Why haven't you blogged?" my big brother said in our weekly, early Sunday morning Facetime.

"Because I'm scrabbling around trying to think of something to blog about."

"But what about our holiday?"

"What is there to say? I become less and less willing to post about personal stuff."

"You could always post photos of Wensleydale."

"I didn't take very many."

I was too busy walking the footpaths in the sunshine feeling happy to be alive, like Fotherington-Thomas in How To Be Topp ('Hullo clouds, hullo sky'), to want to stop and take many pictures. 

But here's one of the aforementioned brother snapping Mill Gill Force.

My big sister was looking at a similar stream when a student came up and said "Look at the colour of the water! The pollution!" She calmly explained to him that the water in the dales is the colour of beer because of the peat, not pollution. 

But back to the question of why I haven't blogged. There was a lot to think about when we were all together last week, but I don't want to share it.

This last ten days has been a magical blend of blue and gold October, and family - not just my sibs - and I have felt so happy. And our family is set to increase, because there's a brand new grandchild expected in November. I've been thinking a lot about family, and on Saturday when I was painting I was listening to an old edition of Poetry Please on the radio and was moved to tears by a poem called Grafters, by Nora Hanson. She is a mother, grandmother and great grandmother and her poem reflects that. It also reflects how I am feeling.

I chased up the poem and have permission from Valley Press, the publishers, to share it with you here.

                Grafters  

                by Nora Hanson

You can hear the poet read it in her lovely northern accent here.

And you can see more about Sparks, the anthology it comes from here.

Lastly, here for my big brother are two pics from our holiday:

View of eastern Swaledale

The river Swale

A trip with the sibs

 It’s that time of year again - when I take a trip with the sibs to Wensleydale. We’re staying in Askrigg, up the dale from where our parents lived. As I’m on my hols, this is not a carefully constructed blog post: it’s a collection of happenings, and you’ll have to make do.

Last time we were here, I left a drawing of a mouse in the tiny art gallery:

Yesterday I left a copy of one of my books in the roadside library and it’s already been taken.

This is me at Mill Gill Force:

Photo by my sister Kath

Yesterday we went to the Nearly New Cashmere shop in Masham. With the amount of frank advice and snarky banter that went on in there, if Kath hadn’t told the sales assistant we were siblings, she surely would have guessed it.

Out on a walk today, I met an American who didn’t know about footpaths or public rights of way and had never heard the word ‘stile.’ I was showing him the way to Aysgarth Falls and we came across this stile in the middle of a field. Of course it used to be in a wall, but the wall has gone and the stile has been left to mark the route of the footpath. As you can imagine, this took some explaining.

Kath, on a previous trip

I’m having a fabulous time, snarky banter or no.

My dream is different from her dream

Here I am, sitting in bed at 6.49, first mug of tea drunk, Wordle completed, headlines read, wondering how it is that a person can say she would:

“love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”

Does this person - Cruella Suella Braverman,  the UK Home Secretary -  not understand what refugees have been through?

...you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire...*

How can she ignore the fact that most people who come over the channel in small boats have a legal right to sanctuary here, to claim asylum? 

My dream is different from hers. My dream is that a UK government will treat refugees kindly, that the many who have been tortured will be cared for with sensitivity and tenderness.

Refugees seeking asylum need safe routes so they don't have to risk their lives in small boats crossing the Channel.

The government eventually gave safe routes to Ukrainians by screening them abroad. They could do it for all people fleeing war and persecution and seeking safety here in the U.K.

Hugs
My line drawing

If you care about this as much as I do, please consider supporting one of these charities:

Safe Passage works to unite child refugees with relatives here, and campaigns for safe routes for refugees.

Refugee Action has been supporting refugees and people seeking asylum since 1981.

Care4Calais and Detention Action support refugees and are challenging the government in court on the Rwanda policy.

*excerpt from the poem Home by Warsan Shire

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation

Oh, for another Oliver Cromwell to dismiss our current crazy, cruel and incompetent government who are clearly intent on making the rich richer while grinding ordinary people into the dust.

20 April 1653, London, England

"It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place,

which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God's help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!"

 

On being 'retired'

Let's leave the obscenity of the current government's policies on one side for now and think about other things.

I've been thinking about retirement, and how I've never liked the word. That might be because I've had a patchwork life in which only 6 years was spent working full time in an office outside the house. There has been plenty of work done in other venues and in other forms, some of it well paid, some of it not paid. I've just not had that day after day, year after year, monthly pay cheque for 'going out to work' which ends for a lot of people in retirement. 

Anyway, the word retirement has always conjured up the picture in my head of someone who has become a blob. So it follows I have never wanted to think of myself as retired, even though I am 72 and have a pension and no paid work. Until 2 years ago I called myself a writer. Now I call myself a painter. I realised recently that I actually think of painting as 'my work,' which is exceedingly strange. 

On Monday I was sitting in bed keeping warm at 7.30 in the morning not wanting to read the news and depress myself, and I decided to do the mending instead. And as I was mending it occurred to me that this is what retirement is all about - the liberty to do what you like when you like. And what's so bad about that? 

The other thing I've been thinking about is my obsession with grass in my paintings. This is the latest. 

Acrylic on canvas board 50 x 74 cms

My brother thinks it is finished. I am not so sure. But that's beside the point. Why do I like grass so much?

I like the lines. I like the way it catches the light. I like the variety and the delicacy of the seedheads. 

And it's everywhere, at least where I live. So many of my paintings are about the everyday. I love the everyday, in art, in fiction, in drama.

I watched the latest version of Little Women again the other day, smiled again in recognition at Jo running down the street in joy after having her first story accepted for publication, cried again when Amy says she has been second best to Jo all her life. (Wasn't Florence Pugh fantastic as Amy?)  And then there is this quote which Jo reads to Amy:

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows.... What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

One advantage of getting older is having the time to appreciate the beautiful details of our immediate surroundings. 

And now I need to get to work on my new painting, which is of grass and corn and bright red poppies.

Random thoughts

After 10 oppressive days when there was nothing on the news except stuff about the Royal death and funeral, I read the paper today. Now I’m in the depths of depression and despair. This government and its actions is antipathetic to everything that I believe in. What can we do about it? I have no idea.

Someone I follow on Twitter said yesterday that all she wanted to do was sit on the beach and look at the sea forever. I understand how she feels. Yesterday at teatime I rode up the quiet Trail to my favourite thinking spot, climbed over the fence and sat and looked at the view. It was so peaceful and so perfect amongst the dried grasses. I could have stayed forever.

But feeling defeated and opting out does nobody any good. I just have to find a path for me.

Dave works hard all day every day. He is either helping other people with their DIY or he is doing domestic jobs. His main occupations this week are 

1/ going out early and bringing home firewood from roadside verges, as we have still not bought any domestic heating oil because of the price 

This week's haul

2/ processing plums. Yes, the plums are still with us. The ones currently in the Hepworth towers food preparation factory are inedible raw, so he is washing them, stoning them and stewing them and then he eats them with his yoghurt. We’ve also frozen as many as will fit in the freezer. I can’t eat them now: these last ones far too bitter for me.

He does occasionally break off from his manic activity to give treats to the cat next door. He is also trying to make friends with a cat from down the lane. This cat is called Alan. Yesterday Dave rushed down the drive shouting “Alan let me stroke him!”  I don't think he should let anyone overhear him saying stuff like that.

Meanwhile...in the studio (i.e. sitting room) ...There are two painters who I follow on Instagram whose techniques are very unusual and result in stunning paintings. I’ve been trying to work out how they actually put the paint on the canvas and I can’t. So I wrote to them both. Neither was helpful. Basically, it boils down to their being protective of what they had learned after years of experimenting and not wanting to share it with anyone else. I’ve not come across this attitude before in other spheres. I’m wondering if it’s something different about the art world, or whether it’s because they’re both men. Or whether it’s for some other reason. Do they really think that I’m going to be able to produce works of art in competition to them? Do they think that if I do that I’m going to reduce their market?  There’s a lot to learn.

My cosmos are still flowering and bringing me so much pleasure 

I also want to say that I was feeling very low when I started this post but while I've been writing it I've been having a text conversation with Het and it's really cheered me up. I was telling her about Dave's exploits and she said "He's a dude." She's right.

So please raise a cup of coffee to friendship and to dudes!

This last week

Living out in the sticks as we do, I usually just see one or two friends a week, but this last week has been strangely and madly sociable, seeing a different friend each day from Monday to Friday, plus one day having an extended FaceTime with Het.

I also finished two paintings. Here's one, which is for my friend who recently died:

'For Chris' 
42 x 59 cms. Acrylic and collage.

And I started another, produced a report with two friends, began knitting a baby jumper for the expected new grandchild, and had two long walks and three bike rides. See what you can get done when you’re not in a queue?

(For the record - I respect the Queen’s dutiful life, while finding the idea of a hereditary monarchy with a divine right to rule outdated and utterly preposterous.)

The weather here has been beautifully September - chilly starts, bright sunshine, long shadows, slightly melancholy, and my cosmos is flowering beautifully.

I've recently finished the last of the five Cazalet Chronicles, none of which I have read before. They’ve been great holiday reading. When someone offered me the first one earlier in the year I tried it and thought “Ooh no, this isn’t for me! What a waste of time.” 

But then my daughter lent me hers at the start of the summer and I gave it another go and was hooked. I loved the way the author, Elizabeth Jane Howard, lists exactly what is eaten at every meal, and I like the fact that she tells you how people are dressed. I could have done with less time spent on the children’s activities and conversations. They were an unwelcome distraction from the main events i.e. the relationships dramas of the adults. I love spending time with children but not reading about them in an adult book. I’m not sure why that is, because I do like children’s books. Maybe I just don’t like EJH’s children. 

The last few days I’ve been thinking about the fabulous elder grandson, who this week gave me permission to use his name on here. It's Tate. I used to mention both of my grandsons on the blog and when they reached adolescence they asked me to remove them from all my posts. This was a tedious process, but I did it. 

Tate left home for Uni yesterday and it feels huge in a way it didn’t when my children went. As I write this I realise that this is just not true. When our daughter first left home (before Uni) I dropped her off at her new place and came home and felt as though my arm had been chopped off; and when Isaac went to Uni I was similarly bereft. The-family-member-who-declines-to-be-named has always been within easy reach and I’ve never had to miss him.

But as for grandchildren, the hold they have on me, and the love I feel for them, continues to surprise me. Tate has also given me permission to have a (pre-approved) photo of him on here, so for all of you who have been reading the blog since he was tiny, and remember my posts mentioning him, here he is, my eldest grandchild:

Have fun, Tate, and work hard. You already make us proud.

I won’t embarrass him by saying anything else. 

Who knows where the time goes?

Yesterday I went with the lovely Jaine and the-family-member-who-declines-to-be-named to a baby shop, to look for prams/pushchairs/buggies/car seats - the whole caboodle. It was exciting and fun. It was also jaw dropping to see what all that stuff costs these days.  

I found myself remembering when our daughter was born and Dave and I were students and how the height of luxury was a brand new carry cot his mother bought us for £5. I think my parents must have bought us the cot and the baby bath, because we didn't have the money. We lived in a flat with no hot water, no bathroom and a loo at the end of the garden. The rent was £2 5s a week and we were happy. Last month an ice cream cost me £3.50.

So when the-family-member-who-declines-to-be-named asked me how it was for us when we had our babies and I replied, I sounded like one of those old men who had a handful of gravel for breakfast - you know the schtick - "We could buy a roast dinner for half a crown and still had enough change for a bottle of whisky." 

By the time the-family-member-who-declines-to-be-named arrived we were grown-ups and bought a new Moses basket and a very smart second hand pram. He was 6 weeks premature and so tiny that when we took him out in the pram, Dave had to pop in 2 bags of sugar as ballast.

On the way home from the shop we called at our daughter’s house for a cuppa and to say goodbye to the fabulous elder grandson, who is leaving for Uni on Saturday. Gosh, I can't believe it. I remember so well the joy he brought us when he was born, and the fun we've had through subsequent years. It makes me wistful. 

Meanwhile Dave and I get older and older. Dave is up in Leeds today doing DIY for a friend, and I am home in a quiet house, working my way through a list of chores and also lovely things like riding my bike on the Trail, and trying to finish a collage I've been working on.

As you know, I'm not allowed to show pics of the fabulous grandsons, so here are two from my tiny historic collection. We lost all our pictures of daughter and Isaac in the fire and these are two my mother gave me from her collection.

Daughter (4 months) and me (21)

Dave (eat your heart out Jimi Hendrix), daughter and my Gran

Here's Sandy Denny singing Who Knows where the time goes?  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkOB57UcYk8

a song that would definitely be one of my Desert Island Discs. 

Wishing you a happy Monday. Live today: tomorrow is too late.

Love letter from home

We watched Have I Got News For You the other night; it was the special edition about our last “Prime Minister,” Johnson. I also saw a clip of Joe Lycett mocking Liz Truss on another show. Both progs were supposed to be funny, but you know what?  I can’t laugh, even at satire, at what’s been going on and what we’re heading for. Isaac said on the phone yesterday ( from Colorado) something droll about Truss, and I explained I just can’t laugh about any of it. I asked him if he could laugh about Trump when he was in power. 

‘No,’ he said.

In other news…I’ve been ill and I’m still recovering and Dave has been wonderful - like he always is when I’m ill. I just thanked him yet again for being so sweet and caring and for keeping the show on the road, thinking of all the plums he processed while I’ve been out of action.

This is just some of them:

There are hundreds more on the tree.

He said ‘It’s all so easy when you’re in bed and not being untidy and leaving stuff around everywhere.’ 

I laughed. ‘That’s how you see it, is it? That I’m the untidy one?’

‘Certainly,’ he said.

Imagine a NO COMMENT that fills the whole screen here.

Having said that, he really is the sweetest man I know. 

Now, if HE were the new Prime Minister the U.K. would be run with honesty, competence, justice and compassion, and we could all relax.

Silence

 I have woken up to silence and a sweet note from Dave.

He’d told me he’d be leaving soon after 5 a.m. to spend a day - and possibly a day and a half - helping a friend in the West Midlands with some DIY. 

Before I say anything else….I would not like to live alone, and I know how lucky I am to have a partner of 52 years whom I get along with.

But the bliss of waking up to a silent and empty house is something rare and special.

I go away four or five times a year, and Dave has the freedom to have the radio blaring out or is able to play his electric guitar at 6 in the morning if he wants to. He can leave the back door open without my complaining about the draught. He can sit in the kitchen playing his acoustic guitar with Radio 4 on loud without my wincing and asking him to choose just one.

So although he can enjoy the house without me, he never goes away, and I am rarely here alone for more than three hours at a time.

It’s not just the silence I relish, it’s the absence of any kind of demands, or need to engage with anything beyond my own thoughts and activities. The freedom to go out and not say when I’ll be back. The liberty to live my life without sharing a timetable or itinerary beforehand. I can just be. I can be led by whim without explanation. I can decide that actually I don’t want to go out on my bike this morning as I’d planned, I’ll do it at teatime. Yes! A simple thing like that. 

Don’t misunderstand me: I am always free to do what I want, it’s the always explaining beforehand that can feel like a bind. 

I am also free today to make chicken soup. When Isaac and the family were staying I cooked roast chicken, but because Dave can’t bear the smell of boiling stock I stuck the carcase in the freezer until a day when he was out. Ooh, and I can have a kipper for lunch if I like! 

Enough, I’m not going to start telling YOU what I’m going to do with my day.

On a separate matter, I have learned a lesson this week with my painting. I sometimes paint pictures from photographs I’ve taken, and they work out fine. e.g the washing line painting.

That’s why I thought I could paint this fabulous picture that Isaac took when he was here, of some honesty seeds along the lane.

I’ve tried and so far failed to paint a successful copy. Or rather, I have successfully painted it, but it doesn’t work because the composition is not strong enough, and there are other problems too - depth of field, and what the camera does to sources of reflected light. So I’m going to develop it into something else, perhaps an abstract. Watch this space. 

Actually, now seeing them together, I see that the purple is far too dark. Hmm…time to reconsider….

Have a terrific day!

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.