Letter from home

It is so hard to know what kind of post to write while the war in Ukraine continues with all the concomitant suffering.

I know you’ll all be as upset about it as I am, so what else is there to say? Except to rail against our cruel and mean spirited government that is making it so hard for refugees to get here to safety. All EU countries are allowing entry with no visa and offering three years residence along with the right to work and to benefits. The U.K. insists that desperate people work their way through the bureaucracy of a visa application, and even then there are only a few people eligible.

The only good thing about this situation is that British people who have so far been ignorant of just how impossible it is to enter the U.K. as a refugee can now see the truth about our government's 'hostile environment' policy. 

So with all of the above, it feels wrong to be writing about what is going on at Hepworth Towers. What this war is teaching me, though, is how important it is to appreciate what we have, and to allow ourselves to enjoy small pleasures. It would be ungrateful not to.

Warmth is one such pleasure. We live up a lane and there is no gas supply so we have oil central heating. When I rang up to order some last Friday I was told that although usually I could order 2000 litres, they would only sell me 1000, and the price had gone up in a week from 69 pence per litre to 96 pence. I did not order any, and we have turned the heating right down and severely restricted the hours it is on. Lucky for us we have log burning stoves and a stock of firewood that Dave collected last winter. With the stove lit, the sitting room is warm on the coldest day. Snuggling in my warm bed at night I feel lucky I am not sheltering in a cold, cold metro, or a basement in Ukraine with no food and no water and children to care for, like my friend who is trapped in Kyiv with her teenage son. 

Other news...

If nothing worse happens on the world stage, I am hoping to fly to Colorado next week to see the family; and I have been working on two paintings. This one is finished.

Acrylic on canvas board. 59 x42 cms.

This one of Wensleydale is nearly finished. It needs a tiny barn adding somewhere on the bright green hill, and I think I am going to lighten the sky.

Wensleydale meadow.
Acrylic on canvas board 42 x59 cms.

I want to paint a washing line next and I’m so pleased I  managed to get a photo of our line one day when the sun was shining and there are shadows on the grass.

Last evening I joined with 250 other Quakers from America and the U.K. for an hour's zoom Meeting for Worship with the focus being Ukraine. It is a daily event  sponsored by Friends House, Moscow, a small, non-profit organisation living out Friends' testimonies in service to the people of Russia, Ukraine and beyond. 

The Meeting was powerful and sustaining.

If you would like to join in, please email me at hugsDOThepworthATgmailDOTcom and I will send you details.

That's it.

I must get up and dressed. I am going with a friend to an art/photo exhibition in Buxton called A Celebration of Derbyshire Trees.

Wishing you all a peaceful day.

Our plum tree last spring

Complexity

I have been in turmoil over the war in Ukraine, at times completely overwhelmed by the horror and the sadness and our impotence to stop it. This has been amplified by anxiety about the future. Will there be a nuclear war, with Russia and Europe wiped out? So much for the nuclear policy of 'mutually assured destruction.' (MAD)

But my turmoil has resulted from other things too. I've been wrestling with all kinds of questions - some by the response to the war from western politicians, the press and ordinary people - and some from challenges to my own way of thinking.

All war is horrific, with civilians being killed, whether it is in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine or Yemen. Where has been the outrage in the last five cases? When, for example, does the western world chastise Israel for its everyday violence towards Palestinians, and when they bomb built up areas in Gaza? What about their use of white phosphorus in the bombing of Gaza? And cluster bombs in Lebanon?

Then there is the subject of Ukrainian refugees. The EU countries have stepped up swiftly and generously. The UK has been guarded and evasive, happy to wave the Ukrainian flag but not to waive the need for a visa for refugees.

A field of rape in Northumberland, 2008

At least many more of the UK public can now clearly see the inhumanity of Priti Patel's hostile environment, introduced by Theresa May, in putting up barriers to people fleeing from war. 

There is a bill going through parliament which wants to veer from the UN Refugee Convention, and to create two classes of refugees: ones which come here with a visa, and ones which arrive by whichever way they can. The latter would be criminalised. The Lords recently rejected these clauses, but when it goes back to the Commons, what will happen then?

Unfortunately, some commentators have been drawing their own disgusting distinctions between white, European refugees with clothes like ours, and people of colour who come from faraway countries outside Europe.

They are all people in a desperate plight.

They all deserve to be treated kindly.

There are other strands to my turmoil - how did we get here? This one about NATO expansion is interesting.

Then there is the question of my pacifism. My father and grandfather were COs, and I've been reading about conscientious objectors in WW1 and marvelling at their commitment and bravery. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought  - 'What use is a pacifist in the Ukraine?' 

But then I thought - it is always the politicians who decide on war. What if no-one was willing to fight?  What if there was a war and no-one came?

I leave it with you.

Today, I've got two poems:

Refugee blues

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said:
‘If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead’;
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
‘If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread’;
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

W.H.Auden

Luck in Sarajevo

In Sarajevo

in the spring of 1992,

everything is possible:

 

you go stand in a bread line

And end up in an emergency room

With your leg amputated.

 

Afterwards, you still maintain

That you were very lucky.

 

Izet Sarajlic

translated from the Serbo-Croat by Charles Simic

 

Kittens playing with a ball of wool

Are you old enough to remember those ‘interludes’ they had between TV programmes back in the 50s? I remember the one where a kitten was playing with a ball of wool. Or was it multiple kittens and balls of wool?

Whatever. Think of this post as a harmless interlude between thinking and reading and worrying about the war in Ukraine. We need to be informed. We need to help where we can. But perhaps it’s important to also have an occasional break. 

If you don’t feel like that, I understand. Perhaps come back another day.

Here is today’s poem. (I found an interesting commentary on it here.)

A Brief for the Defence

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert

Here is the kittens interlude...

I still have nightmares about my A levels - yes, after 54 years - and I deserve to. I did not work hard and I was lucky to get the grades I needed to do the course at University that was top of my list: Psychology. I did work hard at that, so it all turned out OK in the end.

My problem is that apart from failing my driving test twice, I don’t remember failing any other tests, and that makes it hard to fail things now. Yesterday I had my third field test at the opticians because I did not do well on the previous two. I suppose you’d call it a resit. I know this is trivial, but I find the field test both difficult and extremely stressful. I’d almost rather resit my finals than take a field test. 

I have worn glasses since I was 3 and I was also a child who had to wear those horrible pink eye patches to correct my wandering eyes, so I am not inexperienced in the field of eye failure. I have had my cataracts ‘done’ (and long time blog readers will know about all the fuss I made) and now I am on the brink of some other kind of eye failure. The optician will ring me next week and tell me what it means. 

Look, I know I am a wuss, and there are people with terrible eye problems. There are three people close to me with serious difficulties. And maybe it’s just another sign of aging, and I just have to suck it up along with everything else, and be thankful the NHS is looking after me and my eyes. Hmm..I have almost convinced myself. 

That’s it.

This was flooded Monsal Dale on Monday:

here are my hellebores, finally flowering in our exposed and windy garden.

and here is Chione (RIP) as a kitten:

Thoughts for the day

 Still in bed at 8.25, reading poems in the anthology BEING ALIVE, the sequel to STAYING ALIVE.

Here’s the poem for today:

That’s what I’m aiming to do - not taxing my life with forethought of grief.

I will get up and paint, and then go to Sheffield and do some errands, hoping there’ll be time to go to see an art exhibition as well.

Meanwhile in the back of my mind run thoughts of a Ukrainian friend and her son in Kyiv. 

And also the thought that nuclear weapons are not just obscene, they’re a waste of money. 

Things I found in my in tray

A couple of weeks ago I threw out old manuscripts from my filing cabinet and - with much pleasure - a clutch of rejection letters. And yesterday I actually got round to clearing my in tray. This has been on my to-do list for months.

There were some interesting finds in there: my mother's record of her 1939 stay at Bramham Park along with 25 nursery school children who had been evacuated from Leeds. The children were between two and a half and five years old, and my mother, a nursery school teacher, and the other scant staff, had to spend every hour of the day with them - asleep or awake, seven days a week. 

To begin with they were in charge of the cooking too and she includes weekly menus, and the quantities needed to make them. My poor mother! She hated cooking. Eventually a general cook came from Leeds to help out, but even so, my mother comments "Things never got beyond reproach."

I also found my social researcher's information/advertising leaflet from the late 1990s:

When you open it up this is a sample of what you see (though in dark green print)

I also found these newspaper clippings:

When I got round to binning stuff and filing the rest, I made room in the filing cabinet by throwing out the detailed plans for a novel entitled "The Pippin Family Nit-Comb"  and notes and plans for a brand new novel featuring Sally Howe, heroine of Plotting for Beginners and Plotting for Grown-ups. For some reason I couldn't bear to throw away my screenplay adaptation of But I Told You Last Year That I Loved You.

Then last night in bed, as I was writing my to-do list for today and emailing it to myself (a nightly habit) I felt sad about the unwritten Sally Howe novel, and added to the list "retrieve Sally Howe plans."

Don't hold your breath, though. I am a painter now, not a writer. 

February
Acrylics on canvas board. 42 x 59cms

It's odd, isn't it, what we can, and cannot bear to throw away?  I still have my mother's navy blue P.E. knickers from the 1920s and the 1950s Willis family nitcomb (labelled by her).

I wonder what my children will keep of things I leave behind.

On being uncharitable

Yesterday morning we walked along Baslow Edge. There are nine edges in our part of the Peak District and Dave and I are trying to walk along one a week. The sunshine and the views were lovely.

In the afternoon I went to put a bunch of snowdrops on Mary’s bench. Who would have thought that seven years after she died I still miss her? Yes, I am used to missing her. It’s not like toothache, more, perhaps, like a badly darned hole in my favourite jumper. 

Unfortunately for me, there was a woman sitting on the adjacent bench who wanted to engage me in conversation. I was polite and friendly but I’d have preferred to be quiet. She told me about an old friend who died two years ago: how they had met once a week for thirty years and how the funeral was in the early days of Covid with only 12 people allowed at a funeral and so she could not go. And her friend’s husband was rather aloof and she had never asked him where her friend’s ashes were scattered. So I was lucky that Mary’s family had chosen a bench.

Then she asked me about Mary and I couldn’t speak. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ I said, my voice breaking. And I walked away thinking, utterly unreasonably, well she might have lost a friend but I lost Mary, a special friend, and mine was the bigger loss. 

How crazy is that? How can you measure or compare losses? And why would you want to? 

I think my unspoken uncharitable thought was a weird lashing out because she had intruded on my time of quiet remembrance. It’s a simple thing to pick snowdrops from our garden and arrange them with sprigs of ivy and drive to Sheffield to tie them on Mary’s bench with a ribbon, and to sit for a while and think about her. Only when the ritual is interrupted and spoiled is it clear how important it is to me.

The cure

I know that my posts have become infrequent, and I'm sorry.

I live such a quiet life these days which often begin like this:

and like this:

also by Mary Oliver

And I have spent too much time over the last two weeks looking online to find out if he has been booted out of office yet. But then it hit me that if Rishi Sunak took over, there would still be a million destitute families in the UK. So what is there to look forward to except a thunderbolt or a miracle?

And this is the reason why I don't post. I am appalled and ashamed of what this government has done to this country and I despair that there is nothing I can do about it. And I am sure that many of you feel the same and probably don't want to read about me wailing and gnashing my teeth.

Of all the things on my taking-myself-in-hand-agenda, the most helpful are the cold showers* and the deep breathing, and the reading of poetry to reset my mind after reading the news before I get out of bed. 

Here's an example:

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

and another:

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

The brother who likes my blog said to me the other day that he sometimes doesn't read the poems I put on the blog. I was dismayed, not that he doesn't like them, but that he doesn't even bother to read them.

I didn't like the poetry they taught us at school, because it all seemed so old and fusty and irrelevant. But now I have heaps of modern poetry books and as well as entertaining, challenging and stimulating me, they comfort me.

If you've never got into poetry, I recommend the anthology Staying Alive as a place to start. The two poems above are in this anthology.

There are, thankfully, other ways my day can start:

I hope your day is going well. 

Letter from home

It has been a quiet week at Hepworth Towers, with three high spots and one low spot. 

First the low spot.

Most of my meals at home are vegetarian, but I am trying to make one vegan meal a week. Last week's was good, even though it had 53 ingredients, but this week's was a monstrous concoction of another plethora of ingredients that included aubergines, tofu and meso paste. I usually like aubergines, but this meal was horrid, and the leftovers have been accusing me every time since Tuesday night that I have opened the fridge door.

Yesterday I realised that it was making me miserable being faced with said leftovers every night when I was deciding what to make for tea. I didn't want to eat them, but it would be wasteful to throw them away. Reader, I did throw them away: the world did not cave in, but my conscience hurt. 

And the high spots of the week?

- a walk with Liz in Bradford Dale

 

Photo by Liz

- a walk with Dave along Curbar Edge

- and thirdly, the arrival of my new boiler suit.

Do you recall this piece I wrote about Dave and his clothes?

...in our local agricultural suppliers he was seduced by a Dickies boiler suit in a subtle bottle green, for only £25. Here was a garment he could relate to. It was practical, comfortable, warm, commodious, cheap and had, joy of joy, 9 pockets, three of which were zipped.

But the boiler suit was so new, so comfortable, so smart, he refused to wear it for jobs such as mending the shed roof, because it might get dirty. Instead he would don it as soon as he got home from work, slipping into it as “smart leisure wear.” At the weekend he would wear nothing else, and I colluded with him, and bought him another one in navy blue.

I was on the point of persuading him that in fact they weren’t classy leisurewear, when, by some freak chance, he spotted a men’s fashion article in a colour supplement. This featured a boiler suit by Kenzo Homme, at ten times the price of his. He was trendily dressed – the only recorded time since student days.

I am a very messy painter. I get paint on my hands, my face, and my clothes, and my dungarees don't cover up everything, and I was fed up with wearing the same old T shirt and jumper underneath, so I decided to get a boiler suit, and Zoë suggested a white one, which is fun, because it will gradually colour up to look very individual.

Also, when I was ordering it online there was an option to have some wording embroidered near the pocket. Dave said I should have 'DANGER. SUE AT WORK' But I went for something else.

Have you read it yet?

And here is Larkin’s poem:

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor   

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin 

The quiet view from the sofa, yesterday afternoon

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

William Stafford

Obsessions

How have you been? Are you pleased we've got to the end of January?

The sun is shining here as I write, thank goodness.

I wrote you a post this morning about my progress on the taking-myself-in-hand agenda but it was so dull I deleted it. I will just say that I'm still having the 30 second cold showers before the hot one; and that the next best thing on the list has been reading a poem before I get out of bed, because it resets my brain after reading the unremittingly awful news.

Enough of that  - my New Year apathy has gone and I've even got round to replacing the terrible pots that were on the doorstep with these.

Have you ever heard it said that an author will keep returning to the same topic over and over? That it's a thread running through all of their books?

Well, I've realised that there are three topics I return to in my novels: relationships, grief, and how to get published.

And I think I have a similar problem with painting. I am obsessed with grasses and with patchwork quilts.

I've done two large paintings of my latest quilt and I am considering one of all three, viz:

As for grasses, I've painted the following:

'and life slips by like a field mouse not shaking the grass'

Colorado colours

And for the last two weeks I've been working on a new large painting of grass. It's not finished yet, but I thought I'd show you anyway. It's hard, though, to decide which photo of it to show you. The light makes such a difference.

In real life the sky on the canvas is a sickly sweet blue and I intend to change it. I am also wondering whether or not to add some different flowers in the lower left hand section. They'd be these orange ones. Are they coltsfoot? Or something else? Does anyone know? They grow on the verges of the Trail.

I'll leave you with the concluding sentence of a piece in our village newspaper from a young farmer whose father died a month ago and who has been getting to grips with all the jobs on the farm without him:

'Nature is a great source of certainty and comfort.'

It's not about the cake

 

It's not about the cake. It's about the lies, and the corruption and the resulting lack of trust, and the fact that 70% of the population wants him to resign and yet he is 'fighting on.'

It is unseemly.

He is fighting for himself and no-one else, and the Tories' continuing support makes them complicit.

        But now for the good news.

Jack Monroe, food poverty campaigner has persuaded the Office of National Statistics to recognise the fact that the inflation of food prices hits the poorer much harder than the comfortably off.

She explained here in the Guardian:

The Smart Price, Basics and Value range products offered as lower-cost alternatives are stealthily being extinguished from the shelves...

... In 2012, 10 stock cubes from Sainsbury’s Basics range were 10p. In 2022, those same stock cubes are 39p, but only available in chicken or beef. The cheapest vegetable stock cubes are, inexplicably, £1 for 10. Last year the Smart Price pasta in my local Asda was 29p for 500g. Today, it is unavailable, so the cheapest bag is 70p; a 141% price rise for the same product in more colourful packaging. A few years ago, there were more than 400 products in the Smart Price range; today there are 87, and counting down.

Jack Monroe's success, of course, does not solve the problem of food poverty itself, which is set to get worse this year with the fuel price increase and the increase in National Insurance.

We will only solve the problem of food poverty when we elect a government that cares about social justice.

Meanwhile, à propos of nothing, it's coming round to 7 years since Mary died and I miss her. This excerpt from my novel EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW YOU expresses it well.

"I think of you so often, every day, I miss you...wanting to talk...in an unfettered way, in a way where I can say what I think and won't be judged for being critical because all I am doing is observing and commenting, and you would understand that I am not being unkind, I'm just noticing, and giving reactions, and trying to find out how I fit into the world, and what matters, and what does not."

so sweet and so cold

I've been sitting in bed not wanting to get out because the next step would be  going to the bathroom and having the 30 second cold shower (before the hot one) that is on my taking-myself-in-hand agenda. See the last post.

So here I am blogging, as a delaying tactic.

Do I feel better as a direct result of following my new agenda? or do I feel better because I have something else to focus on besides feeling fed up? Who knows? It's been working anyway. 

I began on Monday and have been doing well. I've managed all the daily things on the list, including the cold shower. Yesterday I nearly chickened out of that, but managed to push through. 

The biggest challenge has been not being rude to rude motorists. I barely managed this on Monday: I said something charming in a sarcastic voice. They never hear me either way, but I suspect that shouting rude things is not very Quakerly.

The best idea has been to read a poem in bed first thing, partly because it helps to counteract the news, but then, when is it not a good idea to read a poem?  I have a shelf full of poetry books in the bedroom but hadn't picked one up since Christmas. This week I've been reading from Billy Collins' collection Sailing Alone Around the Room. Check this poem out as an example.

Going outside within an hour of getting up is also good. I saw the sun shining on the clump of snowdrops that come up first every year. They are along the lane and back onto a wall that faces east. 

They're the snowdrops that make a guest appearance in Even When They Know You.

And talking of poems, and Even When They Know You, do you remember this snippet of conversation between Joe and Jane?

‘I’m sorry, I’ve crushed the marsh marigolds. Forgive me, they were so-’

‘This is just to say I have crushed the marsh marigolds that were by the spring, and which you were probably saving for dinner. Forgive me, they were delightful, so bright and so jaune.’

‘Jaune?’

‘Well, you think of a word for yellow that has one syllable!’

Did you realise it was an allusion to this poem by William Carlos Williams?

This Is Just To Say

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

The format of this poem is often copied and used in parodies, and this week a writer called Tom Sutcliffe put this on Twitter:

It is not for me to say whether I ate the plums that were in the icebox. As you know Sue Grey is investigating this matter We await her conclusions so sweet and so cold

(note to non-Brits - this is a reference to our disgraced and disgraceful Prime Minister, his Party, and his parties.)

And now I need to get upstairs and persuade myself to take the cold shower.