Visits from siskins and bullfinches put a smile on my face and my mind off the state of the nation. Went back to work on Thursday but it was quiet and empty, maybe not a bad way to get back into the routine, which kicks in properly tomorrow.
During last week I visited 'Ship of Fools', where I learned that the main boards editor Erin Etheredge had suddenly passed away. The response has been quite overwhelming. My nephew was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a blocked bowel and I've been helping keep him occupied with a Harry Potter text quiz. Today I caught up with a ex-colleague's blog in which she gives a candid and unindulgent account of living with lung cancer. Earlier in the week we had a book group meeting, where I had a chance to have a good chat with the organiser who also has cancer and is coping well. All of which puts stuff into perspective somewhat.
About Me
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Friday, 31 December 2010
Another Year
In the bedroom, my wine purple velvet dress hangs from the wardrobe door, draped with a sparkly scarf that glitters in the lamplight and my long black cardigan, scattered with hundreds of tiny silver threads is drying across the radiator. A little make up and I'll soon be ready to help make the party shine, like they did in the war and the depression that preceded it.
What would I like in 2011? The ability to stay calm and keep a sense of perspective; a good sense of humour and enough money to keep the wolf from the door and maybe, in some small way, to make a positive difference. I'd like my friends and family to keep well and for reading ages to improve across the world and for everyone to have access to clean water. Oh yeah and for this blinkin' government to abandon their plan to sell off the forests. It's not that much to ask is it?
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Research
I am tired now. I've just spent hours researching and preparing background information for the poetry unit options to post on Moodle. I wrote a handout on romantic love (one option) and spent quite a while putting up links on some of the references in Carol Ann Duffy's The Kray Sisters for another option. And what a brilliant poem it is.
You don't have to be gay or even a feminist - though I was and possibly still am the latter - to appreciate it. It's as feisty as feck. Mixing references to suffragettes and Violet Trefusis and Vita (Orlando) Sackville West with Lulu, Barbara Windsor, Bridgette Bardot, Shirley Bassey and Germaine Greer takes some leaps of the imagination but with its final quote from These boots are Made for Walking, its evocative presentation of London and its in ya face wit it all makes perfect sense.
You don't have to be gay or even a feminist - though I was and possibly still am the latter - to appreciate it. It's as feisty as feck. Mixing references to suffragettes and Violet Trefusis and Vita (Orlando) Sackville West with Lulu, Barbara Windsor, Bridgette Bardot, Shirley Bassey and Germaine Greer takes some leaps of the imagination but with its final quote from These boots are Made for Walking, its evocative presentation of London and its in ya face wit it all makes perfect sense.
Friday, 10 December 2010
November
November started wet and got sunnier and colder and featured perfect, endless winter skies. Skies to die for: big, fat, massive, huge, magnificent skies in pale winter blue splashed with orange, red, pink and turquoise and puddles of gold for the sky gods to bathe in. Skies to keep one sane on the way to work in the morning. Hyperbolistic.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
October
I'd forgotten just how lovely October can be with its gentle mists and soft yet cool, clear sunshine. When I walk down Heartbreak Hill in the mornings, robins and finches skitter in the hawthorn and, despite the slight troubles I have encountered lately, this fills me with gladness.
The leaves are turning and orange and brown predominate(I read somewhere that the glorious crimsons and purples of last year will not feature heavily this Autumn). Later berries and flowers still brighten up gardens but the petals on the Japanese Anenomies in our front garden are starting to fall. Winter is not far way but I do not dread it, despite the gradual reduction of light, which can bring on bouts of tired melancholy.
I have always been aware of the turning of the seasons throughout the years of my life, familiar markers on the journey and I am suddenly aware that today is a beautiful day to enjoy the gifts God has given me.
The leaves are turning and orange and brown predominate(I read somewhere that the glorious crimsons and purples of last year will not feature heavily this Autumn). Later berries and flowers still brighten up gardens but the petals on the Japanese Anenomies in our front garden are starting to fall. Winter is not far way but I do not dread it, despite the gradual reduction of light, which can bring on bouts of tired melancholy.
I have always been aware of the turning of the seasons throughout the years of my life, familiar markers on the journey and I am suddenly aware that today is a beautiful day to enjoy the gifts God has given me.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
Back for Autumn
The Great tits and the Coal tits are back. Last seen in the Elder in early May, they disappeared for four months but now they are back, snacking on sunflower hearts and black sunflower seeds. The feeders are twirling.
Friday, 24 September 2010
Second visit to London
My second visit to London was probably a year or so later. My maternal great aunt, feeling I needed to get away from the sometimes toxic problems of my home life, took to me to visit Aunt Rachel in Morden.
Aunt Rachel was a bit of a legend in our family. Back in the late 50's her husband had won a fortune on the football pools. By 1969 the money had run out, most of it lost in a dodgy investment in a race course. The digging machines rusted away on the abandoned wasteland but Rachel managed to hold on to the house in Morden, where she lived with her son and youngest daughter.
This time, the train did not leave from Bolton and we travelled, not by special charter, but by Intercity from Manchester Piccadilly. Piccadilly was the biggest and most magnificent railway station I had seen. Its fabulous Victorian iron-girdered ceiling, still blackened from the smoke of steam locomotives, and its long platforms transported me to the same place as the opening pages of a new book: it promised good things to come. Stepping on the long train, holding on to my small suitcase with one hand and my aunt with the other, I knew this was a special journey.
Perhaps because I was sharing this journey with a woman in her early sixties and not with a gaggle of giggling, gossiping school girls, I became far more aware of my surroundings. I did not find the journey at all boring. I gazed through the windows as the train moved through the endless green countryside dotted with churches, cottages and farms, through the suburbs of little boxes and small factories and onwards into the city. On that visit I saw something I have never seen since: as we entered the suburbs of London, hanging from every balcony of every tenement, were rows and rows of washing. When I visited Rachel's again a year later, a change had taken place. There was far less washing. Maybe the weather was different or maybe the inhabitants had purchased tumble driers or taken, as my mother did, bags of wet washing to the launderette; perhaps they did the whole wash there? I don't know but as the 60's gave way to the 70's it seemed to me that the population's washing habits underwent a revolution. Washing lines didn't disappear but the sheer volume of wet shirts, skirts and knickers decorating the edges of the West Coast Line was severely reduced.
Euston station was just the same but this time there was no embarrassing Beatles bag and no coach. Instead Aunt Eliza took me down the short escalator into the tube station. We purchased our ticket at the wooden window and took a much longer ride down to the platforms.
I stood on the platform full of wonder and half afraid. When the train clattered into the station, I was scared the force of it might drag me on to the live rail, which Aunt Eliza had sternly explained would kill me should I fall upon it.
Inside the train I was transfixed by the map of the Northern Line on the opposite wall above the heads of the passengers. We passed beneath Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Charing Cross and then moved out to Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell and North Clapham. At some point we came up from the tunnels and into daylight as I checked each station off against the thick brownish-black line opposite: Balham, Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and finally Morden.
After such a wonderful ride through unknown places, Morden was a dreadful anti-climax; to a child who'd grown up in the heartland of the industrial North, South London surburbia seemed incredibly dull. All it had to recommend it was the eerie white light of the street lamps, which illuminated the long avenue where Rachel lived.
I don't recall much about that first visit to Rachel's, apart from spending time with my cousin Caroline and listening to 45's on the radiogram in the sitting room but that ride on the underground, where I first discovered the incantational power of place names and first experienced the strange and almost obsessional pull the capital city had on my imagination, was significant.
Related Posts:
Creative Writing - First visit to London
Memories for Mother's Day: Those who went before
Aunt Rachel was a bit of a legend in our family. Back in the late 50's her husband had won a fortune on the football pools. By 1969 the money had run out, most of it lost in a dodgy investment in a race course. The digging machines rusted away on the abandoned wasteland but Rachel managed to hold on to the house in Morden, where she lived with her son and youngest daughter.
This time, the train did not leave from Bolton and we travelled, not by special charter, but by Intercity from Manchester Piccadilly. Piccadilly was the biggest and most magnificent railway station I had seen. Its fabulous Victorian iron-girdered ceiling, still blackened from the smoke of steam locomotives, and its long platforms transported me to the same place as the opening pages of a new book: it promised good things to come. Stepping on the long train, holding on to my small suitcase with one hand and my aunt with the other, I knew this was a special journey.
Perhaps because I was sharing this journey with a woman in her early sixties and not with a gaggle of giggling, gossiping school girls, I became far more aware of my surroundings. I did not find the journey at all boring. I gazed through the windows as the train moved through the endless green countryside dotted with churches, cottages and farms, through the suburbs of little boxes and small factories and onwards into the city. On that visit I saw something I have never seen since: as we entered the suburbs of London, hanging from every balcony of every tenement, were rows and rows of washing. When I visited Rachel's again a year later, a change had taken place. There was far less washing. Maybe the weather was different or maybe the inhabitants had purchased tumble driers or taken, as my mother did, bags of wet washing to the launderette; perhaps they did the whole wash there? I don't know but as the 60's gave way to the 70's it seemed to me that the population's washing habits underwent a revolution. Washing lines didn't disappear but the sheer volume of wet shirts, skirts and knickers decorating the edges of the West Coast Line was severely reduced.
Euston station was just the same but this time there was no embarrassing Beatles bag and no coach. Instead Aunt Eliza took me down the short escalator into the tube station. We purchased our ticket at the wooden window and took a much longer ride down to the platforms.
I stood on the platform full of wonder and half afraid. When the train clattered into the station, I was scared the force of it might drag me on to the live rail, which Aunt Eliza had sternly explained would kill me should I fall upon it.
Inside the train I was transfixed by the map of the Northern Line on the opposite wall above the heads of the passengers. We passed beneath Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square and Charing Cross and then moved out to Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell and North Clapham. At some point we came up from the tunnels and into daylight as I checked each station off against the thick brownish-black line opposite: Balham, Tooting Bec, Tooting Broadway, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and finally Morden.
After such a wonderful ride through unknown places, Morden was a dreadful anti-climax; to a child who'd grown up in the heartland of the industrial North, South London surburbia seemed incredibly dull. All it had to recommend it was the eerie white light of the street lamps, which illuminated the long avenue where Rachel lived.
I don't recall much about that first visit to Rachel's, apart from spending time with my cousin Caroline and listening to 45's on the radiogram in the sitting room but that ride on the underground, where I first discovered the incantational power of place names and first experienced the strange and almost obsessional pull the capital city had on my imagination, was significant.
Related Posts:
Creative Writing - First visit to London
Memories for Mother's Day: Those who went before
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