Christmas 2015

23rd visited family in Oxford
24th visited family in Buckinghamshire
25th entertained family at home
26th visited family in Hertfordshire
27th entertained family who were banned from visiting most people because of chicken-poxy three year old - poor mite.  He called it Christmas pox.  Got a sense of humour that lad.

Didn't have to travel as far as last year, so it was enjoyable, without the stress of driving.

Roll on 2016, and we're looking forward to the panto this weekend.  Oh yes we are!  Happy New Year

Three degrees removed

Last year MiL moved out of her home and passed on an heirloom to us - a square piano.  This piano had been her mother's before her, and it has been in the Green Room at Drury Lane, before being taken up to Sheffield and played in the theatre there during the war.  After her mother died, it stayed with her father and then with her stepmother, who had it for decades.  Her stepmother wasn't a pianist, and didn't really appreciate this piece of furniture, at one time apparently she considered pulling out its insides and turning it into a drinks cabinet! When her stepmother moved out of her home to a care home, MiL had the square piano again.  Being the worse for wear, she had it restored, lovingly and carefully restored by Douglas Hollick.

But transporting it to our house meant it needed retuning.  Our musician neighbours put us in contact with the Royal Academy of Music where we found someone who now enthusiastically tunes our piano.  He's going to contact Douglas Hollick to talk about the piano and whether to tune it up.  At the moment he's tuned it to 392 herz because otherwise it is going out of tune too quickly.  When he came this year to tune it, we discovered that he knows my late husband's best friend from school - my husband's friend's friend makes us three degrees apart I guess.

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine - last night a housemate from many years ago, visited with a bottle of wine. He calculated my age and today remembered my birthday, sending me an email with birthday greetings. How nice is that!

Rehearsal of "Guys and Dolls

Just seen the dress rehearsal of "Guys and Dolls". It's witty, romantic, with wonderful singing & acrobatic dancing that's superbe in the sewer scene. They've been rehearsing it at Aylesbury and are about to start performing for the public at Manchester. See  http://www.guysanddollsthemusical.co.uk/. One of the cast staying with us offered tickets for the dress rehearsal and we're so glad we saw it.
I asked husband, "what do you think of the scenery?" "Some of it's very nice" he unhesitatingly replied with that look in his eye that meant he wasn't thinking only of the backdrop. Watch the women dancing, and the men are pretty good to watch too.
Go and enjoy if you get the chance.

Yellow month

Apart from the day the glaziers took the roof off the conservatory, it hasn't rained much this month and the leaves are yellow and gently falling.  In this photo, 38 years ago, the weather was similar. The rain held off and the leaves gently fell.  It was a good day and the start of a good life.
The men of this somewhat yellow photo have fallen now.

Corfu visit: sun, sea, smells and sounds

We went to visit an old Norwegian friend who has a holiday house in Corfu, leaving just as the first English autumn morning dawned clear and crisp. In Corfu, there were so many flowers still blooming and the air was warm and the sea warmer - I summarised the week in two minutes at https://vimeo.com/141837801
Then we came back to the English autumn. Here, I see no flowers, but fruits everywhere and the bottom of the garden under the apple and pear trees smells of perry and cider. The leaves, though not yet fallen, are shades of red, russet, orange and yellow. I need three times as many layers of clothes as I needed last week in Corfu and next week I  might even use gloves in the morning.

New start

Today, my 91-year old mother, newly widowed, moves to a new care home in a new town.  She's blind and her hearing is going.  Is she brave!

Helsinki

Four tranquil days by the sea, even on the sea too, sailing round the islands, like Isosaari we spent this week.  'Iso' is the Finnish for 'big and once I lived on Big Robert's Street - Isorobertinkatu.  'Katu', the Finnish equivalent of the Swedish word 'Gatu', means gate or street.
Daughter and I wandered the streets of Helsinki
and the market

Red cathedral, Helsinki

and the cathedrals, red and white.
We had a lovely evening meal with a Sibelius concert - we should have stayed there longer.

Finland is full of trees, pine trees and delicate silver birch trees. And water seems to make up half its land in lakes, not rivers.  In the fields of Suomenalinnea (an island off Helsinki where the Russians built a Finnish fortress - the Gibraltar of the North), we saw no cows or sheep or signs of rabbits, though I noticed that several Helsinki women walked poodles or dogs that looked a bit like poodles.  The streets were clean and clear, and pavements were wide for pedestrians and separate tracks for cyclists.


We ate reindeer meat, and berries - lingonberries and something like blue berries that were very palatable.
The ligon berries were however so tart that your cheeks watered.  I found a use for them by mixing them in with the butter-fired mushrooms I cooked in the evenings at the YHA hostel.
In the hostel, we met the usual friendly sort of foreigners.  An Indian couple from Ahmedabad advised me to visit again, and a very English gentleman with bottle-bottom thick spectacles introduced himself with "how do you do?"  After the usual pleasantries about where we came from he started a long story about how he came to lose his driving licence, a story that entailed him drawing my attention to the braces that held up his yellow knee length dungarees that he'd made for himself so he could attach his wooden leg more easily. Eccentric?

Eurokangas fabric store

Helsinki train station

Daughter found the most magnificently well stocked fabric shop and had a whale of a time examining various cloths to turn into coats, capes and costumes.

Damp Devon

Each year for some seven or eight years, husband and I have taken two or three grandchildren youth hostelling.  This year we aimed to do it again, but this time two parents came with us, and my daughter. This year the company made up for the rainy weather.
We visited SS Great Britain in Bristol on the way down there, the most fascinating old ship I've been on.  I've been on older ships (in Stockholm and in Portsmouth) but this one related to relatives that I could imagine in the 19th century who might have travelled to Australia on such a ship. Its engineering is amazing.  How did they work out the maths to create those structures?  They must have applied calculus and had the machinery to create the propellor and the bows.
On the Monday,  thought we'd hide from the rain by investigating the hidden underground passages of Exeter.  Unfortunately too many others had had the same idea and it was fully booked.  So we paddled around,saw the outside of the cathedral, picked some blackberries at the park and ride car park and went to see my revered first mother-in-law.
Later in the week some of us walked up Dunkery Beacon, and we visited Dunster Mill and went round  Dunster Castle, which was probably the most exciting event of the break - husband left his brolly there.  Yes we needed umbrellas all week.

Wedding hats

One of our daughters is marrying and we're told we have to wear hats.   Here are some hats that daughter and I have made.

Last week, granddaughter #1 turned up at tae kwon do in her new silver hat!  And here are inspirations:
https://uk.pinterest.com/rowleypolybird/hatspiration/
I think I'll photo hats at the wedding.

Fine art - first class print making

My sister's been awarded a first class honours in her fine arts degree after eight years balancing part time study with part time work.  Her final exhibition was a couple of months ago - introduced here https://audioboom.com/boos/3275106-ba-fine-arts-final-exhibition-2015.

My sister specialised in print-making Exploring through print-making.   Some of her papier mache look like death masks, and that's on purpose because she was exploring the theme of mortality.  Mortality interested her because of a number of deaths in our family over the last few years while she was studying. Hear her describe her work on this theme at https://audioboom.com/boos/3276557-fine-art-mortality-with-cath-hartnett.


The last photo is of a papier mache of our mother's hand, frail with age. Even through the paper, you can  see the wedding ring on her fourth finger.

Up, not about

My father is out of hospital after several weeks.  He and my mother are together to celebrate their 65 wedding anniversary.    But their spirits are not up.  Mum is happier now that Dad is with her, but he's bed bound, not only can't get up and out of bed but can hardly turn himself in the bed.  His only comfort is listening to audio books.  Mum was eating with other people in the care home till he came out, and now her only company is him.
As aged Aunty E keeps saying "it's old age and dry rot!" And Mum and Dad feel rotten.
Nevertheless, their loyal younger friends in the parish gathered today for their anniversary mass, signed a card for them, iced a cake and sent sweet smelling jasmine.  Mum and Dad must have done something special to have so many people care.

First Holy Communion

Allelulia, sing to Jesus

We sang as the last hymn of the First Communion mass today.  Most of the time, most of us did not sing because the choir sang, and because we didn't know the words of the hymns.  But this hymn, "Allelulia, sing to Jesus", is a hymn that a couple of my singing relatives know, and did they sing out with grins on their faces at the words

"thunder like a mighty flood"

They loved it. Mind you, I love their singing.

It was a lovely ceremony, with just ten children taking their First Communion at a Blackfriars family mass in Oxford.  The children concentrated on the mass, not sitting with their families but at the front, like guests of honour.  After the mass, they were presented not only with certificates, but also with a set of rosary beads each, and advised to bring them the next two visits because one of the Dominicans was going to do something with them.  I love that idea, not just giving a relevant gift, but helping the children to see it as more than just a pretty trinket, but as something to help them develop further spiritually.

What a lucky little relative we have who belongs to such a church community.

Lovely Lola lost

This young, elegant little cat, an adventurous beastie, has been living next door to us for nearly a year, getting bolder and bolder, tripping across our patio every day to leap over the next wall, into the court and out to the street.  She caught a pigeon on our lawn earlier in the spring, taking it down to the bottom of garden to eat it.  Twice I've found her in my hens' run, causing a lot of clucking, fortunately hens 1:Lola 0. Initially she teased our old cat Cheeky by pouncing on her sleeping, but gradually they reached a truce so Lola would pass without the pair of them spatting and she would eat Cheeky's food only when Cheeky had had enough.  Yesterday evening, Lola was surprised by big black Torres passing and they had a cat fight, which she lost, being trapped between two large plant pots. This morning I watched Lola chasing the flies on the lawn in the sunshine, and later sitting lady-like on the patio, perhaps smelling where she and Torres had been.
This afternoon she was knocked down in the street, and then run over by two or three more cars.  I've seen a squirrel killed in the same spot. I wish the council would put a speed bump just at that angle in the street where it bends slightly and if you go too fast you can't see quickly enough if there's an obstacle.  One day it'll be a child runs down the steps and under a car.

Holiday topics

Toastmaster topics master this week asked us to speak about holidays, e.g.

• "What is the best holiday you have ever had?"  
• "Do you prefer to holiday on the beach, or have a more active holiday like cycling?  Explain"
• "Would you holiday in the UK or go overseas?    Why"

One of us had to speak to, "Have you ever had a disaster on holiday", which should elicit a humorous litany of woes, but had she asked me to speak, it would have upset the room. The most disastrous holiday I ever had ended at a quarter to one on 23 August 1996. When the disaster happened, the holiday ended. Another of the topic questions was, "would you take out holiday insurance?" That August we had insurance as usual, but only for the usual four out of the five of our party, and I had to pay out a couple of hundred pounds to get one of us home!  Do I need to assure you that now I always have insurance?

The last topic was open to the room, "has anyone gone abroad on Xmas day?".  Yes - and that was probably one of my most memorable holiday, if only because it was the first one I had away from my parents and family when I was 22.  Booked in summer, whilst suffering from a party-induced hangover, my housemate and I flew to an Austrian skiing resort, Mayerhofen.  Housemate got all the gear, onesie ski-suit, gloves, hat, and I, not knowing if I'd like it, wore my English weather water-proofs.  Housemate put on her skis for the first time in our first class, faced up the hill, stood up, and slid backwards, thus promptly falling over.  She went back to the hotel where she spent the rest of the week, kindly donating me her fantastic onesie, a  garment I wore there and then, and for many years after both skiing and later on winter gliding fields.  I discovered I loved skiing and had some aptitude for it. I spent Christmas lunch alone on the top of a mountain, outside an Austrian ski restaurant, eating my sandwich and enjoying the cold crisp wonderful Alpine air - a good Christmas holiday.

Family favourites talking

It is so nice to have grown up children who can talk to you adult-to-adult.  Over supper, husband, daughter and I were discussing showers, the difference between showers and baths, and the hygiene of showers.  This involved explaining fluid dynamics with reference to Bernoulli.  Have you heard of his work? He studied and explained how differences on pressure affected water and air flow and his theories are relevant to gliding, and to shower curtain hygiene. This principle explains why gliders fly, and why shower curtains gather germs, and it's fluid mechanics  that you would study at honours level in mathematics or physics.  Daughter did not wince a moment when husband explained the theory and he gave me a thumbs up when I asked, "when you have a shower, what does the shower curtain do?   Does it move in or out? That's the effect that Bernoulli models"
Similarly, decades ago, at meal time, I mentioned something about educational theory - Piaget's ideas of how a child saw and compared volumes when asked. My teacher mother exclaimed in delight that now there was someone in the family who knew what she was talking about. Isn't a pleasure to be able to discuss ideas with your grown-up family?