I will post later in the week. I’m having a bit of a health worry and I have a ton of catch up gardening (which stops me worrying).
If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, enjoy the sunshine, if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, enjoy it stopping, catch up later.
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Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that I visited this topic previously many years ago. As this blog has been going so very long, there is a possibility I was a mere child in my fifties when I did the writing. I recall (vaguely, like watching a black and white film through custard) that I considered the principle sign of ageing to be a fondness for wearing cardigans. I may also have waxed lyrical about the possibility of scarves and slippers.
The French have a saying about it which translates as: If youth only knew, if age only could. Droit dans, soeur!
With the stupidity of youf and, obviously, from this point of view, I didn’t take into account bits dropping off.
Bits dropping off becomes a major topic of interest when you get well past retirement. I always thought the purpose of retirement was to give you time for hobbies. It’s not. It’s because you can’t do an honest day’s work without falling asleep in the middle, or, bits, dropping off. Fingers and toes are top of the list. These are underappreciated until age and arthritis sets in. For no reason your thumb hurts, swells up and refuses to help you take the top off a bottle. Toes just go on strike. I have a toe that sticks up because I broke it when I was in my twenties and the Xray missed the hairline fracture so I continued to wear high heels and it set. Up. Last November, still in sandals and trying to prolong the lockdown summer, I walked into a drawer, broke it again and didn’t go to hospital, which I’d heard was full of people sneezing. My toe went an interesting shade of black and purple as if it was auditioning for a limp-on part in a Gothic novel. It was interesting colours and awfully painful for weeks. So I loosened my orthopaedic sandals and carried on. But I forgot to tighten them again, so, in a few months, my other foot fell into the hole I’d created. I kept waking up with a swollen ankle. thinking I had sprained it. I did arch strengthening exercises for weeks (toes like a duck, up on your points, sloooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly down.) to no avail, still waking with a sprained ankle and by now walking on the wrong side of that ankle instead of the foot and gardening like a deer run over by a tractor.
Then I remembered and did my sandals up. Der.
You see, your what’s it called goes. Um. Thingy. Memory! The part of your brain that hasn’t dropped off is asking: why are we limping? No, really, why are we limping? Have we always walked on our ankle, like this? This hurts! Is this normal?
Readers who also have shortened memories, (quick quiz: what did you have for lunch yesterday? Me neither.) will recall me going on a not diet a week ago when the OH bought a new pair of scales that actually work and tell the truth, which is, obvs. a shocking thing for a pair of scales to do. I don’t really want to know and I am the woman who, at my last bone density scan found myself plea bargaining with the nurse about my height. That drops off as well. So, even if you stay the same weight, if you’re losing height, you’ll be overweight. Get short enough and you’ll look like you’ve been sat on by an elephant. How fair is that?
I took heed of the treacherous item, climbed upon it three times a day (never get weighed at teatime) and behaved accordingly. Two days ago my intestines played up and I had a couple of days when I couldn’t eat anyway. So I have lost weight. Ten years ago, I would have been delighted and amazed, triumphant and obnoxiously self congratulatory.
Now, however, what I am mainly, is wrinkly.
Fat makes you look round and youthful.
Wrinkles make you look wrinkly. There’s a character in the Simpsons who is very very wrinkly, if she goes on strike I could be a stand-in.
Everything loses collagen, including your bladder and the capacity of your bladder.
I am the idiot who redesigned a house so I had a walk-in wardrobe. Anyone with intelligence (I remember having intelligence – or was that someone else?) would have designed a walk-in toilet rather than having to trek along the landing six times a night. Any senior reader who wishes to write saying: Six times a night! Only six, that’s luxury that is, wait till you’re eighty, sunshine, may. I will definitely publish all polite comments about how often we leave the warmth of bed for the long trek, we need to know this stuff briefly before we forget it forever or until we are eighty, when I will be writing about the wonderful exercise available to eighty year olds during the night time and the necessity of teatime being the last cup of tea for the next five hours. Like the motorway petrol station in the back of beyond that warns you : Last petrol for fifty miles, fill up now, three gold bars per pint and for a diamond necklace we’ll sneeze in your tyres too. And you think they’re just trying to drum up business until you run out in a particularly lonesome stretch with wolf noises.
Have I mentioned memory?
Then there’s memory as well, of course.
You already know about my cataracts affecting my poof raiding, so I’ll not bing ern a pout thait.
Then there’s tinnitus. My friend lived in a house haunted by constant whining noises.
It was actually her mother unable to find the bottle opener, but she did have tinnitus and said the drink helped her forget.
I have broken off two weak fingernails that I was just beginning to grow, gardening. So I have coated them with the strengthening stuff and now have two shiny nails, that gouge out lumps of skin every time I blow my nose and all the rest plain, but fortunately odd nails are fashionable.
I have been gardening for a week straight, apart from a day at the hairdressers, re-laid a lawn, dug everything and planted whatever I could lay my hands on or wrest off the slugs. Ten years ago I would have felt, fit, trim, worked-out.
Now I feel about a hundred and three, with wrinkles. I have wrinkly arms, swollen ankles, a wrinkly chin, a tight grey perm and a big fat thumb.
So I’m going to have a cardigan, a scarf and an early night with six loo breaks from sleep to hobble down the corridor, in the hope I can remember exactly why I am hobbling down the corridor on my ankles in the middle of the night.
Seven signs of ageing, upon consideration, may have been somewhat of an understatement.
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If you are a reader from the beginning of JaneLaverick.com (and for the sake of anyone new, this is my real name, who would invent it?), well done! In September it will be twelve years. The first thing I wrote about, the very first funny column, was how to get weighed to weigh less than you actually weigh.
Weight and the losing of the extra, has been a hot and miserably itchy topic with me since the 1960s, when my dear flat chested mother, alarmed at the way things were developing with me, decided to diet me and weigh me every week For my 18th birthday. prompted by my mother, a cousin (who I have not spoken to much, since) bought me a pair of scales which I am still using. There they sit in the wardrobe, covered in 1960s flower power stick-on plastic. The enemy.
I wrote, as you will recall, if you are the loyal reader (you and me against the world, naturally) of interesting techniques involving getting weighed standing in the wardrobe, with one hand on the garment rail, flex the bicep, take the reading, relax, back handspring, double full dismount, shove yer arms back, bow.
Also, step on scales breathe in, taking care to only inhale lighter air molecules. The necessity of sleeping as heavily and sweatily as possible and getting weighed first thing, after blowing your nose.
I did not touch on assisted weighing, as practised in clinics, I have heard, where paper-thin girls, dressed in lab coats of great brevity, assist you on to the scales by elevating parts of your anatomy (legs, arms, stomach, etc.) so that you get your core weight (Cor! Is that all?) And, of course, only getting weighed on a Flatterday, at any time during the month of Yesvember.
And all was well, up to a point. I knew where I was and what I was, or at least what one leg propped up on the door frame was, then the OH, who has spent the lockdown eating, spoiled it all by buying new scales.
I got weighed on the new scales.
Horrors.
There is nothing for it, I will just have to bite the bullet. Or, to be more exact, bite the bullet but under no circumstances masticate and swallow.
Three and a half years of intestinal troubles, following five years of sitting in a car to and fro (see Dementia Diaries) have done me no favours.
The only good note is that my intestines are on the mend, at last, and this year, when I grow cucumbers, I’ll be able to eat them, instead of giving them all to the neighbours.
In fact I might just do that, eat what I grow. I did it when I was young and thin and had a greenhouse.
If you are a good friend you will not email recipes. There is a massive and profitable world-wide industry based on recipes for people who wish to lose weight. No one seems to have spotted that the cooking is the problem. Move away from the frying pan, dear, put the bottle of oil down. Well done, good giant!
I have read that to change the world you need to change one thing to begin.
So I am going to stop eating after seven at night, which is knocking back an hour and a half.
I am going to stop Internet shopping late at night. Paddling up the Big River with chocolate in the canoe is right out.
And I will cut down every meal by one spoonful.
And I’m going to put the birthday chocolate, mine and from the S&H, in a cupboard until the new, traitorous scales are singing a different tune.
Just that – I’ll let you know.
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Erroneous beliefs
Anything eaten standing up has no calories.
Anything eaten whilst standing behind an open fridge door has no calories.
It is a good idea as you get older to have extra padding in case you fall over.
Ice cream eaten from the tub, with a dessert spoon, has no calories.
Gift chocolates do not count.
Butter is emollient and rushes through, leaving no trace.
Burping after a fizzy drink releases the calories into the air, harmlessly.
It is not fat if it is encased in elastic shapewear, it is smooth.
Fat on the buttocks is helpful because it has evolved over eons to assist fast running and will be fuel when you enter a marathon.
Thin chips are less fattening than wide chips.
Any fried snack loses calories in the factory when it is put in the bag.
Sitting still but breathing a lot can assist weight loss.
You should eat a lot of sugar, otherwise dentists will have nothing to do.
Having massive knockers is a sign of great beauty.
A double chin can assist in weight loss by preventing you looking directly at the plate.
Food eaten in restaurants does not count if you have to wait between courses.
Sweets were invented in antiquity, to refuse them draws fire from the gods.
Most of the developed world is fat, so it’s OK to join in.
Fat people are cuddly, if your arms are long enough.
If you don’t sit for hours watching television, people will stop making programmes and chairs.
And…if you don’t eat as much the sewerage system will lose interest and close up.
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I used to read my horoscope avidly, in the days when it was in the newspaper. I also had a list of astrologers in my Favourites on the computer. By scrolling through the list I could even find a favourable one on a day when everyone else was predicting gloom and doom.
As the years in Al-Anon family groups ticked by and I learned about CONTROL and the way it spread through families of alcoholics like mycelium underground, popping up everywhere after a shower of alcohol in poisoned toadstools, I realised that was the reason I read the horoscopes so avidly; I had ceded control of my own life to my mother, my OH and anyone else who couldn’t control their temper, drinking, or outbursts and had decided to control me instead. The horoscopes were an attempt at a map of the unknown road ahead, which is what you’ve got with someone else at the wheel.
So I eliminated all astrologers except Georgia Nicols, because she is hilarious.
However.
Today there is a possibility that 1) the full moon coupled with 2) change in the power of signs to the next one from mine and 3) Scorpio doing something dodgy and 4) Something in trine, or rising, or dropping off or in opposition and Mercury retrograde, all combine to predict that: Today anyone called Jane and a Taurus is going to have a very expensive and generally rubbish day. The only consolation being that George Clooney (exactly ten years younger than me) is also having a shit day.
It started on Saturday, this Wednesday.
The OH suggested on Saturday, lying, as he was, at full length in a chair, watching me fly around getting the house and the food and the everything else ready for the arrival of the grandchildren and their parents, on Sunday, that to prepare the drive I needed to move my car out of the way. I was in such a rush I decided it was easier to do that than argue, which I did not have time to do, so I parked it in front of the garage door, leaving plenty of room on the drive.
Although the year-long build has been generally satisfactory, a less wonderous feature is the amount of rain generated by the new sloping roof. In a thunderstorm, such as we suddenly had on Saturday, the gutters overflow in a waterspout, on to my little car, parked under a waterfall. I knew this was daft and moved it later when I had to go out for something I’d forgotten, subsequently sitting further up the drive in a hail shower that sounded like hammers on the roof, trapped inside watching the snow sliding sideways across the windscreen. In May.
Sunday was a family day, only slightly spoiled by the OH taking the family round the new build and taking all the credit for something he didn’t design. help with, finance, or even get out of bed for, while I was doing cooking things.
Monday we just sat, knackered.
So it was Tuesday when I got into the car and found I was paddling. I drove round to the supermarket and it sounded as if I was driving a swimming pool.
I rang the garage and asked if it was safe to drive to the garage and the garage asked if the water was anywhere near the electrics.
Where are the electrics?
Oh, all over.
This morning I drove with some trepidation to the garage, expecting to be electrocuted momentarily. The OH followed and brought me back.
The garage rang, expressing surprise at the hell of a lot of rain (their phrase) and the dampness of the carpets. It would be necessary to the tune of £600 just for the labour to get the seats out and the carpets up and necessary to the tune of another £600 plus VAT to have new carpets. The OH suggested taking it somewhere cheaper, but as I plan to part exchange this car into that garage, that was right out.
I then drove the OH’s car to my dentist’s appointment, having first nearly backed it into the garage door. By the time I got to the next town I’d got the hang of it and my heart had stopped hammering, right up until the bit where the dentist said the only permanent way to cure the stain on my front tooth which had developed in a lockdown year with no dentists, was not a new filling but a new wrap-around doodah (the leaflet for which I carefully left on the waiting room floor in shock at the price.) £600 for this tooth and, don’t you know, you have to get the one next to it done too, to make them the same colour, otherwise you’ll have one candy striped front tooth and one next to it with the usual blue swirls on it, so that one will be £600 as well.
£2,400 poorer (in one afternoon,) with £3,000 per eye cataracts to come, I switched on the computer to find my latest literary agent’s rejection.
Will Scorpio make friends with Aquarius? Will the second declination of the third house put the mockers on the advancement of Libra? Will the garage find out where the water is getting in? Will I ever find a literary agent who isn’t a scam or a rejecter? Will it be dry enough tomorrow to wash the bath mats?
It’s a right whatsit, Mercury Retrograde, or as Georgia put it: Today’s Moon Alert takes place in your house of money, avoid spending.
Quite so.
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I usually write this blog on a Sunday morning. I also write any other time if I have something to say. But I am not expecting to be writing next Sunday morning, because, all things being equal, the S&H and family are coming to visit for the first time in eighteen months.
Well, that’s the plan.
However, the S&H is getting his first Covid vaccination the previous day, let’s hope he doesn’t have an adverse reaction. They live in Wales and we live in England and the rules are different and can change at any time. The Covid variants spreading like blazes in other parts of the country, brought back by international travellers, could cause an emergency lockdown and so on and on and on.
It’s a bit Pollyanna but the only way to save your mental health in all of this is to cultivate a win-win attitude. I am thinking that if they suddenly can’t come, I won’t have to cook lunch for seven, but I will tidy up, so I’ll have a nice clean house. I won’t have to worry about the OH suddenly turning nasty. This is happening ever more regularly. I can still see them virtually, thank goodness for video conferencing.
This is happening with everything. In case you are struggling for positives here are a few to borrow until you can think of some for yourself.
If you can’t go shopping you save money. If you can spend money, you are helping the economy.
If you lockdown and don’t see people, you are helping to stop the spread of the virus.
If you can only talk to loved ones by email or telephone at least you can do that and cheer them up.
And so on.
I still find the most helpful tool for getting through this and every other negative circumstance in my life is the gratitude list. Every night, before I go to sleep I rehearse in my head the good things that have happened in the day. They might be just a very nice conversation with someone. It isn’t until you are lonely, or living with someone incapable of producing two cheerful sentences on the trot that you realise what a blessing a positive interchange can be.
It could be almost any encounter with nature, including the blackbird singing in the garden. A couple of days ago I was digging in the soil, assisted by the robin, who was carefully ignoring the big worms in favour of collecting small grubs and insects, so he must be feeding youngsters. From my window I watch the bluetit fluttering up and down the rainwater pipe, checking for anything tasty hiding behind the pipe. I also watch next door’s cat.
Here he is keeping an eye on his own garden from the roof of my shed. The fence you can see behind him belongs to the garden at the bottom of mine. They did not like the OH putting up a shed, so installed garden fencing with arched canes on the top. Every morning when I open the sitting room curtains, the cat, who has been waiting, rushes up and down every one of the fence loops until he gets to the end, then drops into my garden, rushes to see me, remembers half way he’s a cat, licks his paw and strolls off round the back of the shed. After he has had a nice drink out of the rainwater barrel he goes home for breakfast and then reappears on the shed roof.
Last week we had a note through the door about a lost cat and the following day another note to say it had been found and all was well.
I am still putting the library out on the drive and still have at least once a week a cheerful conversation with library users and have had three actual notes of thanks put through the door.
From the beginning of the Awfulness there has not been a day when I couldn’t find something for the gratitude list at the end of it. That year has included postponed cancer check-ups. verbal attacks, health panics and good old too much month at the end of the money.
The gratitude list gets easier the more you practise doing it. It can have a transformative effect on your life. I am grateful I know about it (and that is item one on the list tonight.)
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Boris Noris, stupid boy
Had habits you could not enjoy.
His table manners were not great
He let you watch him masticate.
He licked his knife, he sucked his fork
And, as he ate, he always talked.
He was a windy child and grew
And as he grew his farts did too,
He liked to bend his knee and crouch
And hold his breath to let them out
And if they smelled quite awful too,
He liked to point and say: ‘It’s you!’
As he walked his shoes would whiff
His socks were always damp and stiff.
His mum, who was the village bike
Let him do just as he liked.
If he was rude, she thought it funny
She really was a dreadful mummy.
One day, Boris, child of renown
Took a bus into the town
Feeling he needed some enriching
He’d come equipped to do some nicking.
Inside his jacket a bag he’d pegged
And a rugby sock down his trouser leg.
The sweet shop was his primary mark
Then the stationers beside the park,
The paper shop, the cake shop and a quick foray
Into a shop of ladies’ lingerie.
Although in there he did not linger
Nothing tempted his itchy finger.
Alas it was not long before
He tried the massive department store.
On the ground floor some of his dodges
Were pocketing wallets and trousering watches.
Up in the lift to ‘Fashions We Love’
He stole Harris Tweed scarves and cashmere gloves.
Next floor up, in ‘The Home Cocktail Bar’
He nicked a silver device, for taking lids off jars
A diamond set corkscrew and a gold plated cane
And a brush for scrubbing inside of a drain.
Up to the next floor in ‘Cash And Accounts’
He found unattended money and trousered large amounts.
Of all his dubious strategies
This was the most defective
Attracting the attention of the lithesome store detective.
The store detective – name of Keith –
Cried: ‘Stop right there, you little thief
Do not run into Rugs and Lights
Or I will have you bang to rights!’
But Boris Noris, loud and fat
Would not hang around for that.
Shouting: ‘Alligator, later!.’
He made a dash for the escalator.
With the nickings banging like an alarmer
He clanked on to the staircase like a boy in armour.
But farting, blowing raspberries and out of puff,
He missed the first step and that was enough,
Like a ball on a bowling alley, downwards he tumbled
Shouting: ‘Out of the way, you gits! I’ve been rumbled!’
Two steps lower, dainty Lady Mary Chalmers
Was chucked over the handrail, into Men’s Pyjamas.
Decked in Winter Winceyette and Y Fronts, double banded,
She leapt towards the moving stairs, and grabbed him as he landed.
She handed him to Keith, arriving like a train,
And was removed to the fourth floor café, for revival with champagne.
Then Keith, the store detective, got Boris by the Noris
And marched him, clanking like a tank, right into the office.
Where the manager relieved him of all that he was able
And wrote it down and spread it out in heaps upon the table.
There was:
A glass globe full of gobstoppers
A brush for scrubbing drains,
A box of chewy, fizzy sweets,
A pouch of goldish chains,
A box of pencil sharpeners,
A leather-bound shopping list,
A model of Euston Station,
Two bags of salted crisps,
A cowbell and a bale of hay,
Some Fair Isle ankle socks,
A bottle for topping pot pourri
And a bottle for oiling locks,
A diamond thing, a goldy thing,
Six wallets and two watches,
A lipstick and a handbag,
And a book of carpet swatches,
Some scarves, pound coins and ten pound notes,
An album for ‘Photos that I love’,
A birthday cake, two custard tarts,
And a pair of cashmere gloves. (Pink.)
Police arrived, they took him off
They gave his mum a phone,
When she got there she had to give
Much dosh to get him home.
Was he contrite?
Well, heck as like,
He did not feel a fool
But boasted round the village
And an awful lot at school.
A date was set to go to court,
Boris Noris was marched in,
Sticking his tongue out, thumbing his nose
And doing tons of farting.
His brief dragged him up
Shut him up and said to sit and wait,
They were waiting for the magistrate
The magistrate was late. (Traffic.)
‘Stuff you,’ said Boris Noris,
’I really do not care
Who is standing on the bench
Or sitting in the chair
They can come from far and near
From bath and bed and loo
No stupid-looking magistrate
Can tell me what to do!’
And then the usher called for ush
From retailers, stationers and farmers
And said, ‘Pray silence for the magistrate –
Who is Lady Mary Chalmers.’
Boris stopped mid-fart and went white.
Over all the rest I draw a veil,
The story is not pretty.
Boris got his just desserts
Banged up inside the city.
He learned his lesson,
Quite reformed – he got a nasty fright
Now he only ever farts under the blankets
On his own, in his bed, in the night.
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Complaints to JaneLaverick.com – I thank you.
I have been thinking. Again, I know. About the things that really matter.
The first is good health. After the last decade I consider myself a bit of an expert on this, because I haven’t had it and have been around and caring for people without it in a terminal, eventually sort of way. I know we’re all terminal eventually and the realisation of this as it truly applies to oneself is quite something. Tomorrow is something tricky to appreciate until it is in short supply. After the cancer diagnosis and the bungled surgery I had plenty of days where I thought tomorrow would not come. It came for me but not for my cousin.
The first time a close acquaintance buys the farm, hands in their dinner pail, goes the long journey and even, horrors, actually dies is a very sobering moment. It happened when I was fifty and the school friend who shared my birthday died. She had had a hysterectomy but the cancer was ovarian, and missed, it was just a few weeks from the real diagnosis to death.
In the modern world we have used many advances to distance ourselves from death. In most countries we pay specialists to care for the dead person, to attend to whatever last rites there are and dispose of the body. For many people in the developed world the first sight of a dead relative may come late in life or never.
Instead we worship at the platform-heeled, gold-sandaled foot of youth. We cherish inexperience and appearance and devalue age and knowledge. This is strange because as a species we have more age and knowledge than ever before. Five hundred years ago when life expectancy was around forty years, senior members of the village were venerated and their opinions, formed of long experience, were sought. Now anyone who can flick through a smart phone has access to the wisdom of ages but actually only knows how to flick their thumb up and down a small screen.
To acquire the wisdom of age you have to live a long life. I wouldn’t say I had the wisdom of age, despite just having had a very significant birthday, but I do know a very great deal more than I did when I was thirty, when I believed I knew enough to mother a child. Having been a teacher, maybe I did, but I would have to say the bulk of knowledge of what people are like and what they do has probably been garnered in the last twenty years.
The last ten years has taught me that surviving life-threatening disease and medical conditions is largely a matter of luck. If you happen to get the rubbish surgeon on an off day you will be in for several years of suffering while your body sorts itself out. If you go to A&E while the B team are on diagnosis, it can take up to a year until someone is bright enough to figure out what is wrong..
If you are like the OH and have inherited a constitution from some very wiry long-lived survivors you can push your luck quite a long way uphill.
Unless your N&D are made of strong stuff you will be on your own eventually.
There is an episode of the Simpsons in which Marge tells Bart: you have to be kind to your children because they get to choose your old folk’s home.
What all of this means is that if you have any good physical capability left anywhere, including basic stuff like being able to digest food, walk on your legs and heal when you are broken, enjoy every minute of that and give thanks for it. Add it to your gratitude list every night, so that when it disappears you won’t be bitter and twisted but will remember that you did have it once and appreciated it.
The other thing that really matters is freedom. You would think in the modern world we would all be free. Nothing has pointed up the case that this is not the case more than the pandemic. Countries with free citizens who voted in their politicians and had the freedom to vote them out again if they decided they didn’t like them are the countries where the population are in the process of being vaccinated.
Freedom is life. Good health is life.
Be grateful if people are kind when you are poorly, selflessness is a rare and wonderful quality. Be kind yourself and hope it comes back around to you.
If you have health and freedom be grateful and happy because you have possibilities.
And with possibilities anything is possible.
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I think it is good for any artist to reach beyond their zone of familiarity and essay another medium altogether.
Many years ago I did crazy patchwork from the very pure motives of using up expensive pieces of material, rather than throw them away. There is a cushion, recovered often, with a crazy patchwork cover underneath, in velvet, and a stool cover, the same. All hand sewn with interesting stitches. I also sleep under a quilted bedspread which I made, more than thirty years ago, from some good fabric found on a market stall.
However it wasn’t until I went to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC that I saw the stupendous levels to which some quilters take the craft to produce actual artworks in fabric.
I am so far behind that, as to be grovelling on the floor, but I have made a quillow for the step-mum-in-law.
The quillow is a handy invention , a quilt that turns into a pillow. If you are speaking British English rather than American English it should probably be called a quushion.
Here is one side of it
Here is the other.
The entire quilt fits into the cushion.
This on one side and
this on the other side. Everything is patchwork, including the pocket, at the left of the picture that it all fits into.
I didn’t have a pattern I just saw one and had a go.
It is imperfect but I enjoyed every minute of it. In the middle the sewing machine which I had bought from a shopping channel, broke down, entailing hours of online correspondence, a trawl of Tinternet to find a repair shop still open in lockdown, miles away. I took the machine there and left it, retrieving it some weeks later.
For the first time I used a walking foot, a sewing machine foot which passes fabric through from the bottom and the top simultaneously, thus avoiding the wrinkles. It worked well, all the mistakes are my own originals.
This is definitely not art.
Incidentally to fold the quillow into its own bag you need to place it, bag underneath, fold the sides over each other in line with the edges of the bag and then turn it all over. Place your hands inside the bag which is now uppermost, turn that inside out and fold the quilt into the bag.
It lives on your comfy chair, looking like a cushion until you fancy a nap, whereupon you unfold it into a blanket with a very handy pocket for your book, or chocolate.
I really enjoyed this. It was probably the work of a week, if I hadn’t had to lose the machine in the middle and it would have been quicker if I hadn’t patchworked everything in sight, but that’s me. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it a lot.
Stay tuned for more adventures in quilting. A lap quilt is a nice gift, it’s the hug we aren’t allowed to give yet and a very good way to pass the time in creativity of a different and interesting sort. It also has the benefit that, if you are giving it away, you cannot hit the ‘I hate this rubbish thing, why did I make it?’ wall that usually occurs a few days after perpetrating anything, because you’ve packed it in the box you can see on the floor and sent it off.
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I have been watching, with interest, a video tutorial on how to fold a made item back into a bag which is part of it.
In the opinion of this blogger who could not set up a film studio at home for toffee (be grateful) this facility is far too easy to access for those who have the platform but nothing to put on it.
The teacher of how to fold this into that, got it wrong twice before there was a break in the video, during which she went off to someone else’s site and watched how to do it. Sadly, by the time she returned to her own broadcast the knowledge had wriggled through her fingers and off down the drain that is Tinternet. Twice more she paused, to absorb the knowledge that would classify her as an expert, were she only able to teach what she knew and each time what she knew proved to be less than she had hoped. The more she struggled, the less she knew. If only I knew how to embed the reference to take you to the video you could watch it yourself, however you will not struggle to find would-be professors of this and that online, a few may know what they are on about and even fewer may be able to transmit their knowledge.
I always underrate my teaching skills even though I have taught probably hundreds of dyslexic readers with my own system, which always works in two hours twice a week for two years. The S&H has inherited my skills and can talk the most terrified through anything computer-related and make them think it’s their own cleverness, without speeding up the pace or raising his voice one scintilla. Last week he talked me through getting my printer working again, which involved reading numbers, (big ones) out of the inside of the machine (right inside near the little fused wires, all written in gibberish.) By the time the printer worked I felt as if I had successfully fought several dragons and won and he didn’t even smirk, and I am his mother.
However, in the matter of teaching the grandchildren………………
I offered to teach them to read by video conference call at the start of the lockdown. I was greeted with disbelief: You couldn’t teach them because we can’t even make them sit down. How are you going to make them sit down?
Teaching lesson One, you know.
The OH is in line for worst teacher of the century. He cannot demonstrate, just takes over, does the task with swearing and then goes away. The S&H might have been a million pound footballer if the OH, requested when the S&H was a baby, to teach him to catch a ball hadn’t just thrown it at him, said ‘Oh you are hopeless’ and walked off. The S&H was about ten months old. I would have done it but was too occupied in running him through the interrogative pluperfect and similar joys. Should I not have attended to his ball skills as well?
Tinternet is a seemingly inexhaustible source of inexpert help. I am reminded of my dim cousin teaching me how to smoke cigarettes. We purchased two cigarettes and one match in a small conical paper bag at the local sweet shop and them walked the area around the shop. ‘Suck,’ she instructed, and, a moment later, ‘blow.’
It was harder to unlearn the habit thirty years later, which I did on my own.
I failed miserably at playing the piano, which was a mixture of my own reluctance to practise and a terrible teacher. She would let me in and I had to admire what she was wearing. I sat at the instrument and then had to admire her legs, poking like two sticks for building a fire out of the bottom of her none-too-clean pleated skirt. To this day if anyone asks if they have good legs, it takes me right back. I began with scales and, as soon as I was settled into them, she would pop off to the kitchen for a nip of sherry. Mostly, if I faltered, at the start of the lesson she would remember to put the glass down before appearing at the door to give instruction. She also taught Latin from ‘Teach yourself Latin’ and I knew more than she did from lesson one. Her main trick was to write : Caesar adsum iam forte and read it out as Caesar had some jam for tea and then laugh, less at the start of the lesson and more as the bottle depleted. I eventually mentioned the sherry to my mother, hoping to avoid lessons altogether but was sent elsewhere to fail my first exam and give up.
There are demonstrators aplenty on shopping television and online. The good ones are in short supply and the dreadful ones are hilarious. The television camera does nothing to indicate who is a successful teacher and who is pants until the sales roll in or roll away. There is nothing quite as good as 120 children from a sink estate on a Friday afternoon and just me to keep them instructed and entertained, for accelerated learning in teach yourself teaching.
It’s interesting learning, teaching, what you mainly learn about at first, is yourself.
And, of course, how to put the blanket back in the bag (had another look, no still no joy.)
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No, not me dear. Chance would be a fine thing. There is recent research that has discovered that people with huge thighs live longer than the lean flanked, so that’s all your top models not getting out of bed for less than a heap of money, doing it in a time-limited way. Whereas us chunky-thighed folk will continue to waddle good naturedly to the door at any time of day or night for years and years and years. Of course, the answer could be a built-in to the question: maybe your lanky unwilling riser is unwilling to do anything else for you at all and gets regularly offed by enraged would-be employers, but people are kind and helpful to the cheerfully thunder-thighed well into old age. I am still waiting on health news that is favourable to the short and shrinking. One day there will be science that says it’s the best you can be, to be short with fat legs and straight hair and I will be so IN you’ll be glad to know me. ‘Oh yes.’ you will say, ‘I know her very well. She has often oscillated past under my nose somewhere, cracking a joke.’
My time is yet to come, meanwhile what I have been making that is tall and thin, is cards. There is apparently a vogue for tall thin cards that has nothing to do with rumours put about by paper mills who think they have sold us all the square cards we are going to buy and are yet resisting the blandishments of octagonal envelope manufacturers.
Here, therefore, some of my efforts.
It’s the Ikebana next stage. The Japanese lady’s face is made from a silk cocoon. There’s a man as well
doing some very masculine looking bonsai. These both contain my original watercolour miniature paintings out of the window. In fact out, as a direction, is figuring in everything arty I’m doing at present. I think art is an expression of hope in the same way that science fiction is an expression of fear.
My hope is all about all of us escaping from lockdown.
A small steel rule die of butterflies by Tim Holtz enabled me to cut butterflies from diverse materials. Thick card covered in gilding flakes coming out of the jar.
And alcohol ink decorated acetate that I made years ago but had never been able to cut with thin metal dies,is coming out of the bottle.
Either way it’s all about escaping.
The OH turned 70 a couple of days ago, so we went out on a bit of a shopping trip to Stratford on Avon because it was Shakespeare’s birthday too, Will was 457 and neatly, died on his birthday, some think of the celebrations. We found an orthopaedic shoe shop and I bought the OH some mind-bogglingly expensive shoes and then we went home because my intestines are playing up.
This is the thing about age. Bits drop off as your art improves. Think of the stuff our William might have written if he had lasted a bit longer.
I would never have used a day of my life making one card when I was younger. Each of the efforts above took several days and I have every intention of sending them to people who will probably just bin them. I think it’s worth doing.
I will be following the OH age-wise in a week or so and the way I think is the most noticeable change in me from my youth.
When I was younger I was extremely keen to be tall thin and cool, having failed to grasp that people who invest time in appearance do so because that’s what they’ve got.
I thought the best thing you could do was to earn a lot of money, having failed to realise that the more money you have, the more expensive things get.
I thought the point of art was to be sold and that sales validated the worth of the art.
But that will be the end of the art for a while because I’m back to writing. I know everyone else did a lockdown novel. Lockdown is when I stopped, now everyone is getting out and about I’m sitting indoors scribbling. I’m the antithesis of the tall cool trendsetter with the long lean flanks, striding ahead waving a flag in this year’s Panettone colours.
I am your comically undertall pal with one foot in philosophy, the other in art and the whole self in writing.
Scribo ergo sum.
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