little moments

A funny thing happened when I was walking from home to the local shops on Friday morning.  As I turned a corner I saw a woman on the opposite side of the road walking towards me.  I didn’t know her, but she was a similar age to me and carrying a bunch of tulips.  As she saw me, she called out with pleasure and started to cross the road towards me, speaking as she did so.  I was struck by a moment of doubt as I wondered if she was someone I SHOULD recognise and I checked over my shoulder to see whether she was actually greeting someone behind me.  This made her realise that she had taken me for someone else and as she reached my side she apologised.  We both laughed and agreed it was a case of mistaken identity, patted each other’s arm reassuringly and carried on our way.  What could have been an awkward moment turned into a little jewel of connection in the middle of an ordinary day.

I’m trying to pay more attention to these little moments.

the long haul

Steve and I have been married for 45 years. (No I can’t believe it either – surely we’re still in our carefree twenties).

I’ve been intrigued over the past few weeks to start noticing the artefacts (many of them wedding presents) that have made the journey with us.

It’s probably no surprise that stainless steel flatware would survive (and no doubt outlast us) just as my parents’ silverware survived them and came into our possession.  We love this Norwegian “Maya” cutlery and have six place settings, which we use mainly for special occasions.  There was a period when it came into everyday use, but the teaspoons vanished one by one, as teaspoons mysteriously do, and proved difficult (scarce and prohibitively expensive) to replace.

We were amused and gratified a few years ago when visiting an exhibition of twentieth century Scandinavian design in Glasgow to discover that our knives and forks were featured as design classics.

There are also quite a number of kitchen items, still in regular use, that date from 1972:

This well-used yellow canister contains porridge oats.

This bright yellow lemon squeezer shows no signs of age.

But this enamelled roasting dish has a more venerable appearance

And these sundry utensils have lost their paint, but are still perfectly serviceable.

Who knew that pyrex is so long-lasting?  These all came as part of a set (some have been broken).

We also have pyrex measuring jugs so well used that the measurement details have worn away.  They have been demoted to my studio for dyeing and felt making.

This glass decanter is sadly marred by limescale, but I love its fat bellied shape and the gorgeous heavy stopper.

We’re book hoarders, so many of our books predate our marriage, but there are three that were actually wedding presents or given to us at that time.

Perfect Cooking by the marvellous Marguerite Patten

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

 And the Oxford Book of English Verse

Textiles are not renowned for their longevity, but this Irish linen double damask tablecloth (impossible to photograph) has made the journey.  It really only comes out for Christmas and family celebrations, but is special to me because it was a gift from my Irish uncle and is covered in symbols of Irish history – a double bonus of Irish heritage and mind-boggling textile skill.

My make-do-and-mend personality is demonstrated by the backing fabric of this quilt.  Once upon a time it was a yellow bed-sheet.  Back in the day Habitat had fantastic deep-dyed bedlinen and we had two duvet and sheet sets in  bright yellow and royal blue.  Over time they wore out and went out of fashion (not necessarily in that order), but I still had a yellow sheet available for the dye-bath when I wanted to finish this quilt about ten years ago.

Clearly many things that started out on the journey with us have worn out or been discarded en route.  We are looking a little careworn ourselves.  (I really can't do selfies and I hate having my photo taken, so this is true love).  But somehow or another we're both still here, still married, still friends, not thrown away.  If you know me well, you know that I'm not a great one for sentimental language or expressions of love, but I am grateful for our mutual perseverance and loyalty and the love that has fuelled them.  We're also really grateful for the things that have been added to us over the years - notably three lovely daughters, their husbands and six grandchildren, plus dozens of wonderful friends.

Crystal clear*

 

I had breakfast in the bath this morning, which is something I haven’t done very often since moving to our current home twelve years ago.  This is partly because we now have an adequate shower and partly because we no longer live in a house with bathroom and kitchen on the same level, which made the process of making breakfast while the bath was running a less risky affair.  Anyway, whatever; it triggered memories of that former house and former times and, as I lowered my head under the surface and my ears filled up with water it triggered another reminder.  I have been a hearing-aid user for fifteen years. 

 

 

This is probably not an anniversary I expect to celebrate, but it is worthy of some thought and reflection.  I was fifty when I acquired my first analogue hearing aid having requested a hearing check earlier that year.  Unusually (I think) I was one of those people who became aware of my hearing loss before other people started insisting.  My father gradually lost his hearing as he got older and I had strong memories of the period before he succumbed to testing while he insisted that we had all started mumbling.

A lot of people are familiar with the process of having spectacles prescribed and the process of the optician flipping lenses asking which one is better.  Sight correction is a careful and precise art – hearing correction is less so.  The process has been improved by digital hearing aids which can be adjusted to some extent to accommodate the type of hearing loss, but basically a hearing aid is a small loudspeaker positioned behind the ear with a plastic ear-mould inside the ear.  It can take a very long time to get used to a first hearing aid.  To start with the sensation of having a large foreign object in the ear is very pronounced.  It feels like having a bad head cold and can make you feel as if your nose is blocked as well as your ears.  Then the sounds it amplifies are unfiltered by the brain.  Going out from the hushed hearing aid clinic into a busy street feels like a sensory assault and flushing the loo sounds like a waterfall being unleashed from a dam.  In the first year of having my hearing aid I frequently felt so desperate that I took it out and felt it wasn’t helping.  It took a talking-to from one of the audiologists at the clinic to make me persevere with wearing the aid all the time and really start to get the benefit from it.

I now have two digital hearing aids which are programmed to my particular hearing loss, which also have special settings to cope with noisy environments and for listening via loop systems.  I am well used to wearing them from the time I get up until I settle down to sleep at night, but they are not without their problems and difficulties.  Batteries don’t last very long and frequently give up the ghost at inconvenient moments.  Plastic tubing pops out of place and is difficult to realign.  An enthusiastic hug from a friend can cause shrill feedback if my ear is covered.  I try not to think about the time I sleepily removed my hearing aids at night and carefully dropped them into my water glass – not realising until the morning that they had been immersed in water all night. 

The simple fact is that hearing aids don’t replace normal hearing.  Even with the amplification of my aids I need the television louder than other people.  Clarity is lost and I frequently mishear or fail to understand what people say.  I can’t join in desultory chat amongst a group of people making conversation across a room; I can’t “earwig” on conversations in buses and cafes; I have more or less given up trying to listen to my beloved Radio 4 and hardly ever click on video or music links on the computer because the effort of setting up the earphones and taking out the hearing aids to listen rarely seems worth the effort.  Certain voices are more difficult to catch than others.  Children’s voices, for example, are very light and not always clear, so I sometimes miss out on conversation with my grand-children.

 Other people’s attitudes to deafness are very interesting.  I’m not stone deaf, so on the whole I haven’t encountered rudeness or exasperation from people outside the family.  I’ve never been embarrassed by wearing hearing aids and always make people aware that I have hearing difficulty so that they don’t think I’m being rude or ignoring them if I don’t respond appropriately to something they say.   Family and friends are good at asking me where I would prefer to sit in cafes and restaurants and at relaying instructions to me in public places when I can’t hear the speaker.  In domestic situations with my nearest and dearest it’s not always the same story.  I know that it’s not easy communicating with someone who’s hard of hearing.  I had years of trying to make myself understood by my Dad, who could be pretty haphazard in his use of hearing aids and there were definitely times when I gave up and decided the effort of repeating myself just wasn’t worth it.  On the other hand as the deafened person one soon becomes aware of the tutting and rolled eyes of an impatient family member being asked to repeat themself, of the exaggerated raised voice and slow enunciation as if talking to an idiot. I have been known to become upset and angry.  So have they.

Apart from these irritations I think these days that I’m pretty well adjusted to using my aids.  I certainly couldn’t manage without them.   Somehow, though hearing loss isn’t “normalised” in my life.  It’s still a problem and an irritation, something I would prefer not to have to think about and deal with.

*Apparently a fifteenth anniversary is a crystal anniversary

slow stitch

I'm working on an enjoyable piece of stitching at the moment.

 

 

Just working organically, grabbing a scrap of fabric and butting it up against another...

 

 

and rhythmically stitching them together.

 

 

Even the backing is made a scraps of quilt wadding that I'm cobbling together as I go along.

 

 
I really don't know where this is going to end up, I'm just enjoying making it happen.

 



a sideways look

I always enjoy the joke of the signs on these shutter garage doors at Spike Island studios.

From one direction it reads:

If you walk in the opposite direction, you are instructed:

But if you look at the doors face-on the message is not so clear:

 



Which just goes to show that facing things head-on may not always be the best strategy.  Some things only make sense with a sideways look.

a quilt for a little girl

J has just had her fourth birthday.  She is moving house this summer.  A joyful quilt for her bed seemed in order.

This is what I made.

She seems to like it.

uxorious

Uxorious is a strange and rather ugly word to describe a man who loves his wife.  Its root is the Latin word 'uxor' (wife).  Where it is used at all in modern English it may take a slightly pejorative tone, implying a slightly cringe-worthy devoted love.  Or it may be misused entirely.   In his book Levels of Life Julian Barnes says “I bridle at the misuse of the adjective ’uxorious’.  If we don’t look out, it will come to describe ‘a man who has many wives’, or even (that dubious phrase) ‘a lover of women’.  It doesn’t mean this.  It describes – and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit – a man who loves his wife.”

My father was an uxorious man, devoted to my mother.  He delighted in buying her clothes and was quite dapper on his own account.  It therefore follows that when, in his later years, he gave me a sum of money for my birthday or Christmas present, I generally spent it on clothes.  Since his death I have missed the ritual of the birthday card with a cheque and the self indulgent shopping spree.  So I have a new birthday ritual, which is to go out on that shopping spree anyway with my own money to buy something that I think of as being from him. 

I am lucky to have an uxorious husband who takes pleasure in buying me clothes for my birthday too, so this year I have indulged in two lovely pieces of fair-trade clothing:

From my Pa, a block-printed tunic dress by Accacia from Chandni Chowk, which pleases the natural dye geek in me by having a swing ticket enumerating the dyes used (alizarin, indigo, madder, cassis, iron, pomegranate, turmeric)

 

And from Steve this rather lovely summery retro-styled number from People Tree.

It's not even my birthday yet, but the current sunny weather is making me look forward to venturing out in my new threads.  Thanks,  chaps!

there must be a better way!

I have spent the day crawling around on the dining room floor trying to pin together the three layers of my quilt. 

 

This is my least favourite stage of quilt making.  To start with it is always difficult to find a large enough space to spread out the whole fabric. Then getting the fabric completely flat and wrinkle-free on each successive layer is a difficult and deeply frustrating process.  Several times I had to completely lift the top fabric and start again because as I spread it out I found that it was extending past the edge of the backing fabric.  Once satisfied with the layering I then needed to pin the three layers together.  Overall it is a very physical and actually quite painful process – despite the use of that cushion, my knees will take a while to recover!

 

 
The remarkable Lucy Boston (who wrote the Green Knowe children's books) was still making quilts into her eighties, hand-quilting them at ten stitches per inch, so how did she manage the layering process?  I can’t imagine many octogenarians being able to scramble around on their knees as I was today.  If there are any quilt-makers out there who can give me some advice, I shall be glad to hear it.

two exhibitions

On Saturday we took our weekend visitors to two local exhibitions.

First up: Drawn at the RWA. The added frisson here was that my talented husband had had a piece of work selected!

Yes that is a red dot! (picture credit Steve Broadway)

It’s a really lovely exhibition showcasing the skill which is the foundation of artistic practice. For me the striking thing about the show is the sheer diversity of artistic expression. I was intrigued by the contrast between artists who employ a few spare lines and those whose pleasure is to render what they see in minute detail. To quote the RWA’s press release: “Far from being a traditional drawing show, works included vary hugely in materials, subject, and style. From iPad life drawings to chalk drawn directly on the RWA gallery floors, from embroidered drawings to flocked screenprints, the works push boundaries, taking drawing to new heights.”  Drawn runs until 2 June and I recommend a visit. 

After a civilised break for coffee, we made our way just down the road to Bristol City Museum where, tucked away on the top floor at the back of the building, is a small but delightful exhibition entitled “Stitching and Thinking”. Starting with samplers of darning and mending from the museum collection, this show then moves on to examine ideas of mending and repair – from the straightforward repair of stitched artefacts to the more costly business of repairing broken hearts.


(Picture credit: Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery)

The discipline of limiting the colour palette to white cloth and red stitching creates a simple and poignant overall effect, which makes it a very appropriate companion to the largely monochrome exhibition of drawing at RWA. There are only a couple more weeks of this lovely exhibition and I’m hoping to get to the final gallery talk on 3 April.

lucky me!

Receiving this bundle of tea-time goodies in the post on Friday morning got the weekend off to a very good start!  I was lucky enough to win Liz's giveaway to celebrate her blog's fifth birthday.  When I first came across the concept of blogging I thought that it seemed a bit egotistical like writing a personal diary with publication in mind.  But I've come to see it in quite a different light.  My own tentative steps into the blogging world were also about five years ago and although I'm by no means prolific and haven't got a vast throng of readers, I've discovered a lovely world of shared interests, supportive online communities, plenty of fun and masses of information and inspiration.  Thanks, Liz!

Sadly the light wasn't good enough to make a decent photograph.  No snow here to intensify the light; just wall-to-wall grey.  That didn't stop us from having an excellent weekend with visiting friends - food, natter, mooching around galleries and shops, reminiscing, laughing, a brisk cold walk round the harbourside, more food; the best kind of weekend.

getting shirty (work in progress)

At the back end of last year I had an idea for a quilt.  I was inspired by Morwhenna Woolcock’s lovely screen-printed bags made from recycled men’s shirts and by the memory of a quilt I had seen in a book many years ago.  So I put out a call to the men in my family for their cast off shirts and I also went hunting in charity shops.  Charity shop shirts are surprisingly expensive when all you’re planning to do with them is chop them up!  I asked a couple of times whether they had a stash of shirts that weren’t good enough to go out on the racks, but I always seemed to have turned up the day after the ragman had been!   It’s ironic that buying brand new fabric might have been less expensive, but the important point about this project is to re-use and at least my money was ending up with a charity.

 

Last week it seemed like time to make some progress, so I set about cutting up my pile of old shirts (“pre-loved” as the saying goes!).  It felt almost sacrilegious; men’s shirts – even the cheap and cheerful brands – are amazingly well-made and constructed to last.  I chopped off cuffs, collars, yokes, button bands and ended up with rectangles of cotton, polycotton and linen from backs, fronts and sleeves and a whole tangle of discarded pieces.  Surely there’s something I can still do with those!

A little bit of play with my harvested fabrics made me realise that the lovely blues and greys of my chosen shirts were a little bit pale and bland when viewed en masse, so I had another shopping session and came back with a couple of shirts that had red in the pattern. This was better, but still worryingly dull. I like borders on quilts, they provide a sort of frame for the patchwork within, but I had been hoping that this could be a really simple quilt just pieced together in large pieces, with maybe a bit of contrast colour in the binding. However, as I laid out the pieces and looked at them it came to me that one of the reasons that traditional quilts often have a contrasting inner border is that if a quilt is draped over a bed the binding is largely invisible.

Fortunately this was design on the hoof and I pieced together an inner square and Ruth’s fabric stash yielded some plain red fabric. It’s fantastic what a splash of contrasting colour can do to bring the whole thing together and give it a bit of excitement. I'll try to bring some decent photos to the blog when I've finished it. I've left some pockets in place (for little notes or treasures) and it's going to have quite a few buttons added as the quilt "ties".

are handkerchiefs disgusting?

In a recent bedroom clear-out I came across a pile of my Mum and Dad’s old handkerchiefs (yes, I know, weird what we keep!) and they got me thinking.

Some time ago I read a post on a message board decrying what the writer considered the disgusting habit of using a tissue to blow one’s nose and then putting it back in a pocket, or even (horror!) re-using it. There is a current infection control campaign to “Catch it. Bin it. Kill it”, which is encouraging us to carry tissues so that we can catch a sneeze in a tissue and then dispose of it. But where? If you’re on a bus or out in the street, where is the vile object to be deposited? I also find that carrying a number of tissues in a bag results in a horrible papery mess that’s no use for anything. Googling the slogan “coughs and sneezes spread diseases” led to some funny public information films from the 1940s encouraging that generation to catch their sneezes in a handkerchief.


As someone who grew up in a less wasteful and possibly less hygiene-obsessed age, I was taught to use my cotton handkerchief at one corner first, so that it could be used more than once. And (unless I actually had a cold) it was expected to last all day. “Have you got a clean hankie?” was my mother’s invariable farewell call as I left the house. Since those days I have, like most of the rest of the population, taken to using tissues and my mother would be ashamed of me because I often forget to supply myself with one before going out.

I was really interested, therefore, to find a tutorial for hand-hemmed hankies on a craft blog and comments which make it clear that some people do still use them, either for preference or on “green” anti-waste grounds. Since then I’ve been going out with a cotton hankie in my pocket. Whether I’ll be organised enough to keep on top of the laundry is another matter.

What do you think?  Handkerchiefs:  disgusting or green?  (Before someone else suggests it I realise that green and disgusting is also an option!)

happy soup

Some left over roasted beetroot and butternut squash made the basis of a lovely colourful soup to brighten a grey day.

I just added chicken stock and a couple of chopped potatoes, bubbled it for twenty minutes and whizzed with the hand blender. The addition of a dollop of creme fraiche and some bread and cheese made a cheering lunch for three.

weekend

Well, at the weekend my sister finally made her twice-postponed Christmas/New Year Visit. I was beginning to think it was going to be the subject of perpetual rearrangement until next Christmas. January/February also had other postponed visits because of bad weather and illness, so I was beginning to feel a bit jinxed.


Fortunately we were able to assemble the local family for an evening gathering on Friday when we all ate together early enough to accommodate small children’s bedtimes. We also exchanged some belated Christmas presents, which felt very strange! 

On Saturday we went shopping! Not a particularly favourite activity for either of us, but Sheila needed some office clothes and a second opinion, so off we went. We got that sorted reasonably painlessly and met up with Steve for a snack lunch at the lovely refurbished Bristol Guild Cafe.

Next stop was a bit of culture at the Museum where it was the last weekend of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. Footsore by now, we trudged home for tea, cake and quantities more food.

Sunday with visitors always means some kind of walk. So we headed off to Leigh Woods for a wander and even saw a bit of sunshine and blue sky.

It was a very good weekend, so I woke this morning feeling a little more optimistic about the eventual arrival of Spring and the prospect of more trips and visits.

marmalade (again)

It’s that time of year again; the internet is awash with marmalade posts. So here’s my annual update on the marmalade ritual. In fact I am a little late to the party – largely because the 28 jars I made last year did, in fact, last a full year and we’re only just on the last one!

I didn’t have the energy for another marathon session, so bought a modest bag of Seville oranges from our local greengrocer. We had a similar number in the freezer from 12 months ago and they combined to produce about 1500g. I also had quite a number of lemon “shells” in the freezer, which I save after squeezing as described in this post last year, so they were included in the mix as well.

I noticed that a friend had used Nigella Lawson’s recipe*, which involves boiling the fruit whole.  As I had frozen fruit which would certainly be rather soft and squashy by the time it thawed out, this seemed to be a method that would embrace that characteristic rather than make a problem of it. I found that it worked pretty well. Once the oranges have been cooked and sliced open, it’s very easy to scoop the flesh and pips out leaving softened peel which is easy to chop finely for inclusion in the marmalade.

I used “jam sugar” with added pectin rather than the usual granulated and it reached setting point quite quickly. (The sugar also has added citric acid, so the remainder was delicious on our Shrove Tuesday pancakes!)

Ta dah! Another lovely addition to the store cupboard. Whoever invented marmalade was a genius. I know that my husband will be quietly twitching about the skew-whiffy labels, but  hey – he gets to eat the gorgeous stuff.

*(Having just gone back to that recipe to put the link in, I discover that it's not actually a Nigella recipe, but one posted on her community boards by someone under the alias "chocolate nemesis" so the credit should go to him/her). 

snow motion

Hurrah! I can get around in the snow again.

I’ve never been a huge lover of the snow. As a child obviously I found it quite exciting and did my fair share of snowman building, snowball throwing and tobogganing if there was the opportunity. Equally, I had never had any special dread of snow, until I had a fall three years ago which led to a twisted ankle and badly bruised ribs.

That experience left me feeling fearful of going out if there was snow or ice underfoot. I wasn’t happy with the sense of being housebound and dependent on other people for supplies. It felt like old age a little bit too soon. So when I saw a headline back in early December about the “coldest week for decades” (which turned out to be nonsense) we decided to buy some shoe spikes. This weekend has been our first opportunity to try them out and I’m very pleased indeed. Confidence returned.

Apparently they’re among “the top ten gifts for older people”, but I’m happy to see that Charlotte who is perfectly young and fit was looking for her "yaktrax" before going for a walk with the dog.

christmas dinner

Yesterday, for the first time in our married lives, there were just the two of us for Christmas Dinner as all the daughters were committed to visiting their other families on The Day and my sister is not arriving until the weekend when there will be more of the extended family around.  In the past I sometimes used to feel the victim of other people's expectations of Christmas, so we've never insisted that our family have to be around to fulfil particular rituals and we were happy with that.

In fact daughter no. 1 invited us over for Christmas breakfast, so we were able spend time with them and exchange some presents early in the day and then we went off for a walk in the woods.

I had bought a venison fillet for our Christmas dinner and was a little bit anxious about cooking it, as it only needed ten minutes in the oven and I didn't want to spoil it.  Step forward one of my trusty spreadsheets, proof (if any were needed) that I am a control freak at heart!

I'm glad to say that it was delicious and we very much enjoyed our day.  I hope you did too.

odyssey

We have just come back from seeing an amazing show at the Tobacco Factory Theatre  - Paper Cinema's Odyssey.

We went on the recommendation of our great friend Si, not knowing what to expect, but knowing that he rarely comes up with a duff tipoff.

The publicity describes it thus: “Homer’s Odyssey, a cornerstone of literature, [is] vividly told through beautiful illustration and masterful puppetry. Cinematic projection and cunning tricks transform a suitcase full of cut-out paper puppets into an array of living characters and striking landscapes. A silent film is created before your eyes, set to a captivating live score from exceptional musicians.”

It was quite astonishing and a total delight – a strange fusion of illustration/animation, puppetry and magic lantern show all performed before our very eyes with wit and charm.