Stranger in our Midst...

There is a dark brooding Nordic presence in our living room. No, it's not Sven the masseur... Though it is naked, like Sven. What? Yours keeps his clothes on?
It is our Christmas tree. What are you like? I decided to lug it downstairs yesterday, as Ewelina was able to help with a little furniture re-arrangement. So much easier with two. And so much easier than trying to work with one's husband.  So there it stands, fluffed and waiting to be dressed.

I put the clock on it last night. An hour and a half before Dearest noticed that it had arrived.
Sven is so discreet. Even when he is evidently pining for his baubles...

Not yet, but Sven it's time..

And it's still November....

Big weekend. But a truly great one. Jools Holland and Jose Feliciano at The Royal Albert Hall on Saturday night for the grown-ups and Winter Wonderland and Cinderella on Ice for the little ones on Sunday morning.
The first part reminded me how much I love jazz and the second how much I dislike ice shows. And Winter Wonderland is my idea of hell's jingle bells. A mercifully brief visit on a day that was blindingly bright and crisp. Timing is all; it was a lovely introduction to Christmas.

We returned home to the bowl of brandy-infused fruit I'd left some days earlier, in readiness for the Christmas cake. As I write, I can smell it cooking. I feel as though as though the Christmas season is launched.
I hope I haven't peaked too soon. It isn't even December yet! I need to get a grip. Or lose one.

And they all moved away from me on the bench....

Happy Thanksgiving! May all your turkeys be succulent, and your brussels be maple-glazed with bacon...
I am quietly relieved that we do not celebrate it in this house. I don't need an eatathon as a dress-rehearsal for Christmas. However, as a non-participant it does sound like a heart-warming festival.

I don't know if it were mention of Thanksgiving that made me think of Alice's Restaurant
and Arlo Guthrie this morning. I no longer own my much-played album, so I tried Jukebox. Sure enough, there he was, giving a 50 year anniversary performance. I can almost recite the lyrics and they still made me smile.
So if you want to give yourself a blast of nostalgia this Thanksgiving then take a trip to Alice's Restaurant where you can have anything you want (exceptin'Alice). And then do the B side and sing along with Ring Around Rosy Rag. And be sure this Thanksgiving to Touch your nose and Blow your toes while you're doing it.
Or you ain't doing it right.

1967 ... as if it were yesterday

One Green bauble,hangin' on a wall...

I am one of life's bodgers. I don't wear my bodger badge with pride. Nor am I being nauseatingly self-deprecating when I say this. I am an enthusiastic have-a-go-gal who accepts that the end results may be less than perfect, but then life is like that.
I received a gift of a glass bauble from an old friend during the summer. A beautiful piece of glass made by someone in the West country called Will Shakespeare, no less. This is no Christmas bauble. It is all all year round one. There was only one place it could possibly hang and that was in the recess of a small kitchen window where it would catch the light.

I thought at first that with a bit of brute force I could make a hole in the plaster, put in a rawal plug (already impressed?) and screw in a hook.
Four months later I had to call in the expert. My brother who is the handiest man alive and has a Makita drill which, if you know anything about anything, is the meatiest, manliest, meanest drill on the block. But he could not drill through the steel lintel.

I suggested we stuck a plinth on to the surface, through which we could screw a hook. He said he would go home and saw off the top of a broom handle which would do the job. He returned shortly with hewn handle and super strong glue. I had my hook. The glue had to dry overnight. Ready for bauble?  No, my brother weighed the weighty piece of glass and the next day returned with a small bag of pea shingle similarly weighted, to hang for 24 hours to ensure the fixture would hold.

So for 24 hours my kitchen looked as though it was adorned by a dog's poo bag.
Thoroughly tested by the most meticulous of men, I finally got to hang my bauble.
Singing, "Baubles, bunions and beads, rings-linga..."And it's not even December!

Precious Things....

When Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor Who, got into the large lift at BBC Television Centre he would gaze at the array of buttons with his googly eyes and say, "Now where would you like to go?" He always got a laugh. My mother had a laugh too, when I said I wanted to knit myself a scarf like Tom Baker's.  In brief, as opposed to the scarf which was very very long, every time I put it down, my grandmother or mother would pick it up and undo my holey bits and compensate by knitting six rows more. I fear I have mentioned this previously, but the chances are that neither you or I can remember. So we're good?

Anyway, knitting and all other fine craft work skipped my generation. I wasn't overly hopeful of the knitting genes untangling in the next. Dearest daughter showed a small inclination ten years ago in an attempt to engage with her M-in-Law. Not a good combination. Lethal weapon in same room as husband's mother. It was the knitting that died the death. Which is possibly a good thing.

So when Son-et-lumiere decided he needed to engage his brain during recreation, he thought of knitting. It is not something I would have thought of, personally, but then I am blessed with a brain that goes into snooze mode on command.  I bought him the needles and the wool (like the Good Mother that I am) as we still have a Wool shop in our village. And equipped with a You Tube video he cast-on. Never been able to do that. And as for How-to videos.. never got me anywhere with my pom-poms. I'm delighted to report that his scarf is coming on a treat. (I'm also relieved that I won't find it in my Christmas stocking.. not the Good Mother.)

This week I finally got round to laundering the baby knitting I'd retrieved from Buckingham on a previous purge. This consisted of two shawls: an everyday one and one for special occasions, and the christening gown. All made by Grandma Leyshon for her first grandchild. Last worn by my granddaughter eleven years ago.
I find it hard to put them away, because I have been enjoying their intricate beauty. I will write a note with them so that whoever looks at them next will have a record of their history. In the meantime, they have been recorded in a Bunion blog.
Sublime in the ridiculous, really.

Gathering of the Clans...

I never stood a chance with my mother-in-law. Put simply, she did not like women. She was a mother of men, and revelled in her role of matriarch. No female competition. Until later. She did, however, place importance on family. But more specifically, family gatherings. The bigger the better. Regardless of how much their size would daunt my Dearest husband for whom they would be absolute hell.

However, time passes. We are now the family elders. And yesterday we sat seven around a dining table, brothers and sisters from two branches of Dearest's family. Convivial eating, drinking and writing names on the backs of curling and ancient family photographs. Putting heads together over the identities of some, and making educated guesses as to others. Realising with poignancy that there is no one left to ask. And being mindful that whilst we still have it in us to do so, we should all be putting the names on the backs of photographs, no matter how obvious it appears to us right now. Or else, in fifty years time, another few generations  down the line, will be left scratching their heads.

It would be overly sentimental to think of Dearest's mother looking down on this modest gathering, but if she had been, she would have been spitting feathers at missing out.

Woman on a Mission....

I raised a question in class today. 
No, I haven’t joined the  University for the Third Age.  No no no... it’s Thursday and a Slimming World day.
I wanted advice for dealing with a husband who persistently eats LARGE bars of Cadbury’s (during the nightly binge-watch of Bloodline).

And nothing useful came back...
You see, I have tried eating one of those humungously large carrots Ocado persist in delivering me. Last night, I crunched an award-winning one loudly, from top to bottom, in a very ostentatious manner.  Dearest, didn't turn  a hair (or even a rabbit) but turned up the volume with the remote...
So carrot-crunching isn’t going to cut it. My group have lame suggestions that involve divorce, so I have to fall back on my own deviousness.
I think I might have it...
When practising the piano the other day,  I said ( in a jolly voice), 
“I will be getting better if I practice..”
He replied (darkly, I felt),
“When?”

So the next time he dives into the chocolate, I’m going to announce that I will do my piano practice for as long as he is eating the chocolate.
Passive aggressive piano playing might produce a Pavlovian reverse-response.

There again, it might not. 
Worth a try. Meanwhile, costing me a fortune in carrots...

Keeping One's Brain in Gear....

Do you ruminate while you're driving? No, I don't mean chew gum. Though that sometimes helps. I'm asking, because I find I have an internal monologue running the whole journey. Dearest says driving helps him think. Dear Lord, if I did that as well as drive, I'd be up the next gum tree. No, my thinking consists of:
"A lorry on the horizon. Will I have to overtake the bugger? " or
"New cars joining this road ahead... do I swing out into the fast lane or do I throw down the anchors to let them in? "
Decisions. Decisions. All of which are undoubtedly good for giving the grey matter a bit of therapeutic pummelling. So what's all this talk of introducing driverless cars? How is that going to exercise the brain? Life will be one long taxi-ride and no fun whatsoever. Just when I am getting used the gadgets on my new car.

Actually, I think you can have too many gadgets. Dearest, who is a boy-racer at heart, and couldn't wait to give the Mini a spin, rang me on his maiden outing from the hard shoulder of the M1 feed lane. He had tried answering the phone using the steering wheel button and had pressed speed control in error. He couldn't go beyond 43 miles an hour.
"How the bloody hell do you get it off?" he rang to ask, "and where is the sodding manual?". I knew he was cross because he rarely swears..

The manual was on our dining room table. Natch. Where I had been busy not studying it.
These cars are too sophisticated. Take a friend of mine who has a new car. It has a little lever,  instead of a handbrake. It has a small indentation beneath it. Perfect place for depositing her earrings which were giving her gyp. That was until she went to recover the earrings and lifted that little lever as her husband was driving at 80 miles an hour down the motorway. What a totally daft design. Which is what I'm pretty confident her husband did not say as he thankfully controlled the vehicle.

How we will reminisce over these gay old times when we step into our driverless cars and say,
"Home, James, and don't spare the horses.."  

Country Matters...

I'm going to get berries on my new Skimmia! I've already got one, you know the kind with red florets?
Come on, I'm doing really well with Skimmia and you want more details? I bought this new one months ago and it was only when I brought it home did I read the small print and see that it needed a male one to produce berries. Bloody hell, I thought, how do you tell the sex of a Skimmia? It's not as if there are any overt indications, after all. This is a plant of our times, obviously.
So, respectful of their privacy, with eyes closed , I waved the new girl in the general direction of the possible boy plant. Pimp for plants, that's me. Well, it looks as though it may well have worked as girl plant is getting flowers. It's the small things in life that get you excited as a sexagenarian.

I have adopted this word, rather than sixty year old because it's all about sex these days. Not me, silly, every other bugger in this country and abroad, is on about sexual misdemeanour. I blame Harvey Weinstein, the lion rampant of all predatory males. If half of what he's accused of is true, then his roar has rightly been reduced to a squeak. This seems to have started a witch-hunt of the most extraordinary proportions. Where will it all end? Will it bring down government?

I do wish we could get a collective grip on the situation and save the abject anguish over knee-patters for the genuinely abused. Women of my generation are looking on, bemused at the numerous instances that are coming to light. How did we deal with it? With a well-aimed blow if necessary, a withering retort, or sometimes the best weapon of all, humour. Where did it all go so badly wrong? Nothing really has changed. I just hope that women will be happy when they have finally succeeded in emasculating males and are not offended when the men sex solace in sex-bots.

I'm going out to talk to the plants...

Inkling Cards, By the Book by Simon Dorrell