Advanced blokeish

My blokeish was severely tested this morning

 with the onset of the World Cup.

Thankfully I'd had time to acquire a few holding phrases

about the sacking of the Spanish manager

and I knew that Russia were playing Saudi Arabia today.
I also remembered to ask about the burnt out starter motor on his van.

Our roofer assured me that he would be home by 4 
to watch the opening game

but he was so voluble that I lost the drift after that 

and had to excuse myself with a parting shot about Robbie Williams.

Weak I know, but as I am also trying to learn some Japanese

for grand daughter's pre-school teacher this afternoon

my vocab is getting a little muddled.

The song of the moment on the roof is just the first line of 

Everybody Loves Somebody. On repeat.

O-skare Sama deshta

Busy bee

Having a three year old around

is good fun.

We cooked up some pancakes

when I might not have bothered otherwise

and did an experiment with bicarbonate of soda and 

vinegar mixed with food colouring.

The internet is full of good ideas for things to do with children

(all I had recourse to when mine were young was Child Education Magazine

and a book called Something to Do)

and the means to carry them out is available at the click of a button.

If anyone needs a plastic pipette or 20 litres of white vinegar

I'm your woman.

Something went a little awry with my order.

My phone was requisitioned for these rather arty shots.

Surprise

Lately off the needles as they say on knitting blogs -

a sort of long waistcoat tunic in a wool called

Socks that Rock. 

It just needs some buttons but grand-daughter wants to choose these 

herself when she gets back from pre-school.

And a matinee jacket knitted using the Elizabeth Zimmerman

Baby Surprise Jacket pattern which I first made thirty years ago for my son.

I hope it won't be too warm for a June baby.

New Year blues

Our grand daughter was thrilled to be opening presents.

Anyone's presents.

The more the merrier.

The contents? Well they were not really the point of the exercise.

It was the moment of mystery that held her in thrall.

I received many lovely gifts too,

but the sighting of this blue glass gem on a beach that normally

only yields white and green was absurdly thrilling.

I felt as though I had won the lottery.

And yet and yet.

The glass once dry and cached with all the hundreds of other pieces indoors,

has lost some of its lustre. 

The magical feeling of acquisition has faded.

Where does this pull towards possession come from?

It seems to start so early.

And the longer it lasts, the older I get, the more complicated it is 

to shuck off the weighty legacy.

I had a waking dream nightmare, where I was trying to dispose mentally

of all the items in my house, as if in readiness for an imminent move

to somewhere much smaller than my present abode.

The practical difficulties seemed overwhelming.

And yet so many people have to do just this,

perhaps at a time when they are physically least able to cope.

My parents had a large house which easily swallowed 

in its attics and outhouses

the baggage of a long lifetime, raising a family

and running a nursery school from the premises.

My mother was incorrigible.

'You'll have to deal with all this when I'm gone,' she said laughingly.

And when both parents died within five weeks of each other,

that is exactly what we had to do.

It was haphazard and brutal.

A skip was ordered and house clearance people got very lucky.

There simply wasn't time to make considered decisions.

Today I started my Kondo-ing again.

A little idea

that I'm pleased with.

I have a lot of toys left over from my own childhood,

my mother's nursery school

and my own children.

Some of them have seen better days, 

and are mostly without their original packing.

I have a goodly supply of small boxes and so until recently

was happy enough just to decant and store into those.

But with lids on, these were not very helpful to little B 

who likes to choose toys and put them away herself on the shelf.

So I photocopied the contents

directly on the photocopier bed

and stuck the startlingly 3D image

onto each of the lids.

I'm going to do the same with Lego.

I sorted that years before I knew there'd be anyone else

playing with it, so it's all complete with instructions 

but there are hardly any original boxes.

It was such fun that I am casting round for other things to photocopy.

Food perhaps?

Tools?

Art equipment?

Left home

Home is so Sad
by Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.

I used to think that it was imperative 

that a family home should remain

both a bulwark against encroaching age,

and a sanctuary for return.

But two things changed my mind 

and this poem confirmed it.

I only had one real childhood home

and believed it to be ancestrally ours.

We were a family of five, later joined by an elderly aunt

when she became too frail to stay in her own home.

My mother ran a nursery school

in one 'wing' of the house,

and so it was full from ground floor to attics.

Of course we grew up and left to study

 but still visited from not so very far away

(no heart-breaking emigrations)

and our spaces were filled for a while
with lodging students.

Its life was extended with transplants.

No real thoughts of leaving were ever entertained by my parents.

The prospect was too daunting,

but so was the upkeep and maintenance of this large house.

As the house emptied, it began to wither.

The piano was tuneless.
Weeds grew in the front drive.

The photographs, gold-tinged,
sticky in their stacked albums
show us as strangers.

When our parents died, within five weeks of each other

we had to empty the house with brutal speed. 

Now the house is sold and clumsily converted into flats.

I passed by once and felt nothing.

When we were looking for a larger home

 to fill with our own growing family

we blithely trotted round to view houses

with scant thought 

for the bereft owners.

 We coolly noted the peeling posters,

the graduation photos,

the sad soft toys

lined up on the counterpane

of someone's childhood bed.

(Shaped to the comfort of the last to go)

and thought joyously, 

 of how we would bring the house back to life

with our new and vital presence.

This was our moment and it had no conceivable end.


I could hardly empathise with them
until now.

So what's best to do?

No immediate decision is needed.

The house is still full,

but migrating birds depart swiftly.

Will we be ready

with a marvellous new plan?

Or will we stay
just a little too long 
with the soft toys, the Playmobil,

the music in the piano stool,
in case they might come back?

Where's Patsy?

A love/ hate relationship with blue and orange 
was hard-wired very early in my life by this book.

'Where's Patsy?' by Marjorie Poppleton was published in 1946 by the O.U.P Toronto.

The book was dedicated to Margaret Fletcher, 

('who understands Patsy and her friends so well'), 

the Principal of the Nursery School Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto.

The reader walks around the empty house with the narrator,

looking at all Patsy's things,

with the repeated refrain that we can't see Patsy -

because she's GONE TO NURSERY SCHOOL.

 I believed that if I looked hard enough,

 or quickly enough as I turned the page,

I would see Patsy sitting at her little blue table,

 on her little orange chair,

or playing with her little black kitten,

or eating her scrambled eggs and drinking her milk.

So it was really quite disappointing that,

when she finally came home from NURSERY SCHOOL,

 I couldn't see her face.

(so Margaret Fletcher didn't understand me very well at all)

Fourth of the fourth

This is what I found in the fourth position in the fourth folder - 

an old Abbatt jigsaw from my childhood. 

Actually it was probably bought by my mother for her Nursery school

 which was run from our house in the late 60s and early 70s.

Paul and Marjorie Abbatt were pioneers of children's educational toys in the 1930s.

 They opened a shop in Wimpole Street designed by their friend,

 the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger.

Jane Audas has more information in her trenchant blog 

Shelf Appeal.

I wasn't overly keen on jigsaws.

They spelt boredom on a Sunday afternoon listening to the syrupy medleys on Sing Something Simple.