How has it come to the end of August already? My sister is posting back to school photos of my small nephew as he heads off to his final year of primary school, Things 2 and 3 are informing me that they require bags and shoes and stuff, and I am hoping for an onslaught of schools bookings as we launch our first teacher newsletter featuring our shiny new sessions. If you happen to *be* a teacher, you can find them here.
It was also a short week, kicking off with the bank holiday. My Beloved has been gently nagging me about a HUGE and enthusiastic bramble which has been making inroads into my little patch of garden. I had noticed it, particularly as it was sending runners across the deck outside my shed in a very Sleeping Beauty’s castle fashion, but I was pretending it wasn’t there in hopes that the Blackberry Fairy would take it away. The bramble was also near the mysterious ‘ole that something has been excavating in the corner, so I grabbed a spade to put some of the earth back in the ‘ole to discourage whatever it is, some secateurs and gloves, and the green bin to put all the bits in.
The bramble was tough and invasive, and had sent very long runners out in a tentacular sort of way across quite a large chunk of my corner. Some of them were trying to take root themselves, striking out and forming their own independent thorny republics. It was a rather lengthier task than I expected, to say the least, and while I was doing it some bitey thing bit my leg twice, which made me quite thorny as well. I was talking to an NHS person a few weeks ago and she said that mosquitoes are very fond of O-positive blood – apparently we are universal donors for bitey bugs as well as people. This explains a lot. The bites were exceedingly itchy and swelled up to enormous proportions. This is why I do not do gardening.
The ‘ole, with a cameo from the bramble. Spot the bees.
The ‘ole was next. It appeared one day, and is too big for a rabbit or a rat, so we are wondering if a foxy is trying to take up residence. If so, he’d missed his chance and the ‘ole was surrounded by furry red-tailed bumble bees being very industrious. They are welcome to nest, but I did put quite a lot of earth back where it was supposed to be which they weren’t too happy about. Bees, eh?
Other things making me happy this week (mostly by not biting me)
Deciding what this year’s crochet Christmas decorations will be, starting with some very cute chilli peppers. Later versions did, of course, have eyes.
Taking Ian and Stacy from the V&A Academy around our new site and picking their vast brains about creative courses online and in real life
Gorgeous swim with Jill on Saturday morning
A mooch around the charity shops of Epping, scoring a couple of Marina Lewycka novels as I’m really enjoying the one I got from the library
The final day of our play project with families from The Parent House – joyous, chaotic, colourful, and a great way to introduce our local community to the site and find out what they want from us. The sun shone, Valentina is the undisputed Queen of the Snack, Thing 2 came along again, and we had an amazing day. The site has never been so colourful!
And last but not least, the arrival of A & B, aka Grandthings 3 & 4, thanks to TT1 Amy and her partner Callum. Can’t wait to meet them!
Last Sunday was sunny and warm and as my living room was full of teenagers and I was feeling crafty, I retreated to the garden shelter with my coffee, fabric hexies, paper templates, a glue stick, a book and an excellent playlist on Spotify. I had a lovely morning sticking things to other things and making pretty patterns until I ran out of glue and had to wait for the Amazon man to arrive.
In the meantime, I delved into the shed and found a fat quarter bundle of Makower quilting cottons in red, cream and gold and with the aid of my trusty rotary cutter cut out some diamonds using these Clover templates, with the germ of an idea for some star decorations in my head. Thing 2 joined me after her friends had gone home, bringing her book, and kept me company in the sun. She also had a go at making some hexie flowers using some orphan hexies that weren’t quite what I wanted for my project. (You can see her project if you click through on the Instagram post below), and walked both the cats on their harnesses. It was a really lovely afternoon, peaceful and creative and exactly what you want summer Sundays to be like.
My hexies are destined to become the sleeves of a Liliana jacket, and the rest will be made of a wine-red twill cotton. I decided a whole patchwork jacket would be a bit much but if I do the sleeves in hexies and add patch pockets (of course) it should work well. I’m considering adding cuffs in the twill fabric as well, to tie it back together. You can see the rough sleeve layout below, with a fade from navy through purple into red. If it works it’ll be great, if not I’ll look like some mad hippy…let’s see what happens! I need to decide what to line the sleeves with – twill might be too heavy, but I may have some lining fabric in the right colour in the shed.
An inspirational conversation with some MA students I met at the RCA in July. I’d offered to have a coffee and a chat with them, as they’re interested in participatory arts practice, and the 45 minutes I’d scheduled turned into 90.
Day 2 of the play co-design project – this week we went to Holland Park and had a great time in the adventure playground. This week’s illustrator was Joey Yu, and we had some new families and repeat families. We are very much looking forward to the final session this week! Thing 2 joined me for the day as well.
An evening swim with two new converts on Thursday evening. Many ducks and much putting the world to rights.
Thing 1 started her first job at the local pub. I am hoping for some transferable cooking skills.
Making the Named patterns Kielo dress in a paprika coloured jersey fabric which is way outside my usual wardrobe colours. I look like a carrot.
I finally remembered to take a photo of my current portable project. I had a long conversation with a nice old lady on the tube who was very interested in what I was up to. I love the colours in this one!
Today I’ll be hanging out in my little gazebo at the Copped Hall Open Day, touting my wares and carrying on putting those hexies together. Hopefully people will buy stuff, but if not I’ll have had a nice afternoon in the sun!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading
The Darkest Domain – Val McDermid
Honeycomb – Joanne M. Harris (Audible)
The Covent Garden Ladies – Hallie Rubenhold
Stray Cat Blues – Ben Aaronovitch etc
1983 – Tom Cox
Tackle! – Jilly Cooper. I keep reading these in case she’s regained her touch. She hasn’t. Please stop, Jilly. For all our sakes.
Friday was the first day of our new community co-design project. You remember, the one that was giving me sleepless nights last week in case no one turned up or it rained all day or it was a total disaster, that sort of thing. I have form for this sort of thing – on one school trip all those years ago I managed to lose two children and a parent helper – so it’s not unreasonable to worry!
Luckily it all seemed to go very well – 18 people came along and we took 18 very similar people back to Islington so I am counting it as a win. The Panda coach turned up on time – one of the children was very excited, as they had apparently ALWAYS WANTED to go on a panda bus. I didn’t know Panda Buses were a thing, but there we are. A bonus point to me… Another child had never been on a coach before so the adventure started early for her! No one was sick and we had exactly the right amount of snacks for the day. Pom-bears were the most popular – Valentina, my colleague, hadn’t heard of them before, although my director says they go very well with red wine. We’re a cultured bunch, us.
The visit this week was to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where they have a children’s garden which explores in a very playful way all the things plants need to grow – sun, water, earth and air – in four zones. The idea of the project is to take local families to different playful green spaces (next week is Holland Park Adventure Playground) and then in the final week we’ll work with a play artist to construct models of play opportunities which will be shared with the architects and landscape designers to inspire our own new gardens. Each day is being live illustrated by illustrators, so we can see what families engage with most, and what captures their imagination. We also gave all the participants their own sketchbooks to record whatever they wanted, and one to a small girl who was fascinated by illustrator Grace Holliday’s sketching and was peering over her shoulder. We told her dad all about the Centre – no engagement is ever wasted!
Valentina and Grace met us at the entrance to the Gardens, having left me in charge of the bus journey, and we headed off to the Children’s Garden and Earth area where we found huge sandpits, slides like earthworms and wooden playhouses as well as logs and ropes to help people up a large mound. The younger children enjoyed the sand while the older ones (the group ranged from 5 – 16) enjoyed the sunshine. The second space was Water, where there were pumps and rivulets, with a paddling zone complete with stepping stones. Climbing structures were, again, more popular with all but the youngest children. The round structures you can see in the images above were in the Sun area next to Water, along with some huge eucalyptus trees and some very cheeky baby jackdaws. I loved the use of coloured perspex in the tunnel. Few people seemed to use this area, perhaps because it wasn’t obviously ‘playful’.
We liked the ‘rules of enjoyment’ scattered through the gardens as well as at the entrances – ‘Our trees are for hugging not climbing’; ‘Our plants are for smelling not picking or eating’ and others – offering alternatives to engagement rather than ‘don’ts’. There are clear paths to each area as well as stepping stone paths through flower beds to encourage exploration. They close the space for quiet sessions but the space overall didn’t feel as if it had been designed with accessibility in mind – there weren’t obvious alternatives to climbing frames or the paddling area for wheelchair users, for example, and I couldn’t find any information on the accessibility map on the website (which is also hard to read). I would have liked to have seen this information in a variety of easy to find formats on the website, particularly as we had at least two children with Austistic Spectrum diagnoses on the visit. Kew has a great facilitated community and access programme but for independent visits the information isn’t obviously available. I am happy to be corrected on this, of course, but this is the sort of information we know our visitors need to have.
We went to the Family Kitchen for lunch, where we provided children’s lunch boxes and pizzas for the grown ups. The toilets are sensibly located there too, and a playful handwashing station. Kew have also put a shop in there and an extremely expensive Hackney Gelato ice cream parlour, which I am quite sure a lot of parents could have done without, especially as entry to Kew isn’t cheap.
After lunch we went to the Air space, which was the most popular with our families – little trampolines sunk into the floor, rope swings, colourful windmills and a giant hammock, and lots of things (pollen, apparently) to jump from and on and over. Again, things to climb on were most popular – the Oak Circle, a huge oak tree ringed by a high level walkway, attracted all the children, while a bench ringing the tree provided some much needed seating and shade for us! Grace Holliday, our illustrator, captured so much movement and joy in this zone.
The usual herding of kittens through a final visit to the loos and retrieving them from the shop ensued, and then it was back on the bus to Islington through a lot of traffic which seemed to be Taylor Swift’s fault, at least according to the coach driver who had to battle back round to Harrow afterwards. I’m looking forward to the next adventure, and hopefully the families are too!
In other news…
Poor Lulu cat had to have a sleepover at the Royal Veterinary College this week, which meant a long car journey each way. She was at pains to tell us how unhappy she was about this, especially when speed bumps and potholes made their presence felt. We finally have a diagnosis though – she has not one but six bladder stones and an operation is needed to get rid of them as they aren’t the sort which can be zapped or dissolved. Thank heavens for insurance, which covered the £1548 cost of her stay. She now has bald patches on her legs, chest and belly and took a good 48 hours to forgive me.
Thing 3 had his ingrown toenail operated on (and they did his other foot just in case). He was very brave and looked like a duck when he came home. No photos of this, though.
Things making me happy this week (aka ‘The Happy List’)
Thing 1 got an A in her first T-level exams – we are incredibly proud of her and her hard work after a rough year last year.
Thing 2 finally gave in and made me a lemon drizzle cake. It was excellent.
I put my quilt top together and stuck a lot of paper hexagons onto fabric hexagons, for which I have a cunning plan.
Making the Sew House Seven Wildwood dress. No photos, it needs to be on to look its best. I managed to get the skirt front backwards so it wraps the wrong way. Who knows how I did it, but there we are. It’s green.
Seeing the London Museum’s new logo make it into Private Eye‘s ‘Pseud’s Corner’ not once but twice….in the same issue. I love the Museum, having worked there for 12 years, but loathe the pigeon and ‘splat’
Three days off – some sewing, some sleeping, some KFC with Thing 1, some reading
The finale of The Umbrella Academy – such a good series, and great use of Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman. It made me want to rewatch DC Titans though.
And that’s it from me for the week – I must go and throw pizzas at teenagers in the hope of pacifying them. Thing 2 has three friends over for a sleepover – ‘sleep’ being a very relative term.
I like sleep. I’m a big fan of it, quite frankly, and am willing to embrace it at the drop of an eyelid. Lockdown was brilliant, as I was on furlough, it was really hot and I could have siestas in my hammock whenever I wanted. Weekends almost always include a good nap or two. At night I like to read a bit (until the book falls out of my hands, usually) and then snuggle down with whichever cat happens to be on hot water bottle duty until the alarm goes off.
The hot water bottle on International Cat Day this week
One of the most annoying bits about menopause – which was saying something, given the rest of the symptoms – was the constant waking up at stupid o’clock and not being able to go back to sleep, but the patches seem to have sorted that out. Sleeping with earplugs has also helped enormously. My Beloved claims that earplugs aren’t helping him as he can still hear me snoring, but he can always get his own.
However, so far no one has made a patch that reduces wakefulness due to stress (the first of our National Lottery Heritage Fund community co-design projects starts this week, and what if no one turns up? I haven’t booked the transport yet! Is the bus big enough? What if it’s a total disaster? What if no one comes to the last day which is the really important one? What have I forgotten? What if too many turn up for the bus who didn’t RSVP? Argh! ).
There isn’t a patch to deal with having an 18 year old daughter on the loose in London with her friends, either. Thing 1 has embraced raving and has been off to South London (of all places!) a few times since her birthday. I am not sure why I am more concerned with her going to Vauxhall or Lambeth than when she goes to Camden, but there we are. We give her the lecture every week: no sex, no drugs, no sausage rolls (on the basis that rock’n’roll is in short supply at raves, but there might well be a hot dog seller or a 24 hour Greggs to hand). She’s quite sensible, we think, and we know she’s got a getting home plan and she’s with her friend from the village, but STILL. It’s my job.
At this point my mother is cackling away in her little village in Gaul and muttering about karma. I see you, mother. Don’t deny it.
A couple of evening walks with Thing 2 through the fields and woods between our village and the next. There were deer, we startled a badger on his dusk patrol up near the fishing lake, gorgeous waterlilies.
I say walk – my Achilles has been playing up so more of a hobble. Still, I made it to week 5 on the C25k before it went. However, this evening it went ‘pop’ which Google assures me is not a good sign.
A day at the Peel/Three Corners Street Party – bubbles, dogs to make friends with (including a puppy who’d never seen bubbles before and kept trying to catch them), a DJ playing excellent tunes, lots of people interested in our project.
Saturday with my gazebo, touting my wares at a local church fundraiser. Sold a few bits and bobs, talked to lots of nice people and cut out a lot of paper hexagons for an English Paper Piecing project while sitting in a pretty graveyard. I love a graveyard, as you know.
Hydrangeas flowering nicely thanks to no intervention from me
The prospect of a few days off and a new dress pattern.
Apple cakes using my mum’s recipe, making use of the windfalls in the garden.
Early doors walk with Jill on Friday, putting the world to rights and plotting dastardly deeds.
Progress on the kantha-inspired bag which I keep forgetting to take photos of.
And that’s it from me – next week I’ll try and remember to take photos, as I’m off with a load of families to Kew Gardens. If they turn up. And if the bus is big enough.
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Still Life – Val McDermid
Joe Country/Down Cemetery Road – Mick Herron
The Diary of a Secret Tory MP – The Secret Tory MP
It’s Saturday evening and I am surrounded by small children jumping on and off the sofa and my stool as we run through my repertoire of counting songs, from monkeys jumping on the bed to frogs sitting on a log. We’ve exhausted Alexa’s store of jokes (turns out she doesn’t know any jokes about Transformers, much to Grandthing 1’s disgust) and all her fart noises. She’s now ‘having a rest’ (aka ‘Granny turned off the microphone’) and the kids are being kittens. The garden’s full of the Things and the Timeshare Teenagers – or Timeshare Twentysomethings now – and their partners, and various of their friends have been drifting in and out over the day as we do ‘open door’ parenting. If they know there’s a welcome for them and all their friends in easy times, they know the door will always be open when things get tough.
Our little blended family is expanding at the moment, and it brings me much joy: TT1’s partner has a little girl the same age as GT1 (they’re the ones being cats) and the pair of them are very much looking forward to being big brother and sister to the twins when they arrive in a few weeks’ time. This little girl loves Lilo and Stitch, collects snails and has an endless imagination. She’s a water baby and spent all afternoon in the pool splashing about. Turns out Grannies always have enough love to go around, although I think we’re going to need a minibus for the next family day out.
Airconditioning on the Elizabeth Line. Especially when the Central Line is up to its old tricks again
Running – I’m up to week five on the couch to 5k plan and while the 8 minute blocks came as a shock to the system today I still enjoyed it!
A day at the Royal College of Art with a colleague talking to the MA Visual Communications students -one of them told me that my talk had helped him decide what he wanted to do next. It’s nice to be a good influence instead of a terrible warning sometimes.
Also, they have a nice fernery in the middle of the college, with huge tree ferns, and the roof terrace has a view of the Albert Hall
Some gorgeous and much needed evening swims with Sue and a lot of ducks
Slow stitching on a felt hoop – a Corinne Lapierre kit of toadstools and ferns – at home, and on the sari silk patchwork bag on the tube.
The film of Paul Gallico’s book Flowers for Mrs Harris – they didn’t ruin it, hurray!
Sourdough crumpets – thanks to London sister Tan for the recipe, which is a winner
Now I’d better go and sort out tomorrow’s batch of bread….
Same time next week then,
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Stones of Green Knowe – Lucy M.Boston
London Rules/Nobody Walks/Down Cemetery Road/Joe Country – Mick Herron
This week’s tube journeys have been accompanied by Joanne Harris’s latest novel, The Moonlight Market, which is being marketed as ‘Neverwhere meets Stardust‘ (the marketing team at her publishers are probably cursing themselves). I love both those books, and also am a huge fan of everything else by Joanne Harris, so that I was going to read this was a given.
But…it’s also set in London. London Below, London Before, London today – the London we see in front of us, the London that might be waiting for us down one of those intriguing little alleyways that the older parts of the City (and the city, I suppose) do so well, the London that might be there if you catch it in the corner of your eye. Clerkenwell and Farringdon have many of these, and I am easily distracted by the thought of magic and adventure.* I blame growing up with books where statues came to life in gardens; where forests grow in naughty children’s bedrooms and you can sail away to the land where the wild things are; where there was a permanently frosted world through the back of a wardrobe; and a house full of Civil War ghost children, ebony mice that come to life and lost jewels.
You might say London has enough stories to be going on with, without making up more, but one of the best things about a city with more than 2000 years of stories and people is that there will always be room for more. London, as Peter Ackroyd and Edward Rutherfurd have proved, is enough of a story in itself.
However, people do keep writing these stories, for which I am profoundly grateful. The Moonlight Market is a story about a London man who works in a camera shop on Caledonian Road (‘the Cally’, as it’s known locally) who falls suddenly, unexpectedly in love with a woman who is (of course) more than she seems. A photographer himself, he discovers that his negatives show things that can’t be seen in daylight, and his search for these places and people lead him to the Moonlight Market on a London Bridge that only exists on moonlit nights. Threaded through this is a fairytale about the doomed affair between the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen, and the resulting war between the Silken Folk of the day and night courts. Like her Chocolat series, magic exists and co-exists with the mundane world, and sometimes crosses over – all the best urban fantasy is filled with possibility, of course, and Harris’s books are filled with it.
If you love urban fantasy and London, here’s a few more worlds you can explore:
Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series
Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (I am extremely disappointed in recent revelations about him, but I still love this book)
Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series
Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series
Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series
Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations
Neil Blackmore’s Soho Blue (not magical, but worlds colliding and some of the most evocative writing about post-war London I’ve ever come across)
A good writer makes the setting as much a part of the story as the characters and the action. I first understood this when I did a module at uni called ‘The City in the American Mind’, which introduced me to Sara Paretsky’s Chicago through the eyes of V.I. Warshawski. I’d probably be terribly disappointed if I visited – in my head Vic’s office is in a classic noir setting in ‘the Loop’ , there’s vast tracts of post-industrial wasteland, and there’s a Great Lake smack in the middle. Similarly, Dave Robicheaux’s swampy, louche and lush Louisiana (James Lee Burke is the author here) would not live up to my visions, and if I go to San Francisco I want it to be in Armistead Maupin’s 1970s rather than today. Clearly I need a time-travelling Doctor….but again, that’s another story.
*This probably explains why I get lost a lot on the way back from meetings….if I walk down there, surely it will lead to there (it often doesn’t, but what possibility of magic and adventure would there be if I just walked straight down St John Street to the office?
Coffee with Brian on his last day ever at Museum of London. Hashtag end of an era or something.
Trip with some of the team to the Tower Bridge Experience. Team now convinced I know people EVERYWHERE as one of the bridge hosts is a double-ex colleague from both MoL Docklands and V&A.
Finishing week four of C25K without injury. Crossing fingers, touching wood etc, and sticking everything together with RockTape.
Finishing a sashiko-stitched cat bag
Being able to sit in the garden and work surrounded by plants and sunshine. My Beloved’s new garden shelter is coming on well.
Taking the lovely Matt Shaw round the site in preparation for a new project, watched by this pretty fox.
The Museum of London’s new logo. Sorry, London Museum. I can see what you were thinking but sparkly guano and a discombobulated flying rat aren’t doing it for me.
Still, I spotted the model when I was out with the team at Tower Bridge:
What do they want, glitter on it?
Today I am off for a swim with Isla, and I might even make something. You never know….
Kirsty x
Cover image: Network Rail
What I’ve been reading:
The Life of a Scilly Sergeant – Colin Taylor
The Secret Hours – Mick Herron
The Children of Green Knowe/The River at Green Knowe/The Chimneys of Green Knowe/An Enemy at Green Knowe – Lucy M. Boston
This week I am feeling a little more human – thank you to all the lovely people who reached out to me after last week’s post via Facebook, WhatsApp and so on. It was much appreciated. Thanks also to my Dad, who told me to get on a plane next time and he’d pick me up at the airport for some time off from responsibility. The thought is very tempting, especially on evenings like Thursday when I got home from work at about 8.30 having been to a leaving do and no one had bothered to cook.
I had a couple of days off this week, with the intention of relaxing – it’s probably an indicator of how bad a state I was that it was a real effort to slow down and not feel as if I HAD to finish everything I started. In retrospect, a nine-patch quilt wasn’t the best choice of lazy project. It lends itself to chain piecing for the patches, strips and blocks so you work almost on autopilot. I decided when the blocks were pieced together that I’d make it Quilt-As-You-Go rather than continue in automatic mode which meant some slower focus on keeping my stitching the ditch neat. You can see the quilted blocks here., and Bailey inspecting my work.
So that was the weekend and Monday. My brain was still in overdrive, so when on Tuesday I got up, put my table up and caught myself going into autopilot I made the conscious decision to slow down. So I put the table away, picked up my book and decided to have a lazy day instead. And it was lovely! I had a lunchtime nap, watched some Doctor Who with Thing 2, read my book and later in the day I did some cross stitch and caught up with the temperature tracker which had been sadly neglected since the end of April.
I wasn’t completely sane by the time I went back to the office on Thursday but I was definitely feeling the benefit of some time out. The quilt isn’t finished, but that’s OK – it’s not going anywhere and will still be there when I’m ready to work on it.
Things making me happy this week
Thing 2 becoming hooked on Doctor Who and asking for it to be put on in the evenings. We have just come to the end of David Tennant and Matt Smith has landed.
Having an 18 year daughter – where did the time go?
Sunshine (until it got too hot)
Dinner with London sister and Cardiff cousins on Saturday night
Making it to Week 4 on the Couch to 5k. Five minutes of running doesn’t sound like a lot….
Making business card holders for my lovely business cards. With pocketses!
Full disclosure: this is not a post about actual dogs. Sorry. Especially to my cousin who really, really likes dogs.
It became increasingly obvious by the end of last week that I was in the middle of a fairly serious wobble, on a scale that I haven’t experienced for a while. I should probably have spotted it earlier in the week, when being in a room with people was too much, I was heading to bed at 8.30pm with a book to avoid the sensory overload of the TV, completely unable to concentrate at work and going round and round one piece of work that I just couldn’t get past, and seriously contemplating calling in sick and sitting in silence all day.
When I am on a downward spiral I have a tendency to make questionable decisions and while in my head I know that I should refrain from making them, that same head is the one causing the problem in the first place so those filters are not necessarily in place. At one point I even gave in and had a rest in the office on the giant beanbag (this is a thing! We are allowed to do this!) because I couldn’t keep going. I tried taking an afternoon off on the Friday but spent most of it waiting outside a lock-up to drop off our festival kit, as the person who was supposed to be there to meet me wasn’t, so that didn’t work. My Saturday was taken up with an extended family barbecue which meant I had to be sociable – not that I don’t love them all but I just didn’t have the capacity for it. Sunday was Cally Road Festival so I had to be extrovert all day when my entire being was fighting it…
Even a good long stomp through the fields on Monday morning in a ‘forced restart’ attempt didn’t help: I couldn’t hit my pace and felt like I was wading through treacle physically as well as mentally. The paths were sticky and swampy after several days of torrential rain, and the final straw was stepping on a tussock of grass which turned out to be disguising an ankle deep puddle.
When you’re (allegedly) a functioning adult with a responsible job and a family and several cats and a never-ending pile of laundry, you don’t feel you have luxury of giving in to a wobble – which means that you add denial to the load you’re carrying. Twenty plus years of dealing with depression should have taught me that this is a tactic which never works – a breakdown isn’t like a Teams meeting that you can schedule in between another couple of meetings, and unlike a piece of work you can’t block out a day in the diary to get it out of the way. I described it to a colleague as feeling like I was juggling axes and someone had just thrown me a chainsaw.
As the official office Mental Health First Aider (with a certificate to prove it!), if anyone came to me and said they were feeling like this I’d have taken them off for a cup of tea and a chat, helped them speak to their line manager, signposted all the things we have in place to support them, and probably encouraged them to take a few days off to rest. As the person having a mental health crisis this week, I forgot to do this for myself…there is an MH First Responder as well, but I forgot that in the moment and also she’d have had to refer me back to me….
Depression is also a terrible liar and tells you that you’re being silly and making a fuss and you’ll just be bothering people if you go and tell them how you’re feeling….so you don’t.
I am very lucky in that our organisation is inclusive and open and run by people who actually want you to thrive, rather than others I have worked in where you felt were dispensable as there would always be a stream of people waiting to work there. I felt confident enough on the Friday to say to my boss that I was struggling (probably so that she could sense-check my questionable decisions) and she checked back in with me on the Monday morning to see how I was doing and to work with me to put a plan in place for the week – an extra day at home if I needed it, time to rest etc. I think I am coming out of the other side now, and have booked a couple of days of me-time this week (plan: read books, turn fabric into other things, sleep). I think (I hope) that I am past the days when the first thing you do every morning is wonder whether this is going to be a good day or a bad one (now I just wonder which bit of me is going to ache most) but it was an unpleasant reminder that every so often the Black Dog can still put his paws on my shoulders.
Things making me happy this week
An England football game that wasn’t 119 minutes of tedium (including extra time) with 90 seconds of excitement. I miss Gareth Southgate’s waistcoats. I like Gareth Southgate and would like him to win the Euros except for the fact that if this happened English fans would bang on about it for the next 60 years.
Things 2 & 3’s sports day on Friday. I loathed sports day as a pupil, detested it as a teacher and hated it as a parent but felt guilty if I missed it even though there are two parents in this household. Now they are in secondary school I don’t have to go and I don’t have to feel a single SMIDGE of guilt about it.
New business cards which means I have an excellent excuse to make a new business card holder, which my Beloved thinks is unnecessary but what does he know?
Handing over the community part of my job to our lovely new Community Partnerships Producer
Thing 1’s brownies and Thing 2’s S’more Cookies
Getting a date for Thing 3’s foot surgery that’s not months and months away – don’t panic Mother, it’s an ingrown toenail
Not having to work this weekend and a lovely swim in a weedless lake with Sue and Rachel on Saturday morning
Discovering a quilting technique – Kawandi – I haven’t tried yet but which looks like fun.
Today I get to spend some time with GrandThing 1 while my Beloved helps Timeshare Teen 1 move house before GTs 3 and 4 arrive, and I’m looking forward to my time off! Thing 1 is 18 on Monday so I must also make a cake and wonder how that happened….
So, this week was the General Election and – to no one’s surprise – the Conservatives are out and Labour are in. I don’t know about the rest of you, but to me this doesn’t feel quite as momentous an occasion as it did when Labour got in in 1997. Back then there was cake and early morning partying in the staffroom. I think, as teachers, we really believed that Tony Blair and his ‘education, education, education’ would make a difference to us – the National Curriculum (a cupboard full of files and not a single word about fun, as my teacher mentor Mr Deakin told me when I first said I was thinking about teaching) might be overhauled, the workload might be decreased, there might be some proper thinking about what children needed to know for the 21st century rather than what they needed to know to pass a SAT. They made a start with the Rose Report, and were doing great things for early years like Sure Start and the children’s centres, but all these things vanished into the ether when they got voted out again in 2010.
Perhaps we are all more jaded about politics, post-Brexit, post-Partygate, post-pandemic. Post Johnson and his constant lies and calculated buffoonery*. Post-Liz Truss and her failure to outlast a lettuce. And now, post-Sunak after his drowned rat announcement of a snap election soundtracked/derailed by D:Ream’s Labour anthem, his well-timed Euros gaffe in Wales, his inability to read a room and his total lack of understanding of life for non-billionaires in a cost-of-living crisis. Or – as I read this week – ‘cossie livs’. Dear gods. This did at least provide meme fodder during the campaign – poor Rishi and his lack of a satellite dish! When I was teaching in Hackney the kids thought I was poor as I only had five channels on my telly, so Rishi’s family must have been really broke.
The more cynical pundits have suggested that Sunak was deliberately trying to lose the election – you can’t offload a government in the way you would a business, after all, and he is at heart a businessman. Bowing out gracefully isn’t really a Tory thing, so perhaps the most he could do was call this election and hope for the worst (or the best, depending on your point of view).
The constant banging on about migrants and small boats (although legal migration dwarfs illegal by many, many thousands even post-Brexit: 29,437 illegal vs 685,000 legal in 2023) has precipitated the rise of the Reform Party resulting in the inevitable election (at his 8th attempt) of the loathsome Farage in, unsurprisingly, Clacton. The blue wall of Essex took a serious dent this week, in fact, although sadly the Conservative hold on Epping Forest and Brentwood and Ongar was maintained. Reform came in second in Brentwood and Ongar and I’ve never been so grateful to a Tory before – despite there being a credible Labour candidate and, as a first, leaflet campaigns by all the parties. Wales, bless them, have booted out all the Tories at last – perhaps they noticed the lack of funding post-Brexit when those EU roads stopped being built?
Anyway, as the song says – things can only get better, if only because they couldn’t really get worse. Also, Larry the Cat has been all over social media and he’s outlasted the lot of them.
*The sly characterisations of fictionalised politicians in Mick Herron’s Slough House series are excellent – read them!
Using some scraps from a Bazaar grab bag and some Indian fabric to patch a bag for a try at Kantha stitching
A lovely afternoon with the extended family for Timeshare Teenager 1’s baby shower – the actual showers held off for the afternoon after 24 torrential hours
An excellent parent’s evening for Thing 2. We shall keep her another year then.
Not the football, that’s been extremely boring
A lot of reading
And that’s it for the week – hope election Santa brought you what you wanted this week! Today I am off to Cally Road Festival with our lovely illustrator and Thing 2 – please wish for good weather!
It was my birthday on Wednesday and I had plans. Such plans! I wanted to go to The Manor at Hemingford Grey, where Lucy M. Boston wrote the Green Knowe stories and made beautiful quilts and planted her garden.
Once again my plans were foiled (foiled!) by circumstances beyond my control. So, I was pretty grumpy and feeling extremely hard-done-by and underappreciated when I got up on Wednesday morning. I went for a run, took the furry idiot to the vet again (she was pretty out of sorts too, and I have the scratches to prove it) and then decided I’d take myself off for a bit of pampering.
I started with a proper pedicure at the Nail Bar in Harlow, and while you always have to wait in there I had my sewing project with me so the whole thing was pretty relaxing. The pedicure chairs are also massage chairs so I even got a bit of a back rub, and came out with sparkly red toes and feeling much better. I got my eyebrows threaded (ow) and then went and had lunch with my book for company at Mui & Koko.
My mum always used to say that if I had tattoos I’d regret them when I was 50, and last year when I hit the half century I swore I’d have another tattoo. I knew exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t quite get around to it for a whole variety of reasons, so as I was in Harlow with a free afternoon I contacted a tattooist who’d been recommended by a few friends. It turned out he’d relocated his studio to Hertford, and wasn’t officially open till the following day, but he liked my idea and said he could fit me in that afternoon.
And so, like Bilbo Baggins, I went on an unexpected journey. I hopped on a bus to the train station, bought a return to Hertford and went on an adventure.
I’ve only been to Hertford once before, to see Rich Hall, and as I had some time before my appointment I had a good wander around the charity shops (many, but not as good as Bishops Stortford). I also visited the little museum, housed in a historic building on a pretty street and full of information about Hertford life and, apparently, the largest collection of toothbrushes in the world.
I liked the exhibit featuring all the things Victorian travellers brought back as donations, including a set of Samurai armour and some Japanese sandals, and I had a go at the low-tech ‘dress the Samurai warrior’ interactive. There were a few interventions like this throughout the museum, including an opportunity to design a postcard inspired by the embroidered WW1 postcards on display. There was a little shop for children to play in, and WAY too many scary old dolls for my liking, including a ventriloquist’s dummy.
And then it was tattoo time! The new Gumtoad studio is funky, with some futuristic masks on the wall (that not even I could be scared of), and the tattoo artist was lovely – very chatty and it turned out we’d both lived on Hackney Road at various times, and he’d lived in the village where we live now. It was a wide-ranging conversation covering all sorts of things, from children to urban exploring.
The tattoo took about 90 minutes, and was considerably less painful than the threading earlier in the day. I’d taken my picture with me and he suggested I’d get more detail if it was about 10% bigger. We tested out the best position on my shoulder, and once that was perfect we got on with it! I absolutely love it – it’s exactly as I imagined it, and having it done made my birthday. Thank you to my Beloved, whose birthday present paid for it…
For anyone who doesn’t recognise the character, it’s Snufkin from Tove Jansson‘s Moomin stories – this is him heading off to be alone for a while, as he does every winter while the Moomin family hibernate the cold away. He always comes back on the first day of spring though. I’ve loved the Moomins since I was a child and still reread the books on a regular basis. Snufkin is wise, independent and kind, and has an excellent hat, and this illustration has always spoken to me about choosing to follow the direction you want in life. Thing 2 is named after the author, which tells you something about my long-term love of these little Finnish trolls! Jansson also illustrated a Finnish version of The Hobbit, among other things.
And when I got home there was cake, thanks to Thing 2, and presents from sisters – a book on Boro and Sashiko stitching from Irish sister, and new adventure pants and Moomin biscuits from London sister.
Thanks also to Ma and Pa for the birthday Amazon voucher – guilt free craft and reading!
What Kirsty did next 