178: Somewhere Down The Crazy River

I can’t say I’m overly impressed with the weather this week, to be quite honest with you all. It’s August and I have had to wear actual socks and actual shoes and think about whether to take an umbrella. And then it gets hot but it’s cold in the morning so I have to think about layers. It’s like being on holiday in Wales and having to be prepared for all eventualities, up to and including hurricanes, tornadoes and the Central Line.

July was cool, as can be seen in the temperature supernova update – last year was all hot reds and oranges; this year cool greens and yellows dominate. September will probably be tropical. Huh.

There have been many good things about the week, however:

Getting to go to a workshop at All Change Arts with Alaa Alsaraji, one of our Community Illustrators, and poet Rakaya Fetuga
Meeting the other Community Illustrators – Grace Holliday, Jhinuk Sarkar and Lily Ash Sakula to talk about their current projects
A creative meeting with storyteller Olivia Armstrong about a Quentin Blake inspired session
A new haircut
Barbie. I loved it. I really loved it. I may never listen to Matchbox Twenty in the same way again.
Getting round to making this pair of extremely dramatic self-drafted trousers from a tutorial by Tendai Murairwa in Simply Sewing magazine in a gorgeous teal and purple wax print fabric. I even made a toile for these to test the fit.

Jukebox hero

Robbie Robertson, ex-member of The Band, Dylan stalwart and solo musician died this week aged 80. I’m not going to pretend I’m a massive fan, but rather I’m someone who sings along when his songs come on the radio – apart from his first, eponymous, solo album which I love. Featuring collaborations with U2 and Peter Gabriel, among others, it yielded his biggest hit (this week’s title) and also the gorgeous Broken Arrow which Rod Stewart had more success with.

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4471540

Somewhere Down The Crazy River was a fixture on the jukebox in a village pub I used to spend a lot of time in, usually selected by one particular person. A few times in your life, if you’re lucky, you meet someone who fills a space in your soul that you don’t even know exists. They are the folded beermat underneath your wobbly table leg (and there have been times when my tables were very wobbly, believe me); someone who gets you on your level. I’ve had several of these people in my life and I thank my stars every day for them. I lost touch with this one for 13 years but reached out (with a Blues Brothers birthday card) on his 40th and we remained in contact for the last couple of years of his life. I’d bought and written a card for him every year but never sent them until this one, and I will forever be glad I did. I still raise a glass every year on his birthday – yesterday would have been his 51st. Hopefully he spent it duetting with Robbie Robertson over a lager with a lot of lime.

Same time next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Echo of Old Books/The Last of the Moon Girls – Barbara Davis

Amongst Our Weapons/October Man – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

Paint Your Dragon – Tom Holt

The Mercenary River – Nick Higham (I keep dropping in and out of this one)

177: but I only want the little one

Yesterday was my Beloved’s birthday and so despite the rain we all trooped off to Toot Hill Show – once he had dragged the Things out of bed at noon, anyway. Toot Hill is a small village over the next hill, and they have a proper village show (this year is the 70th anniversary, in fact) complete with local handicrafts, home grown fruit and veg and flower displays like ‘three dahlias in a vase’. My friend Jill’s Victoria Sponge was highly commended – she’s been threatening to enter for several years now and there may have been a riot if she hadn’t got some kind of mention. I’d thought about entering the handicrafts section but forgot. I’ll remember next year. Probably.

I was very taken with the alpacas, but apparently they weren’t for sale. They make the weirdest noises – quite like a whinging teenager, come to think of it, but quieter. There were the usual motley crew of rescue ferrets and a fun dog show; a sheepdog demonstration and allegedly BMX riders but we missed them. In previous years there have been Indian Runner ducks being herded by the sheepdog, and the local hawk and owl sanctuary display, but Storm Antoni was making its presence felt.

My Beloved brought home enormous quantities of interesting cheese, and I did not bring home an alpaca. Not even the little one.

The rest of the day was spent taping and cutting pattern pieces out ready to add to fabric. I’m going through a dramatic trouser phase at the moment and at some point my beloved paper bag waist black ones from H&M are going to give up the ghost. Possibly I need to learn how to do that thing where you make a pattern from your existing clothes, but there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I am off to see the Barbie film this morning and hope to get some sewing in this afternoon.

Other things making me happy this week

A trip up to see the future home of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration – honey bees and butterflies galore thanks to the buddleia which abounds on site
A picnic lunch with Amanda – no cocktails or cemeteries but a ridiculously small dog to watch
Crochet cacti and a whole family of tiny mice
An interesting training session with Climate Museum UK
Discovering new ways to walk to and from the office, which revealed the Barbican entrance to Farringdon station

And now I’d better go and find something pink to wear, which Things 1 and 2 tell me is compulsory for Barbie watchers.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The White Hare/The Sea Gate – Jane Johnson

Odds and Gods/Paint Your Dragon – Tom Holt

The Hanging Tree/Lies Sleeping/False Value – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The Echo of Old Books – Barbara Davis

122: hot enough for you?

Hot, isn’t it.

Properly, officially hot.

Hot enough for the gritters to be out sanding the roads in case they melt, for TfL to be emailing me and telling me not to get on trains, and for the denizens of the internet to be complaining not about the heat but about the latest version of the weather map. It’s far too scary, apparently.

In the ‘olden days’ (ie when the likes of Michael Fish and Wincey Willis were slapping velcro-backed sunshine and clouds onto the map and suggesting we took a cardigan) weather was a happy thing and it was called ‘summer’. Now – with clever computer graphics which show temperatures and snow and things without the need for double-sided sticky tape, weather maps are designed to bring FEAR and TERROR and QUITE POSSIBLY parties of irritating Hobbits chucking bling into what’s being referred to as ‘the A1 corridor’.

Mordor. Sorry, the weather map for this week.

You can almost predict what’s coming next: mutterings about 1976 and how that was a heatwave, Britain did proper heatwaves back then, droughts, reservoirs drying up, plagues of ladybirds, shortage of Mivvis, that sort of thing. It’s like a badly scripted sitcom, with lines spoken by a hanky-headed, string-vest wearing pensioner in a deckchair. Well yes, it was indeed all those things, though I may have made up the Mivvi shortage – for two whole months – but crucially the maximum temperature reached was 35.9 degrees. This is a good four degrees lower than the potential highs this week which are likely to be record breaking. The first red warning for heat has been issued – they did only invent them last year, to be fair – with a risk to life for even healthy people. Significant changes to daily routines are being advised, with damage to infrastructure possible (railway tracks in London were on fire last week, for a start). Schools are considering closing.

So SHUT UP about 1976: since then we’ve developed a bloody great hole in the ozone layer, the ice shelves are melting, the sea is rising and global temperature has risen about 1.1 degree since 1880 with the majority of the warming occurring since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade. Nine of the ten hottest years on record have been in the the last decade, and 1976 doesn’t even feature in the list. Get used to the scary weather maps and maybe have a think about what you, as a citizen of the planet, could do to help: every little helps, as a famous supermarket would have it.

Things making me happy this week:

The pool and the lake
Watching Thing 3’s end of year performance
The portable air cooler thingy in the bedroom
The chilled section in Tesco…
Thing 1’s 16th birthday – Now, 2006, that was a hot summer…Sorry.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay– Michael Chabon

Tales from the City – Armistead Maupin