Twice as nice.

I do not stick to my own rules.

Twice does not, apparently mean a repeat of the same thing.

Last night as I was just dropping off, the weather being chilly, leading to snow flurries, the OH had no problems getting me out of bed to ask where his other fluffy blanket could possibly be because he’d looked in the wardrobe where I said it was and he couldn’t see it.

Wrong wardrobe door.  I opened the other one and for lo! there it was, visible to the naked eye by looking and if pulled slightly with the hand, able to fall out on top of the pullee.

I turned and stalked off with my recently broken little toe right into the bed leg and broke it again.  (The toe, not the bed leg.)

I am getting quite used to broken toes.  Broken toes are sub-dexa scan.  They do not show up on bone density doo dads.  They just break on their own.  Mine have always done this.  The first I remember was sliding on a freshly polished school hall floor.  At A&E they told me I had not broken my toe because hairline fractures don’t show up on X rays.  So I carried on wearing heeled shoes and consequently have had a toe that healed sticking up ever since, on my left foot.  I did a couple randomly, and the OH did one by stepping backwards with his Crocs on my bare toe in Australia, but the most noticeable was the mirror, second toe on my right foot, which I did during lockdown. Under the circumstances I was not keen to go to hospital in case I came home with an X ray and Covid, so I didn’t go.  Now that one sticks up in the air too.

And now my little toe, left foot, is stuck to my other toes with sticking plaster, as it was previously.  It took quite a few weeks to stop hurting last time.

Astrologers would have me believe it’s all due to Pluto at the top of my chart.  Personally I think it’s due to walking barefoot without due care and attention.

And two, the power of two, too.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Two, twice.

As dedicated readers know, it’s all about two.

If I put out three flowerpots, it looks wrong.

I buy vests in twos, it’s just easier than finding I like it, going back and waiting until they’re back in stock to buy the other.

Problems of late have not been coming singly, you may have noticed.  I wish I had.  What made me think that I could go to the dentist with a broken tooth and just have a filling?  Eternal optimist that I am.

I can’t take the broken filling in to the dentist.  I swallowed it, along with a crisp.  So I’m back to up at dawn to get a dental appointment, then goodness knows how many of them to get an eight hundred pound crown* fitted.

I’m trying to be philosophical.  Some people have dental emergencies in public holidays.  Could have been a Christmas roast potato that finished the filling and I’d have been crackered.

Back to soup.

And we’ll be having Christmas Lite.

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*Money, not weight.  You could get a real crown to put on your head for what it’s going to cost me for a fake tooth.

Soup.  (I wish I liked it.)

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The whole tooth.

I should have known I couldn’t get through the last ghastly six weeks without something going south.

Well it nearly went south but I caught it in time.  It was a large chunk, about a quarter, of my wisdom tooth.  So, not as wise as I thought I was, boasting about how calmly I had dealt with everything, everywhere etc.

I rang the dentist at exactly eight o clock, which is not difficult when you’ve been awake since five and up at seven.  I was able to describe the problem clearly because this was before my tongue and cheek had swollen to fill the razor sharp gap.  The first available emergency appointment is Monday morning but they will ring me if someone forgets to go today, unlikely, I think, as pain is quite a memory stimulant, I find.

I will either lose weight because I can’t eat or gain it because I’m living on chocolate.  I have quite lot of chocolate in the house to put out with the library, which I can do when the weather gets cold enough.  In the summer people pointedly put melted chocolate bars on top of the books, or knock on the door to give me a soggy handful.  However right now the needs of the one…

The Romans did have dentists and toothbrushes made from frayed sticks but they didn’t have as much sugar as we have.  Their dental skills lapsed with the decline of the Roman Empire and by the time we get to Elizabethans, cane sugar, honey, syllabub and trifle, suddenly everyone was a fan of fans to hide your black teeth.  Queen Elizabeth the First had famously awful teeth, which is why she is always close-mouthed in portraits and in later ones you can see her face collapsing as she loses teeth.

In South Shields, where I grew up, people awaited the arrival of the black man.  He came to the town once or twice a year and was known for his strong fingers with which he could pull out bad teeth.  He would set up in the market with a wooden chair and quickly attracted a line of patients.  This continued from Victorian times, presumably with several black men, rather than one hundred year old one, until after the Second World War.  I had an uncle who was a dentist, trained in the army.  He had one of those very Forties-looking painted wood dental cabinets in cream with metal handles.  He used to put down the cigarette while he mixed up the amalgam but have a quick draw before he popped it on the tooth.  So I associate dentistry with ashtrays but still smoked as a teenager.  To be fair, rebelling but somewhat repelled, it took a while to get to cigarettes, at first I smoked a pipe with herbal tobacco on the bus, upstairs on the way home from school.  I think I was hoping it would make me thin and sophisticated, which just goes to show you how stupid some teenagers can be.

This, of course, is why you get fatter as you get older.  Evolution assumes you’ll be living on gruel, unhelpful to the tribe as you cannot soften the leather for clothing by chewing it, and therefore, although you get a menopause to help you raise the grandchildren, it makes you fat at the same time, so you can live off your gigantic stomach while chasing children running away from dinosaurs.

I would write a letter to evolution to bring it up to date but it already decided not to bother with my third set of teeth, which is why I have a massive, now broken, partially erupted, wisdom tooth.

In another million years we’ll all have evolved to live off car fumes and be seven feet tall and quite spindly, which, as Earth survivors living in a bubble on Mars will all be a bit pointless. 

Progress in modern life is like the egg and spoon race at school, in that it never really catches up with itself, so that you just know that winners, like the incoming American administration, have had their finger on the egg, all along.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Everything, everywhere….

How much easier it would be if untoward happenings formed an orderly queue and occurred one at a time with a nice space for recovery in the middle.

The lack of postings hasn’t been about me for a change.  The mother of the D.I.L had had such poor health, through no fault of her own, that her kidneys have been failing for some years.  The D.I.L. decided to donate a kidney to her mother, which is about as altruistic as you can get.  Many tests in various locations ensued, the D.I.L’s sister joined in and was tested, but not a match, other family members felt unable to participate, so one way and another it was the D.I.L who was going to be the one.

Donating a kidney turned out to be one of those vague ‘heard it on the news’ sorts of things that you don’t expect to know someone who has actually done it.  Amazingly when I mentioned it to my hairdresser, her brother had done it for a family member.  She said it had taken him two years to recover fully, she also murmured that her children were under strict instructions not to donate anything to their father, her Ex, who was welcome just to go off and die in a field whenever he liked, as far as she was concerned.

Knowing it will happen and the actual event are two very different things.  Although the testing had taken place in a different part of the country, the actual transplant surgery was taking place at a huge hospital, a centre of excellence with all the equipment and the surgeons to do the job, only a few miles away from me.  This hospital, however,  is two hours drive from where the S&H and the D.I.L live.  I have always been released from hospital on the day stated but the hour could be absolutely anything, depending on ward rounds, pharmacists and paperwork.  Therefore I offered for myself and the OH to collect the D.I.L post surgery and bring her here until such time as the S&H could come and get her, making allowances for children and schooltime and time off work.  Although the S&H demurred, in the end his work, from which he is being let go just before Christmas, so the shareholders can get a nice pre-holiday bonus when the firm is bought out in a rush, would only let him have half a day off.  That’s half a day to collect his wife who had just saved a life by donating a body part that she was actually using.

Well it’s all about what is handy for the shareholders, isn’t it?

So we collected her in the afternoon and brought her here.  She sat on the settee and debriefed herself, until she came over all wobbly, so I helped her up to bed, in the lift (I am so glad I have a lift, sometimes it gives you such a lift.).

The following day, as soon as the children had gone to school, the S&H set off, arriving mid-morning.  He found he had a wife still, which was quite a relief, although his hands are covered in a stress rash, unsurprisingly, and as soon as she was loaded into the car he set off for home again.

Throughout the OH was snappy and my guts played up.  Stress and responsibility can get to you as you age because you just aren’t as strong even as a bystander, as you were when you were young.

It is unsurprisingly difficult when life occurs to family members.  My mother always used to say, occasionally when she had been the agent of illness, that she would happily go through it for me. I’m glad she never did, in retrospect, because when she was eventually ill herself, she was like everything that was bad about the middle ages embodied in the one enraged old woman. I recall my father-in-law, arriving to be cared for after his wife died, upon being told that I had cancer, turning and walking off saying he didn’t want to know that.  That may have been a more honest response.  The fact is that when awful things happen to people close to you, how you react is sometimes a surprise even to yourself.

I tried to provide what was needed, step back from the OH being stroppy, though with me, not the D.I.L.  To recognise panic in another.  Not to smother the D.I.L and to take the opportunity to be wise and kind.  I would have to say all my recent hospital stays and  surgeries were a great help in the matter of when to assist and feed and when to go away and give space.

Most of all, I just don’t know how nurses do it.  How do nurses do it? How can you lovingly, professionally, care for someone you aren’t even related to?  Not just how could you do it, but why?

Well that is the first hurdle over.  Now we have to hope the transplant takes for the recipient, that the brave donor will recover well without any setbacks and that the S&H will find a job that will pay the bills.  I gave him his Christmas present which was the money for a new shower, a couple of months ago, which he is now saving in case they need to eat it.

So fingers, toes and eyes crossed that the long range outcome is good.

I haven’t been able to make anything for ages but found myself making a card today, so maybe I have breathed out a bit.

Yet I compare our lives and problems with those in war-torn parts of the world.  How do people go through those experiences and survive?

Maybe the learning we take from this is to enjoy today if it is calm and reasonable.

Tomorrow could turn out to be everything, everywhere, happening all at once.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


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Harrumph.

Dickens had elderly characters saying harrumph.

There is a possibility that I may be turning into an elderly Dickensian.

I don’t say ‘harrumph’ as much as I say ‘huh!’  I say ‘Huh!’ a lot, also ‘Oh Dear!’.

I am unable to get up in the morning without several ‘Oh dears’ or, should that be several ‘ohs dear.’?  Difficult to say.  I don’t ‘Oh dear,’ as I rise unless it’s a really bad day.  I start ‘Oh dearing’ in the bathroom usually.  Not about the state of the bathroom, which, as it is mine alone usually, is clean and shiny.  Neither is it about the state of my body, although I am viewing it in a huge mirror, with lighting right round it, which seemed like a good idea when I was a whole six years younger.  Neither is it about the twenty times magnifying mirror attached to the big mirror which gives a splendid view of everything not splendid at all on the face.  My face started lacking any kind of splendour as it collected scars.  The first was the gardening scar which occurred just missing my left eye when I pulled a tree into my face.  It wouldn’t come up and it wouldn’t come up and it wouldn’t come up

and then it did.

The nurse at A&E was overly gently to the point of being lily livered, I think he was envisioning the scar on his own face, right under his earring.  ‘Never mind’ he murmured slightly patting on a plaster over the Steri-strips nearly pulling the edges together, ‘You’ll be able to have plastic surgery.’ which should give you a clue as to how long ago this was.  The wound went bad and multi-coloured and wept pus, never good on your face.  So I returned and it was cleaned and stuck together much more thoroughly by a young nurse who could have moonlighted as an all-in wrestler.  It finally healed as a zig zag scar so prominent under my eye, if I racked up at any black arts festival, I’d be right in, no questions asked.

The second scar you already know about (hello reader!) It’s the one on my chin caused by tripping over the handle of the library on the drive, trying to save a pot of flowers.  The pot broke, which probably saved my jaw.  A lady motoring down the hill stopped to see what was causing the actual fountains of blood and the OH, interrupted after his shower, got dressed quite quickly for him, to take me to A&E.

There is a useful rule of thumb to be garnered for the accident-prone – never live further than ten minutes away from the nearest hospital.  We did in Nottingham, but as the OH was working there, we were always rushed through as family anyway.

The scar on my chin is an inch and a half long and a fingernail deep, but I can’t be vain, obviously, if I were, I’d have done something about my thighs years ago.  I even wear tight trousers, so I clearly don’t give a stuff.

No the ‘oh dears’ or ‘ohs dear’ are about the inside of my head.

A few columns ago I related a whole string of losses that happened all at once.  Portraiture, Al-Anon, Create and Craft shopping channel and Lynne.

The demise of Create and Craft was very sudden, although the owners had been going to retire and wind it up for months, as a visit to Companies House made very apparent.  Their stated intention to cease to exist on November 5th is there for all to see.  What they didn’t do was tell the customers, the stock providers or any of the employees.  I know about the customers, because I was one, for twenty years.  I know about the stock providers because I have been in contact with many of these small businesses.  The reaction of the employees to the treatment of the employees you can find online on various platforms.

I did enjoy the demonstrations of many hobbies, I did enjoy the prices that can be achieved by throwing a massive budget at suppliers, I did enjoy new ideas for hobbies and I loved some of the presenters.  I do love live television, when it goes well it’s great, when it goes wrong it’s better.

What I loved most was my ability to email in and get the email read out live, on air, by a presenter with no chance to practise.  On a good day I managed to get three emails read out, on a very good day I could make a couple of presenters laugh and on a great day I could make someone corpse so much they couldn’t speak for laughing.

I think that really was my hobby.

It began years ago when I was a columnist for Dolls House World.  I loved to make readers laugh.  In the day of actual letters through the post a reader took the trouble to write a letter, and post it, to say she’d been reading the magazine in bed but her husband was cross with her, she laughed so much she wet the bed and they had to get out and change it.

Lynne laughed a lot when we were talking on the phone, therefore so did I.  There is something so special about people whose awful back ground story you know, who choose to laugh.  Some of the worst things, such as the difficulty of helping a husband made unpredictable and dangerous by a brain tumour, she mentioned once just in passing. I only know of her problems helping her demented neighbour, going in, cleaning, taking a meal in, looking after the cat, because I asked.  There were so many others, bound to affect a woman left alone with children and little income and aggressive parents, but she never dwelt on any of them, instead she focussed on the brighter side of life and laughed all the time.

So quite a bit of the Oh Dearing was at that loss.

I also hmm a lot.  Not like an overripe cheese, which is a relief, nor like someone trying to recall the words to Beethoven’s Ninth, more like someone who should not be surprised, being surprised, mostly at the state of the world.  I am also still surprised that, having left sweets outside in a bucket next to the pavement, some people will run by and grab handfuls, or handsful.  Trying to steal something which is free is not so much an Oh Dear, (or an Ohs dear dear dear, if they take the lot, which has happened) as a hmm, verging on a tut tut. I feel these are people who have not yet realised that you’re responsible for the condition of your own soul, if you don’t keep yours well-watered with kindness and gratitude but let it go all black and crispy, that’s your look out.

On Halloween evening, one little witch, aged about seven, refused a second dip in the top hat of sweets, ‘Oh no,’  she opined, ‘one is quite enough, thank you.’  Very heartening, I thought, though it isn’t the children with the crispy-edged souls round here, it’s a couple of the adults.

Hmmm.

However the Huh!s are entirely at what I am allowing to pass through my mind and, worse, my reactions to what is passing through my mind, and it’s always worse in the morning.

One of the things that would be so helpful in life is to have an understanding of the noises made by babies and what they signify.  It would cut out a lot of doubt.  It is discomfort, no doubt, but of which sort?

A revelation of maturity (I am mature.  See?  Kindness in action.) is that the seriously mature haven’t got a clue what they are on about, either.

My Victorian grandmother, who knew a thing or two, soothed my crying with teaspoonfuls of tea.

Amazingly, it still works.  It’s a pint mug now but that’s progress for you.

~~~~~~~~~

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Behaving like a bus.

I am.  Nothing for ages, then three at once.

After my last post, I went round the corner to the garage, because we were out of chocolate biscuits and sometimes you just need chocolate biscuits.  Ahead of me in the queue was an elderly gentleman who had tried to buy the meal deal but picked up the wrong items and thought the remedy would be to shout repeatedly at the lady behind the till.

I still don’t know what is going on, currently the evil in the world seems to be outweighing the good.  Walking to the garage I spotted a clump of toadstools in the grass on the front lawn.

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These are growing on the remnants of the old tree that used to be so lovely in the spring but died in a welter of sawdust.

So I got my gardening boots on and got myself out armed with the long handled small fork, a very useful tool.

Then I spotted the huge bunch in the flower bed.

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My goodness, is this revolting or lovely?

Let’s have a close up.

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Revolting, I think.  Actually, who would enjoy something as burgeoningly wet and fruity?

I found the answer round in the back garden, cutting down the ends of the peony.  Peonies are huge blowsy flowers that do their thing for a fortnight and then spend the next three months looking as if they are recovering from a major bender with no coffee.

I have known people like that, happily in the past, mostly.

But when I chopped down the mouldy, hollow peony stalks, guess who I found enjoying the damp and a bit of mould?

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This big fat frog, who has been living at the bottom of the peony support frame.  He had the company of a couple of slugs and a snail.

It’s a balanced thing, nature.  It starts off under ground in the dark, in the fallow and wet time of year when it looks as if all the good stuff has gone and just the slugs and frogs are left.   But you need that sort of thing to get this sort of thing, in time.

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Let’s hope it’s a metaphor for the general state of the world currently.

I am off to do some easy arty stuff, I’ll show you later.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Not finished yet.

Apparently I was wrong about the twos.

Remember this?

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It’s the lockdown library on the end of the drive.  Books on the cart, jigsaws in the wheeled box, sweets in the wire basket.

Today I was putting the cart out, after the rain, before lunch, when a very dirty man, on a bicycle, wheeled up and stopped too close.  The cart is chained to the metal loop embedded in the drive, as I was putting the chain through the loop I know he bent down and grabbed most of the  sweets, I’d just spent fifteen minutes bagging up.

I said ‘You took some sweets, those are for the children.’

‘No, love,’ he said, ‘I haven’t.’ and patted his pockets. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘can I take a book?  For my child?’  He took a book.  ‘And some sweets?’  He took a packet of sweets. 

I looked him right in the eyes.  ‘You,’ I said, ‘will go to hell.  Liars and thieves go to hell.’

He cycled off quite fast.

You would think if he was going to steal handfuls of sweets he would at least wait until I’d gone back in the house.

But the hellbent get where they are going.

#######

What is going on at the moment?  Wars everywhere, gangs shoplifting, people crossing the channel on inflatables and a new government we had such high hopes of, just as corrupt as the last lot?

I welcome any theories.  Click on Leave a comment below.

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In twos.

It took a long time for me to realise, even though I am quite bright, that stuff in my life happens in twos.  I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and relieved when it does.  I put pots of flowers  by the front door in the prescribed threes and fives but I fiddle around with them until there are two, and that looks right to me.  It works with health for me, I couldn’t just have cancer (twice) I had to have adhesions too.

Once the second thing has appeared, blinking from the mists of the future, I feel better.

Usually.

Last night the S&H rang to say his job is in jeopardy because the firm he works for is being taken over by the firm he left previously, backed by a middle Eastern bank.

I had a horrible feeling when I worried about all the people losing their jobs at Create and Craft that that wasn’t it. I knew there was something else and in a phone call while the OH was out carousing, I found out what it was.

I told you this column would not be here without Lynne, it wouldn’t be here without the S&H either, who designed it for his mum for a lark because he could.

He’s very good with computery things.  He is currently a Cloud Platform manager, who designed his own video game aged eleven and has got better since.  He went to America to help Microsoft with something for another lark when he’d just finished being a student.

So, if you want the S&H to work for you, email me and I’ll pass you on, if you want to watch Leonie, or buy pretty glue or some cracking stamps, click on this www.artinspirations.co.uk   If you are missing AALL and Create from the telly click on this www.aallandcreate.com

Anything else head down to Leave a comment and well, you know, leave a comment.

I will try very hard to post about something positive next time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Everything, everywhere, stopping at once.

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As well as making dolls, I do people, flat, as it were.

For about twelve years or more, I’ve been going to portraiture, run by a local art shop, the owners of which, paid someone to sit still for a couple of hours so I, and some others, can get busy drawing.  Here are a few of the latest and, sadly, the last because portraiture has closed.  The owner went off to India for a year, during which it sort of fell over.

When new dolls come out of the kiln, I used to think ‘Well, no one actually looks like that,’ until, of course I saw them.  Portraiture was intended to help with the representation of people.  It never fails to amaze me that, given the standard arrangement of faces, you know, two eyes at the top, nose in the middle, mouth underneath, people can be so different.

But that’s the end of that.

To help with all the arty stuff and keep my mojo going, as it were, I’ve watched Create and Craft shopping TV which has been going, under various names, for twenty years.  I loved it all and especially the presenters, some of whom were obviously nuts, some of whom you had to watch for a good five minutes to detect the kind of insanity that can be engendered by being forced to talk about a tube of glue for ten long unscripted minutes.  I particularly loved emailing in to respond to a comment as fast as my fingers could fly and have it read out, unrehearsed, on air, two minutes after I’d pressed send.  My aim was, occasionally to make a sensible comment, but, much more often, to make the presenter laugh.  If I could make them crease up so much they couldn’t speak, it cheered me up for the rest of the day and I hope it did the same for them.

But that’s the end of that.  For a few weeks, although the channel is still broadcasting recordings, a banner across the screen declares it is unable to take payment.  A visit online to companies house unearths a declaration of pending receivership.

One of the greatest joys of the channel was presenter, Northerner and all round arty person, Leonie Pujol.  Always 100% authentically herself and nicer than the nicest thing you can think of with added ice cream, Leonie demonstrated, presented and sold me more arty stuff than any shop could ever have done, even if it had stayed open all night and was situated next door.

Down the tubes with everyone else and an enormous warehouse which had featured in adverts, full of stuff I want, which now, presumably, has a big bar across the door until the contents go to landfill or get sold off in church halls across the land next to Mrs. Somebody’s kibble and custard traybakes to support Snail Awareness Week in Bratislava.

I used to go to Al-Anon family groups once a week but stopped that last week, at variance with the idea of some, that you can cure a disease by prayer and you can’t talk about the science.  I want to talk about the science.  If you’re a regular reader (hello!  How are you?)  you know of my interest in the human brain, easily the most interesting thing on the planet.  How can you not talk about it with it?  As for curing disease by prayer, doesn’t work, I tried.

So that was the end of that.

And then there was my friend Lynne, who I talked to every week for thirty years.  A writer and miniaturist admiring of all artists and coming from a similar ghastly childhood, blinking into the light and ended too, too soon, missed every day.

And that’s the end of that.

Adrift on an ocean of nothing, as deserted as the Marie Celeste by all the things and people that anchored me, I feel the pull and sink of nothingness more than Richard Dawkins must do when he opens his eyes every morning.

I have, however spotted a couple of little life rafts.

If you put Leonie Pujol Art Inspirations into a search engine, scroll down and sign up she will email you when she is going to broadcast a video from her kitchen.  You could find this out on Facebook, which I tried to join and failed (perhaps my face didn’t fit, they sent me a button which turned out to be circular).  Sensibly Leonie is also videocasting on You Tube which you don’t have to join, find a password for, or put your mugshot into, you can just watch it.  On Sunday Leonie was demonstrating how to spread coloured glitter glue through a stencil, disliking some of the results but doing it anyway.  If this isn’t proof that art is for everyone, then there is no proof.

The other little life raft is Tim Holtz, general genius, who does lengthy live videos whenever new products from various companies, which he has designed, are released into the wild.  He is rare for an artist being both left and right brained, he has the words and the pictures.  Clever lad, that lad.

I am trying in a desultory manner to remind myself of assorted clever clogs sayings about doors shutting and windows opening but so far have failed to convince myself.

I’ve got out doll stuff and put it away again.

I’ve got out paper crafting and looked at it.

I did a bit of gardening, but only because I had to.

I am not sure when tomorrow will commence.  I’m guessing not for a while.

Meanwhile you could go and watch Leonie or Tim, I will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Friends in miniatures.

One of the reasons I love Miniatura is that I go there to meet friends.

I am not a person who makes friends easily.  It may be because of being an only child.  If you are one, and only one, you do not learn the rough and tumble of relationships.  The only relatives you have every day are your parents.  Children learn as babies that they are dependant on their parents for survival,  rarely does the sibling relationship carry the same overtones or undertones.  You can be rude to your sister and she’s not going to stop your dinner or lock you out.

At this point, I realise as I write it that some sisters may very well have done exactly that, in which case all you have to do is click on Leave a comment below and do so.

I have a cousin who said, once, ‘Well you know what it’s like, it’s you and your sister against your parents.’

I did not know what that was like and still don’t but the nearest I have got to that is miniaturists.

When interviewing artists at Miniatura, I used to call the show the ‘I had a nasty Mummy club.’  In fifteen years of saying it, no miniaturist ever said they didn’t know what I meant or asked what on earth I was on about.  Anyone I said it to always laughed.

Life is rarely perfect, if it was there would be no learning, but the lessons involving abuse from the people you depend on for survival, are of a high level of difficulty, unsurprisingly.  You can learn at a young age not to trust people.

In all the years I taught children I only met one who I considered to be intrinsically unpleasant.  There are not many people who are born nasty and then work on it, but damaged people damage other people.

This was certainly the case with my mother, though I only suffered the effect, I did not learn the cause until I became my mother’s carer when she had dementia.  I only knew my grandfather briefly, he died when I was a toddler.  From my mother, belatedly, I learned what a very difficult alcoholic he was, though to be fair, there are no easy alcoholics, no one who allows a volatile fluid to do their thinking for them is going to be of an even-tempered disposition.

It is also the case that it is not what happens to us that solely determines our future but rather how we react to it.  There is a strong possibility that Hitler’s grandmother was impregnated out of wedlock when she was a worker in a household by the Jewish son of the householder.  History is a bit murky on the subject but enough historians have come to the conclusion that this was the case to give the subject consideration.

How he reacted we all know, but why is a different question.  Did he love his grandmother very much and feel she was wronged?  Did she tell him stories of her bad treatment when she became pregnant?  Did the household make it her fault (which would have been consistent with attitudes of the time)?  If she had taken it stoically and been glad that after all, the outcome had been a grandson, would history have been written differently?  History repeated itself when Hitler’s mother, Klara, who had been a maid, was impregnated by the father of the family.  He was a difficult and aggressive man, given to corporal punishment of his son, who was impatient, not academic and keen to hold a grudge, apparently.

Could the whole of World War Two have been about the unjust treatment of women?

Life is unfair.  We don’t even all start off as wanted children, me for example.  I began in a children’s home, left after six weeks.  The story of how I was adopted changed each time my adopted mother told it.  She knew the power of stories and wanted the power of power.  Sometimes, in a very Dickensian twist, my natural mother staggered forward holding the baby out and begging the young couple to take the burden.  Sometimes the young couple wandered along a row of babies trying to pick a good one (given that the babies were all illegitimate and therefore intrinsically bad.)  I don’t think I ever heard the more likely story which would be about paperwork thrown at a problem to relieve the state of a difficult boom in babies following a war which had taken all the resources.  I was aware from an early age that some of the other babies had been sent to Australia, which is the furthest they could be sent round the globe without being on the way back again, as slave labour.  This left me in the interesting position of having to be grateful for abuse, as the alternative would have been worse.

Whilst I was the only adopted person of my age at school, I did make friends more easily with girls with an alcoholic parent.  My adopted mother you might classify as a dry drunk, someone with the attitudes and controlling personality of her alcoholic father, but without the drink until much later in life.  I visited households where everyone except one adult was skilled at dancing on eggshells, hypervigilant to changes in atmosphere and excellent at withstanding sudden in-house hurricanes of one sort or another and great at pretending nothing was happening even as they were whisked up emotionally, only to be crashed and crushed a moment later.  I fitted right in.  A couple of the girls with whom I made friends had fathers who were GPs, relieving insane workloads in the days before group practices, with a drink or twenty at the end of the day.

I found some semblance with people who had been very powerless as children, among teachers, though mainly they were people who wanted to get their own back by wielding power like a baseball bat, which I never wanted to do.

Then I fell into miniatures and at last I was home.  Everyone had difficulties.  Some you could see, they had actual wheels on.  Some I only learned of in conversation while interviewing.

One, who was Lynne Medhurst, I set out to help and then found as time progressed, to be a mirror image of myself in many ways.  She it was taught me the chilling phrase ‘colluding parent.’  She was an only one and an abused only one with one parent the abuser and the other urging the abused child to go along with it in order to save their own skin.  She too had married into health difficulties, and had her own health problems, arising from her treatment. Her abusing parent continued to be controlling and unexpected throughout his life.

And yet we rarely spoke of these things, we didn’t have to, we just knew.

And, very amazingly, no one in Lynne’s professional life was aware of her difficulties.  They only ever heard her laugh and be cheerful and admire the miniatures.

That is the wonderful thing about miniaturists.  They nearly all come from a place of extreme difficulty, but none of them invade Poland.

Instead all the control goes into the miniatures.  Out of misery comes perfection and laughter and art.  Reducing a stifling life to absurdity diffuses it in a safe and happy way.  People who have been shrivelled with scorn and abuse all their lives turn it around by shrinking the damage and growing their self esteem. Unlike life you have all the choice in miniatures.  Are you going to make it the perfect little life, or the very imperfect little life?

Lynne had absolutely no self regard.  She was a cracking writer, a great encourager,  a selfless volunteer and a person who turned all her disappointments either inward or into her dolls’ house.  When I rang her answer phone said, ‘This is Lynne,’ then there was a pause as she explained herself,  ‘Lynne Medhurst,’ which is easily the most self effacing recording on an answer phone I’ve heard.

I  miss hearing it.

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