JaneLaverick.com

Not yoga for the knocking on.

Posted on 23rd June 2023 by admin

Because I am married to a man we have two gigantic televisions. He bought the second one for himself, believing the first, which is the size of a rugby team fridge sat on by an overweight hippopotamus, to be inadequate for his needs.

The second is so massive it takes up the entire top of a large chest of drawers in the sun room. It is exhausting for the eyes constantly darting hither and yon in a futile attempt to gain some understanding of an experience as immersive as washing your socks under Niagara Falls.

However on the first television, which lives on a swivelling special TV platform thing anchored to the wall with coach bolts, which itself had to be adapted for the TV with a bit of wood and a couple of dozen huge screws through the metal frame (that’s how we roll round here, Shangri La with duct tape), I made a discovery.

Hidden among the Box sets (which paradoxically have no discernable box anywhere and should probably be called unboxed sets, which sounds like a school jumble sale) I found a whole lot of fitness videos. These did feature men who looked like balloon animals, to be sure, fairly heavily, and also, women with thin arms, who I hate, but also: yoga!

I last did yoga in the 1970s. It was quite a thing, a recent discovery in England. We had yoghurt in the 1960s and economically took away some letters a decade later to discover yoga. With added A, possibly for attitude. We also had silversmithing, which I did at night school, and macrame which I did not, treasuring sanity.

The yoga was served two ways: in the church hall by a teacher and in a book called Yoga for Health, which may still be up in the loft. I partook of both and enjoyed them.

Rediscovering yoga hidden among the box sets, I found it had not changed much. I however, had.

Now there’s an unexpected surprise. Forty years on and I appear to have changed physically. I must check my picture of Doll Maker Grey up in the loft, behind the bookcase and see if it is smirking.

What has actually changed most notably are the transformations wrought by surgery and lack of. The latest lot has left me with a stomach like a beach ball. You know those exercises in the gym where you roll around on a big ball? I don’t need to, got my own.

‘So,’ intones the teacher, in a calm and measured voice (because this is yoga and we are not going for the burn –or any other small Scottish stream) ‘let’s just fold up the mountain.’ Fine, absolutely fine, I am willing to fold up the mountain except that I seem to have the Epcot Centre in the way.

Then there is Downward Facing Dog. I am barking mad to fetch this but utterly unable due to two broken toes.

This is the lack of surgery part of Crumbling Jane. The first toe was broken fifteen years ago in Australia when the OH crowding ahead of me into a bar at lunch time, finding it to be shut stepped back in horror and his crocs on to my bare toe. You could hear the crunch from here to Bondi Beach cobber. By the time we got home three weeks later and I got to the doc (do you remember that? No? Too young? Well in 2008 and for the previous fifty years, there had been a system whereby, if you were poorly, you rang the surgery and made an appointment via a receptionist, subsequently going at a specified time that day to consult the medic. Seems like a dream of lost Utopia, now, dunnit?) it was too late. The toe had set sticking up in the air. It did not help that this was a toe previously broken inadvertently sliding on a recently polished school hall floor and not showing up on Xray.

The toe, also the second, on the other foot, was a casualty of lockdown. Desperate to extend the summer as a winter of lockdown loomed, I was wearing sandals, no socks, in November and walking into the bed drawer, heard the crunch again. I did not go to the hospital, which was solid with Covid sneezes, or ring the doctor, who was hiding. Instead I watched my toe go black and heal stuck up in the air. It stopped hurting after a few months.

To do the Downward Facing Dog, you need bones. You bend your feet so you are standing on your toes, put your hands on the floor and go walkies, backwards. On your bent toes.

Can’t.

I also cannot do the thing where you hold your arms up above your head. (If there’s a robbery in the bank when I’m in there getting fifteen quid for portraiture, I am so stuffed.) I have a long nail and five screws in my right shoulder.

Can’t.

However, quitters never win, winners never quit. (You already know this if you follow the Hollywood award season, one shoe on the red carpet and we will never hear the end of it. Best At Pretending To Be Someone Else. Best At Doing Hairstyles For Someone Pretending To Be Someone Else. Best at Photographing Them Doing It. Etc.)

Therefore I have decided to invent Yoga for the Challenged. I have come up with a load of poses.

Beached Whale (Prone on the lino, hoping a neighbour will look in the kitchen window and has a key, still. Breathe in.)

Seated Pasta. (With or without a box set, your choice.)

Kneeling Stuck. (Shuffle to the edge of the sofa, wish it had handles and breathe out.)

Inter pose Recovery. (Watching videos of cats doing funny things, or picking your teeth, depending on time available.)

Donning Socks. (Best done prior to discovering the bit of the carpet where the orange juice got spilt with your bare yoga feet.)

Upward Facing Having a Nice Lie Down. (On the bed, if you like.)

Warrior Two and A Bit (On the drive with the bin men, or in the porch as the delivery man runs away from the mangled parcel.)

And, to finish

Bag Of Chips.

Thank you for attending the class. Flobberlop.

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Posted in The parrot has landed. | Tagged yoga or not | Leave a comment

Oh ! Computers!

Posted on 14th June 2023 by admin

There is such a lot in the news at present about AI. When it takes over I fear I will be the first against the wall.

My father bought a word processor (possibly off the back of a van) because he wanted to be up to date. This was undoubtedly an ambition in one who had not even touched an electric typewriter because he had had a secretary for that. He then took great delight for the next few years in being unable to make the processor do anything he wanted and took greater delight in telling of friends his age who had defenestrated their computers in frustrated rage. After he died I looked for the word processor, but it had vanished (and I did check outside under the windowsills).

I find myself now turning into that aged and frustrated person. The tech is utterly beyond me. I know I do a blog and have done so for nearly fifteen years. But I can do this because the S&H who has a degree in computers, taught his idiot mother how to do a blog and, to help matters along I just do exactly what he told me. If you are looking for anything fancy (though we did jointly do a moving cartoon, long, long ago) look elsewhere. You’ll get words here and also, pictures. To qualify: nice ones, and, in focus.

The OH however thinks he knows what to do with computers. To be fair it was he who started this family off on the computers, buying a keyboard and watching the BBC programmes on how to programme on a Saturday morning. He plugged the keyboard into the TV and words appeared on the screen. He saved his work Hello. How are you? on to a cassette in the tripe recorder so that he could begin again next Saturday. I, meanwhile, was teaching exam crammer classes and the S&H was left with the OH while I did so. Thus it was that the S&H learned to press escape or delete while the OH was thinking what to do next and then roll away laughing, because this was before he could even walk.

So in our house computers were boys’ toys and I thought they were just a fad, which will be proved wrong when the AI takes over any day now.

Joining in about twenty years later, I suddenly realised you could use computers to write books and to shop and to keep up with long distance friends.

So the latest novel, written with an ever more complex operating system has been messed about with by the OH trying to help, but actually getting annoyed and shouting. Now my page numbers have disappeared, the text is in three boxes across the screen and it’s the same on the memory stick and I am so frustrated I keep thinking what a satisfying crash there will be as the laptop exits the full length upstairs window.

I am so grateful the S&H has his mother’s temperament. Patient and a natural teacher is he. It looks as if he has found an idiot mother app thingy to help with extracting extracts. I knew how to do this but don’t since the latest update. Why has nobody invented Windows Idiot yet? Why all these all singing, all dancing updates? What we need is a Seniors Operating System. The SOS should have a calm voiced very nice lady who can be available on a phone without being played Vivaldi in a queue, know exactly what idiot thing you have done and how to put things back as they were.

The S&H did have his own firm for a while which did exactly that. He anticipated businesses would be as rubbish as his mother but still need to be helped and would pay for the help. He’s a clever lad who has given this up in favour of a wage, which is a good thing, because he also inherited his mother’s business brains which are minute and dusty.

If the novel ever gets sufficiently organised in the computer to be sent off again and then gets published, it will be a miracle. The books will be printed on vellum and encased in little gold boxes, probably. Do you recall the ancient gospel dragged out for the coronation, carefully carried round on a velvet cushion? Like that, only more so.

I believe the tech got above itself. The words are still what count. However, the medium is the message, which is why, when you defenestrate your laptop, you are merely striking the happy medium, and shouldn’t be blamed, at all.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged laptop frustration | Leave a comment

How to be happy.

Posted on 11th June 2023 by admin

There are many religions and belief systems that will tell you how to live your life. Many wars have been fought, simply because people believed different things. Belief is just that, no matter how true you hold your beliefs to be, or how historical you claim their foundation to be to prove your belief. It continually amazes me that the most powerful force on the planet is thought. You cannot see it, touch it, draw a picture of it, carve it in stone or make an engineered model of it, yet thought alone can cause death, life and everything in between.

Given that thought is one of the major motive forces on the planet effective among the human population, it should be incredibly easy to be happy. Happiness is thought, is it not?

If what I have been doing for the past fourteen years is write my thoughts down here, it should be simple to show you how to be happy. It is, after all, just a thought.

Perhaps it is.

Yesterday morning for the first time in a week I managed to speak to SMIL. She has been getting up, having breakfast and going back to bed and back to sleep, she gets up for lunch and then sleeps in a chair in the afternoon. I never ask anyone to wake her; she either needs the sleep because of her dementia, or she is choosing not to be in the care home but in a different place in her dreams. Sometimes, if they take a while to connect me to the part of the care home where the severely affected residents live, one of whom SMIL is, I hear the cries, arguments, endless radio music, bright brittle cheering along of the staff and I think I would choose to be somewhere else too. Moreover there is not going to be any escape. The chances of SMIL recovering from Alzheimer’s disease and being able to live an independent life again, are slim and none. Besides, her daughter has either let or sold her house. A person with dementia does not qualify for free assistance while they still have savings of £23,250. That amount saved alone would not produce enough income to run a house, once any pension and savings have been used up, your local council has a duty to care for you, until then you will have to pay for help, if your doctor has told you that you have dementia and are not safe to be left alone.

While SMIL was sleeping all the time I rang at different times in the day without success. Seeing the lie of the land midweek, I sent a card and some little bars of chocolate. Yesterday morning I talked to SMIL who was surprisingly lucid. I asked if she needed anything, she said ‘no’ with an effort, I asked if she was in pain but she did not reply (she is prescribed permanent painkillers, but I like to check from time to time) and at the end of me chatting on she managed a ‘bye’. She was obviously present during the conversation and understanding.

Would it be worse to be in a care home, with dementia, understanding where you are, or in a care home, with dementia not understanding where you are?

After I had talked to SMIL I put the lockdown library out on the drive. I had been a bit late doing so; I was trying to make up my mind whether the forecast thunder would eventuate. So I was out with the books to see a young and very dirty man arrive. He was wheeling a red bicycle and carrying an originally white bag across his body. He read the sign on the side of the cart, asking: What’s all this about?

I amended the sign a little while ago, removing all the Covid precautions. The notice now says that the books, jigsaws, crafting items and sweets are for anyone to take, that you do not have to bring anything back if you forget or do not want to and that donations are welcomed.

I explained that the book lending had started in the pandemic as an attempt to make people happy when they were very unhappy. The young man said he was homeless and very unhappy. He was obviously a reader. I reiterated that he could take as many books as he liked and didn’t have to bring them back, he could leave them with charities somewhere else. We exchanged smiles, he asked my name and told me his. He said he was known for playing his guitar under a bridge in a nearby town. We talked of books, he said he liked reading, I said I thought books were a good way of putting your head in an other place if you were not where you wanted to be. I fetched a huge fantasy saga book from the garage, that I thought might be to his taste. I think he was probably only in his thirties. He asked if he could take sweets, took one little packet and tried to give me a coin. I refused, giving him a handful of sweets and he began crying, at the same time peeling the wrapper off a chew and putting it in his mouth whole.

He showed me the line on the side of his neck where he had tried to cut his own throat. I said I had tried to commit suicide several times as a teenager and had some understanding of despair but that I hoped this was the turn round in his luck and that things would get better.

He wiped his tears on the back of his hand and shook my hand twice. His hand was very dirty but I noticed he was sober and present, fully aware of his circumstances, polite, communicative and a keen reader.

Here is a thought and two questions. By which circumstance do you develop dementia? We know the mechanism but not what sets it in motion. The life path of the demented person, who can no longer think for themselves is entirely dependant on the good will and resourcefulness of their relatives, if they have some.

By which set of circumstances do you end up living on the street? How does that happen if you are polite, young, strong, literate? Do you have no family who would help, when people who are rude, aggressive and unpleasant enjoy life in the bosom of their families, well-paid jobs and entertain no expectation of life being otherwise?

One of the ways I make myself happy is to count my blessings at the end of every day. After I close my eyes and before I go to sleep I literally enumerate the good things that happened in the day and remind myself why I am lucky. Sometimes if I am in pain or in fear I have ended up just being thankful that there are doctors and that I have access to them and that is one blessing and all I can manage.

Sometimes, such as yesterday the blessings fall thick and fast.

I have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in which are mine and do not belong to a care home. As this may not always be the case I am extra grateful right now.

I was able a little bit to bring sanity and cheerful news to my Step-mother-in-law. I was able to give some books and some sweets to someone who needed them.

I have some common sense acquired in living to know that it is my lot to help others as much as I can within my means and that I am not currently called upon to do so in a way that makes me ill or depletes me, as I have been in the past.

There was a longer list but I fell asleep happily.

I recommend a detailing of your attitude of gratitude as a way of being happy. It takes practice to perfect. It is not a belief system. It will fail in extreme circumstances but work again if you start doing it again when circumstances permit.

If you were happy every day of your life you might never know it. But if you are a sundial and mark the happy days, you will know when you are happy. That in itself is a life skill. It is a way to train your brain to be happy, anyone who can think can do it.

Clouds underline the sunshine.

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Posted in Dementia diaries. | Tagged how to be cheerful | Leave a comment

Life with the undertall.

Posted on 6th June 2023 by admin

That would be me, the undertall. As a child I was small, there were two girls at school in my class similarly sized. We had ballroom dancing, an absolute requirement for young ladies who would be of marriageable age in the fullness of chest, trying to ensnare someone suitable in the middle of a waltz, if they were able simultaneously not to peripateticize on the feet of the person they were endeavouring to charm and converse without gasping, no matter how Strauss the music. I could do all of this, but, sadly, for the girl I danced with was a quarter inch shorter than I, as the man. I can fling you like a cape, bend you over Dover, whirl you under my arm, especially if I am standing on a box and my bingo wings are encased and ensconce your Liberty Bodice clad chest to my massive knockers like nobody’s business and I can do it all whilst carrying on suitable conversation of a non-political, or in any way, controversial hue.

Remaining undertall I first saw the top half of Star Wars in the cinema. Like wise the Godfather, who I am not convinced had legs, and, seated in the aisle, the right hand half of Julie Andrews rushing up half a hill to tell us what half the hills were alive with. I only found out what happened to the Ghostbusters if you crossed the streams when it was streamed on TV.

As long term readers know (hello) I had an inadvertent career in journalism writing for craft and hobby magazines, but if I had been able to reach the top shelf in the newsagent’s I might have written fifty shades of a lot of money, who can say?

As I have grown rich in years, whilst my feet have remained size 4, a massive advantage in shoe shopping because all the samples are made in that size, my legs have shrunk quite a lot. I never had flanks to start with, the attenuated version is even more thighsable and now, having broken both, my arms have shortened too. When I try on my nineteen seventies jeans, they hide my size 4 sample, dirt cheap in the sale, shoes completely.

When I go grocery shopping I take an extendable reach and grab gizmo with me if I really want the thing off the top shelf because supermarkets do not like you climbing.

Life has been designed for people of average height, currently. I am of average height for anyone mediaeval and many Asian countries, just not here and now. I blame free school milk.

However, there is an advantage to being nearer the ground, which I enjoyed all day today.

Out in the newly pressure washed garden, the pressure of the washer had ejected many pieces of mortar from between the crazy paving. Today I first excavated any remaining vegetation, cleaned out the holes and then, having mixed up my mortar, repointed the lot, without having to kneel down. Your six footer could not have done the job without a kneeling mat and constant up and downing, your five foot sixer would have struggled, but I, the undertall, simply bent at the waist and there I was, ground floor. I did all the pointing, and there was a lot, in an hour and a half.

I also have no difficulty in washing the kitchen floor with a scrubbing brush, or varnishing the dining room floor, for a spruce-up (or alternative pine floor board) or anything else requiring a person to sink as low as they can go.

Of course the very astute reader (hello again) will have spotted that anyone bent in half will be at the level of their feet but if the complaints of the OH when requested to pick up the peanuts from round his armchair are anything to go by, the enormous five foot eight, when seated, find this a difficulty.

In the Sixties I had a friend-ish, who, going to drama school, was informed that the floor was her natural medium. This confirmed what a lot of us thought about her, and whether it was her affinity with the floorboards, or some other natural bent, she did actually act in a real film that was filmed and got paid for it.

All my work today was for free and for my satisfaction and I did enjoy every minute of it. Mortar is so satisfyingly permanentish. When I went to Pompeii, I was delighted to see Roman Opus Signinum still holding the walls together and filling the spaces in the flooring, and that was after an awful lot of lava. Of course, they didn’t have pressure washers to blast it out. What they had was a short servant, bent at the waist, scrubbing.

I am more than undertall, I’m practically historical.

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Posted in The parrot has landed. | Tagged short gardeners | Leave a comment

Cleanliness is next to..

Posted on 4th June 2023 by admin

I’ve just had a wonderfully frustrating few days in which I feel quite lucky to have avoided trench foot. I think I have, but it’s been a close call.

I love my garden, which I have stupidly designed so there is plenty to do, which is great until you lose a summer to surgery. The foundation of a garden may well be the grass but the foundation of the foundation is the paths. You’ve got to have somewhere to walk.

Last week I pressure washed the drive when I realised how utterly filthy the bit under the OH’s car wasn’t after he had gone shopping. (We will never be short of peanuts, though I never ate them much even when I could.) Then I followed up with a squirt of that stuff that inhibits the growth of mould and lichen and wished afterwards that I had examined the pressure washer more closely to remember how to turn the jet into a broad blade instead of a point. Now it looks as if someone has been scribbling on the drive with a white pen. Mostly I was being frustrated that as soon as I had got the pressure washer going the hose disconnected itself and sprayed the person rushing to help it. One drive= two pairs of jeans and a top and all the underwear.

So now I had a clean drive, my side passage, where the bins live, looked worse. Utterly filthy. I had put trays of plants there but was seriously worried about them catching something from the path they were standing on. And the patio! Well, don’t talk to me about the patio. For some time, if I miss the washing line or I’m not fast enough with a clothes peg and gravity intervenes, I have to rewash the droppage.

See? Black as your hat.

I had had a frustrating day yesterday, ‘losing’ fifty pages of a novel on the computer while the OH was out supposedly getting more printer paper along with his shopping but, realising that the pub sold peanuts too, went there instead. So I rang the S&H who helped his poor old mother who will now have to proof read fifty pages that he magicked back from the ether. He is a good lad, that lad and very patient, as I used to be before I caught impatience from his father.

So I had the choice: do the computer stuff today or the patio, path and steps and as many soakings as that took.

The pressure washer won, mainly because we are in for a few days of brilliant sunshine and this is the UK. The stuff you put on the clean patio to keep it that way has to dry before the rain arrives and it has to be put on a dry surface.

Yesterday, however, in the garden it was too hot to work by midday. I could tell this because the workers who have dug up the entire street to lay cables for broadband looked very hot when I went out to ask them to move the barriers so I could do a bit of shopping (frightened of running out of peanuts, obvs.) ‘No blocky dee drive’ they all intoned in chorus before blocking the drive. So I explained in pigeon English that I would return and needed to back in to the drive because of the main road. ‘No blocky dee drive, Missus! No blocky!’ Despite being a practiced cynic I drove off, returning half an hour later, nut laden, to a blocked drive. So they let me in and then blocked me there.

So, as I couldn’t go anywhere, today seemed the perfect day to get soaked but not once the sun was up.

I woke shortly before six. I do wish I wouldn’t do this. Miniatura, I’m alert as a lert at five, usually.

I gave up and got up at seven and had my first shower, though I need not have bothered, it took about five minutes for the pressure washer hose to disconnect and soak me.

Who invented hose connectors? It must have been a man. The mangled hose end (I cut a new bit with the hedge loppers eventually) is inserted into the receptacle, a hole in the plastic doodad, then a screw thingy is slipped over the join and screwed then the entire palaver is pushed on to the locking joint on the washer, then the water is turned on, then the electric switch on the back of the machine, then you pick up the gun and squeeze the trigger, then the hose end flips out and describes arcs of spray like an enraged King Cobra, then Jane gets soaked then she turns everything off again.

I found the tin of hose connectors in the garage. Some are brown (1970s) some are several shades of green (1990s) some are orange (1980s) some are black and none of the ****ers work.

I did three mash ups before I found a combination that slightly worked, by which time my wellies (which have a teeny hole, somewhere) were floating and I was seriously damp.

But I did my side passage, including the bit where the land drains erupted up the wall, then I went and washed my feet, which had gone very 1990s looking, got new socks and donned my wet wellies. Nasty. But I did the patio, which looked a lot better.

Still a bit damp but a lot lighter.

Then, after another two changes of hose end, I cleaned fifty shades of grey off the steps.

Which have pink mortar!

Then I attached the hose to the big bottle with the hose connector (theoretical) of moss and mould inhibitor. You know what happened next, I even got the pink stuff in my hair, wrestling with the hose snake.

Another foot wash and pair of socks later and I was onto washing the tree broom.

This free broom, which had been helping all morning, was discovered in the tree that used to be in the front garden after a particularly fierce storm many years ago. I left it there in case anyone wanted to collect it and because it required rescue by ladder, for a few weeks. Then it joined the household and, like the Woolworths reject camellia ‘this bargain 43p’ has been wonderful.

Then, finally, I had a proper shower and washed my hair (Do not get on skin or clothes, wear gloves, if gets in eyes seek medical attention). (If my hair goes a stranger shade than usual you’ll know they missed a bit off the warnings) collected all the hose end bits, and went online to order wellies that do not leak.

The joy of cleanliness, not to be underestimated, either in the execution or the result.

Now all I need is some mortar to fill in the holes blasted out of the paving by the pressure and I will go and get the makings just as soon as the workmen let me out.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged patio cleaning | Leave a comment

Un rewilding.

Posted on 31st May 2023 by admin

If you keep a weather eye on what is happening in the world of gardening shows there is a tendency towards unfettered rewilding, which reached its nadir in some remarkably derelict gardens at Chelsea.

Rewilding in the larger world is a good thing. Owners of large tracts of land that let some of their acreage return to nature have my admiration for a bold move requiring plenty of nerve. The reward in terms of the strength of returning species benefits us all, and is welcomed particularly by those of us who remember the start of the worry in the 1960s, when we’d just got over never having had it so good and suddenly realised ‘it’ was a lot of concrete.

In little domestic gardens now I am unimpressed by endless anything, I like a bit of variety and I like it organised. I think this may have its origins in the gardening lack of abilities of my adoptive parents. My father frequently expressed his belief that what most gardens needed was a good top dressing of concrete. My mother, who had good legs, would stand posed in the front garden, in her hotpants with a tray of purchased plants, until someone passed by to admire her. As we lived in a cul de sac there was often a long wait. I remember an occasion when my parents visited when I was gardening. ‘Look!’ exclaimed my mother, ‘she has her hands actually in the soil. Eugh!’

Because of my health problems over the last few years, especially last summer, the occasions when I have had my hands in the soil have not been many. Feeling much improved this late spring I got started on the garden with a will. At first I did my workout in the morning and gardened in the afternoon. Then I realised gardening is a workout, and, starting earlier, achieved much more.

I have a lot of hanging baskets. Some are strawberries, some will be tomatoes but I was puzzled by the number that seemed to be just soil. The OH, left to his own devices in the garden is Agent Orange, he has a preference for Just Soil and will fling anything greenish bin wards with enthusiasm. However, he has never taken an interest in hanging baskets, other than to be wary of any at head height. So I knew the soil filled baskets were not of his creation.

I woke in the night with the answer. They had been the begonias! Every year for a long time I added to my stocks and every autumn I lifted all the corms, stored them in the garage and started them off again in the spring. Last autumn, however, I was managing getting up, going to bed shortly thereafter and doing a small amount of eating in between and not much else. The poor begonias, left to their own devices, rotted off and then, when the frost got at them, turned back into compost. Poor things, there had been dozens of them, not one survived. I dug the remains into the front bed.

So there will be no begonias this year.

Instead I am doing a lot of ground work. Lifting and reseating edging and doing some major digging. As soon as we have some nice sunshine I will drag the little chair store out of the corner, evict the spiders and repaint it.

There’s a lot to do. I am happy to do it. I am anticipating a very organised summer. Plants will flower symmetrically.

I have already jet washed the drive, when we have more sun I will do the other paths and the steps.

Weeds will not be tolerated and the wisteria will be pruned to where I want it to be. Exactly.

There’s not going to be any fashionable dereliction round here.

Round here we like proper gardening.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged gardening | Leave a comment

Some cards.

Posted on 24th May 2023 by admin

When I’m not miniaturising, doll making, gardening or online shopping (which you should not do late at night, when tired with a credit card), (as my grandmother used to say: Don’t do what I do, do what I tell you) I make cards.

I send them to a number of friends, for many reasons. Number one is that a handmade card is love in paper. It really shows that someone cares. It is not a problem for the recipient to deal with, once you have enjoyed it you just stick it in the paper recycling. This is such a benefit. For some reason people keep giving the OH and I candles. I have no idea what to do with all the candles. We have electricity and live in a house with combustible artefacts, why would I use a candle? And, as for the scented ones – sickbag.

Also, the enjoyment of making the card means that I benefit from a nice pastime, though, to be fair, what I need is more time, not ways to pass it. If it goes wrong, you can recycle it, it’s a piece of paper. I enjoy watching craft TV and online demonstrations of techniques. I like purchasing inexpensive bits to make things and I have loved visiting craft shops since the mid nineteen fifties.

Altogether nice and, if you practise, you can get quite good at it. A card is a modest piece of art that doesn’t demand a wall, or much of an audience.

Recently I discovered the Craft Consortium Essential 12inch paper pads. These are marbly paper in numerous arty colours that make a good foundation for any sort of pictorial effort. I’m buying mine at www.createandcraft.com and you can buy direct from www.craftconsortium.com and various other places near you. They also do paper kits with images and embellishments to match.

I began by using the papers with Tim Holtz landscape dies, they make lovely mountains.

Here the papers are everything: the mountains, the fields, the deer and the tree. The sun is a stencil and I have added shadows to the deer to make them solid. The deer are Tim Holtz dies too.

I used them as background to these vellum flowers, which are from Memory Box dies. When the Tim Holtz texture fades acorn embossing folder arrived in the post I did these, to start with.

In reality they look a little like an old tapestry. Tim Holtz is so clever, he has such an interesting way of thinking, you can find him online and get endless inspiration.

I have five paper pads to get through, each one has 30 double sided sheets, so that’s how many ideas I have, at least.

It’s one thing to make items yourself, I’ve been doing that all my life, but to make items that inspire art in other people is quite something. I enjoy so much using lovely bits of paper to send ephemeral joy through the post.

Pictures made in this way can say more than words, to the people who most need to hear them.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged card making with Craft Consortium papers | Leave a comment

A bit off.

Posted on 21st May 2023 by admin

Me. I am. A bit off. Pains in the guts and just a bit off. I should not be surprised. Like everyone who does regularly not enjoy good health, I dread being poorly again.

I haven’t been well ever since I finished caring for my mother. I was occasionally checked up while I was doing that, in hospital. I had checks for cancer and didn’t have it, until I did and I had a camera down my throat regularly until it was apparent after the surgery that I’d had blocked intestines all along, probably for more than a decade, at least.

I’ve been emailing a friend who had surgery for a blockage and the surgery that caused it had been twenty years ago. It’s amazing what you can have and limp along with. Good health is wasted on robust people who just leap out of bed every morning, expecting to feel wonderful; weedy sickly specimens like me would love a few days of that.

I don’t know if it helps to compare myself with how I was in the four and a half years prior to the surgery, I am definitely better than that, I’m not vomiting for a start, food is going down in the regular way. I just feel off and in pain.

Are the adhesions adhering again? It is what they do and no one knows why some people produce strings of elastic inside and others don’t. Perhaps it’s some sort of evolutionary thing that would have been handy in some other timeline where you might get slightly nibbled by a dinosaur but survive with massive scarring. Am I trying to produce those eight percent elastomer fibre jeans but on the inside as a last ditch effort at a flat stomach? Are my intestines red carpet ambitious?

Like everyone with Internet access I have been symptom searching, including all the anecdotal websites where somebody’s husband had his gall bladder removed two years ago and still can’t climb up a ladder to clear the blocked gutter. (That poor woman has had overflow rain down her cloakroom window all this time, no wonder she won’t let the neighbours come round to see how well her rhubarb is doing this year.)

Or I could just be expecting the old ‘with one bound she was free of pain, a stone lighter and looking wonderful for someone her age wearing trainer socks.’

I don’t know. I’m hoping it’s just a blip. I’m still reporting to the hospital on two counts, so they’re not expecting me to be free with one bound.

It could be worse. I am related to, or friends with, three people much worse off currently, you know one of them, it’s SMIL.

Maybe I have been conditioned by optimistic horoscopes; this year starting this month, Dung Beetles with Milk Jug Rising are in for a windfall, apparently. Though if I’m feeling off I won’t want to go on a spending spree, which, to be fair Milk Men with their moons in Windowpane are cautioned not to do, at least until Pandora turns retrograde in Bus Ticket.

Maybe I’m just overly optimistic myself, expecting not yet a year after major surgery to be plain sailing, the hospital are still taking the wait and see line of reasoning.

Meanwhile I’m doing a lot of assorted card making, drawing and crafty stuff, which is a nice distraction but not the gardening I ought to be doing. Also, I was beginning to think of getting my passport renewed and maybe even go on holiday. But you can only plan a holiday if you expect to be well enough to enjoy it. I know cruise ships for the advanced in age and money come equipped with doctors but I don’t fancy that. My mother loved cruising. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in a floating hotel for a fortnight with several hundred elderly ladies who only close their mouths to swallow. You’d have to be really robust to survive that.

Well, I’ll see how I am tomorrow. Early night and all that. I might wake up full of the joys of spring and not just a bit off.

We shall see. Well, I will. I’ll let you know.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged post surgical concerns | Leave a comment

Plan B for carers.

Posted on 11th May 2023 by admin

When the bombshell that is a dementia diagnosis hits, it can be difficult to access any kind of logical thinking.

From my own experience and the messages from many primary carers, after the initial shock there seems to be a determination that life will continue as it is for quite a long time. Hopefully, with early diagnosis and the right medication, maybe, except for making provision for a failing memory and the frustrations that this brings, day to day will be much the same as it has been with, perhaps, the addition of professional carers, either provided by social services, or privately sourced, popping in occasionally to check all is well, and regular trips to the doctor.

After the initial panic a sort of resignation sets in and the will to make the most of difficult circumstances. Perhaps trips and outings, even holidays, are planned and taken while such pleasures are possible.

However, a message from a friend who had recently become her husband’s carer, prompted me to remind you of the importance of plan B. The friend had suddenly become very ill, was carted off into hospital for surgery, very unexpectedly, so that her demented husband found himself, with little preparation, in a care home.

As regular readers know, SMIL has reacted very badly to the care home. At first she said she would forgive her daughter, who had moved her into the care home to be nearer geographically to where the daughter lived, as long as she could go home. When this did not happen her illness and behaviour deteriorated significantly and she is now in the high security area of the home and is frequently violent.

The leader of the private agency team that cared for my mother, who was very good at her job, described the situation of one of her charges. When she first met this person, the demented person was in virtually a padded cell, not dressed and throwing her own faeces at anyone who came near. Removed from this situation and returned to a domestic and familiar setting, with a plentiful array of carers, the behaviour changed and the demented person turned back into a person again.

This is an extreme example and a very good argument for keeping the demented person in familiar surroundings for as long as possible. I was amazed when the money ran out for keeping my mother at home with 24 hour help, how well she adjusted to the care home. It was a very posh care home. She knew some of the residents already, one was her former doctor, one was a previous bank manager. Confidence that this was the best possible option, given the people that had already chosen it, had a lot to do with her acceptance of the necessity of moving and the sherry afternoons, palm court orchestra and lift (I can still hear her delighted cry: ‘Oh Jane! I will never have to do the bloody stairs ever again!’) immediately opposite the door to her flat, all helped. As did the fact that it was a proper little flat, she had chosen the décor and had her own furniture.

But what helped most of all was the fact that she and I had had conversations from the very beginning. This was not easy. Her husband had just died, she had just had a shocking diagnosis and knew her life expectancy was limited, and she was a difficult person anyway. She was the person who had me locked up and starved when I was a teenager and had just got 11 O levels. (With hindsight I am fairly certain she was jealous.)

I could have used the opportunity of her illness to get my own back. I could have avoided anything likely to annoy her, at which exercise I’d had a lifetime’s practise.

Instead I decided that this would be just the job to grow my soul. I did research first of what was available locally in the way of help. Then, because people with dementia are hard of thinking, I weeded out the no hopers myself. Then we had several, small, not exhausting conversations, at the end of each I wrote down what we’d thought and any opinions expressed and I worked out all the finances of what was do able. I realised early on that my inheritance was going out of the window. Resources available to any principle carer will be very variable, so you need to be totally practical from day one, know what your means are and include your own availability as a resource.

When you have made plan A, which is What We Are Going To Do Now and had a little rest, you need to make Plan B, which is, How We Will Get Help For You If Something Happens To Me.

This is hard, hard to do, hard to think about, just generally not easy at all. But if you wait until circumstances overtake you, your choices will be limited, the possibility of something happening to your demented person by way of care that neither of you would wish, is increased and the resulting deterioration in the health of your cared-for person could be extreme. Demented people do best in familiar situations, as their brain changes they cannot assimilate or cope with the unfamiliar.

Therefore you decide together on plan A and plan B as soon as possible after diagnosis and you write it down somewhere that can easily be found, or you tell a family member, or a neighbour who is a good friend where to find the details. Then your job is to keep updating the choices. Check that the care home, if it is privately run as a business, has not gone bust. Keep in contact with the relief care providers. Keep your demented person, lightly, on a good day, in the loop.

Knowing what the plans are will give you that air of confidence which demented people pick up on so easily. You will find, as the disease progresses that demented people can be like small babies – they pick up on your moods. If you are tired they will cry, if you are not confident they will act up, they will have a tantrum in the supermarket because you are in a rush.

I found time and time again whilst being a carer that the only person riding out to save me was me. I confronted all the dreadful possibilities and, with the agreement of my demented person, knew what we would do if they happened.

The only utterly unplanned occurrence was when my mother’s cat brought a large mouse into the house and then lost it. By then I was so good at dealing with stuff that I found the mouse, caught it in a humane trap and let it out by the river with a complete absence of any drama at all.

This is the ideal mindset for you. Calm and in control is good for you because you are pumping fewer stress chemicals into your own body. Knowing you are calm and confident will calm your demented person and that in turn will make them more easy to deal with.

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Posted in Dementia diaries. | Tagged making a care plan | Leave a comment

The wrong one wins.

Posted on 1st May 2023 by admin

In defiance of my sitting watching television promotes brain fog ethos, I do make a point of watching two programmes. They are: The Wrong One Wins – People and The Wrong One Wins – Places. You may know them as Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the Year.

Why do the judges persist in choosing the oeuvre which least resembles the subject? Am I hopelessly out of date? Is it true that if we’ve got cameras for that there’s no point in having a painted depiction? Why do they keep talking about ‘mark making’ and do daubs qualify?

Then I have issue with all the artists who take several photographs and paint from their photographs. Especially those who put a grid on the photo and a corresponding grid on the canvas and just copy the squares. What’s clever about that? Isn’t it just paint by numbers?

Is it just me? Am I too old, thinking practised skill is a good and desirable achievement?

You can probably detect that I may have more questions than answers but I am not giving a critique from a point of total ignorance. Partial ignorance, possibly, I have not been to art critic school or been steeped in knowledge of what made the greats, great.

I do like things that look like something.

I believe that some modern art is a load of hokum. One or two very modern artists were freethinkers that brought something new to the party, the rest were just freeloaders, including some famous modern names, in my opinion.

What this opinion of how difficult it is or not is based on, is a few years at portraiture.

I was looking for more craft shops locally, searching with a search engine. Thus I discovered an art supplies shop in the next town that was running weekly classes with no tuition. What they did was hire a model to stay still while artists did their thing. There was life drawing, which was a couple of hours of unclad model in a variety of short poses and portraiture in which a clad model sat still for a couple of hours.

I am interested in anything that is likely to improve the original sculptures from which I model my dolls. So I went along to both for a while. I soon became disenchanted with life drawing; the poses were usually about ten or fifteen minutes long, at the most half an hour, so I never got the chance to finish a piece of work well. I did get familiar with proportions of the human body other than my own slightly stunted ones, and looking at a lot of joints was very helpful and culminated eventually in the articulated 24th scale dolls which I do now.

Portraiture took a lot longer to have an effect. As an artist, unlike some of the contestants in The Wrong One Wins, you are trying really hard to make the finished effort bear a really strong resemblance to the person seated for two hours, with a fifteen minute break, before you.

I had several breaks myself of months at a time for ill health of various sorts. A lengthy one towards the end of being a carer for my mother, and a similar break when classes were closed in the pandemic.

I believe I improved considerably when my cataracts were surgically corrected and I could actually see what I was looking at, which is almost cheating in my hitherto squinty life.

I have the proof because from the start I kept every effort categorised by date in 12 inch scrapbooks, so I could see myself improving. I have done this systematically with few things in my life, but it has advantages in that it doesn’t matter where you start, what counts is getting better. It’s one of them there journeys that are so popular currently.

And now it’s time to join the judges yourself. Here are my two most recent efforts, returning a fortnight ago after my time off for surgery last summer. These are the pictures from last week and the week before. Feel free to mutter about mark making and the artist’s honesty with the canvas, you can even bang on about the width of the brush strokes if you like.

Both portraits are watercolours, from those little boxes of watercolour pans of paint. I draw the subject first. The pictures are on A4 watercolour paper pads. Here they are – got your screwed-up judgey face on?

Here’s Christina and

Rupert.

There are no aids, just me looking at the person, drawing what I see and water colouring the result.

What do you think?