Tuesday 31st July - Another Useful Day

Last night, towards suppertime, Himself appeared with an oozing jar. My sour-dough starter had been over-enthusiastic and managed to make it's way up and over and out of the jar, in spite of the (loose) lid. As the jar was on the top shelf, at his eye-level, it had appeared rather threatening when he had opening the fridge in search of supper. So, the final tasks before bed time were sorting out the sour dough starter into a loaf, a batch of overnight sour-dough pancakes, and a smaller, more manageable jar of starter.   

Today I managed to clear another load of tasks that had been cluttering up my head...

I had a letter and two cards to write, the loo to top-to-bottom clean (yes, as there is no alternative to the upstairs loo you are permitted to use it - carefully) and the downstairs floors to hoover.

I managed all this - and some bonus items as well; dusting the upstairs book case and my bedside table, sending off a music certificate straightaway within minutes of receiving it, and remembering to make the sour-dough pancakes with the mix I stirred up last night. (If you leave the "overnight sour dough pancake recipe" longer than overnight, the results are deeply unpleasant and go straight in the bin. Moral - taste the first cooked pancake before you put yourself to the trouble of making any more)

The sour dough loaf that I had put on overnight was less successful - if I make enough of these we could build an extension. I console myself with the thought that rye bread tends to be a bit solid and chewy, and it does have a very good flavour, especially with Jarlsberg cheese, or even honey.

Hurrah! I don't know how long all this industriousness will continue, but oddly enough, clearing the to-do list is lifting a weight off my mind. I've checked the scales - and regretfully I have to admit that it is not clearing any weight off my body.

I watched yet more watercolour painting videos yesterday and this morning. I'm finding the whole thing completely fascinating. You can click the back button and find something else on the internet if you are bored, because all the rest of this post is going to be pictures.

Here's an apple, drawn last night with Inktense pencils that I bought about five years ago... it is startlingly like the one in the book.

 
Here's a whole selection of different brush strokes made using a smallish flat brush

Here's a random flowery sort of page - the exercise was to paint imaginary flowers "fast and loose", not bothering with accuracy, but to just get the paint onto the paper. It gave me a chance to try the Rose and the Hookers Green that I bought yesterday. I am wowed by the rose colour.

 
I'm doing all these pictures in what I have taken to calling my "Book of Mistakes". It is the Journal that I was given several Christmases ago, and hadn't started yet. The paper is truly unsuitable for water colour, which is a great comfort because if I manage to produce anything half-way decent then that is a success indeed. The creator of the journal, Susan Hable, has obligingly filled half the pages with random designs and quotes, so my plan of completing the journal over the Summer is made that much easier. 



We had a phone call from our Canadian friends, bringing us up to speed with all their news - "ah well," they said, "time for us to get some breakfast". I looked at my watch - half past two.

By the way, the Fiat Panda is 0.9 l, not 2. Although it has 2 cylinders and is turbo. That sounds as if I know what I am typing.

Monday 30th July 2018 - The Summer Holidays Begin

  Last week - how long ago that seems now - was still a working week, at least on Monday and Tuesday. Then there was the final paperwork to be completed/scanned/emailed, and a few emails and phone calls, and last minute shuffles of next term's schedules ("I know we wanted to book the sessions for the mornings, but we now need them to be in the morning"). So, although most of the week was not timetables, it still felt like a phony holiday...neither work nor play.

Today - today -  let the holidays begin!

I have dealt with four tasks that needed doing, to get them done, and to clear them our of my head. According to Mark Twain

'If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.'

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mark_twain_414009
Before I did any figurative frog-eating, (actually frogs' legs aren't too bad - we ate them when I was young, in  Indonesia. Not sure about the rest of the frog though, and it does seem very wasteful to only eat the legs of something and not the rest of it.) -now, where was I? oh yes, I cleaned the bathroom from top (at least, as far as I can reach) to bottom. I can be certain that all those striations in the tiles floor are exactly that - striations, and not dirty marks. There are 30 bars on the towel rail, I counted them as I burned my fingers running a damp cloth over each one. Why would all this effort make me feel so happy? It's something that has been annoying me for weeks, and now it is done. That's why!

I spent some time yesterday watching youtube videos of watercolour tutorials. There's more to this lark than applying paint to paper! This is my latest endeavour;

Two of the stones would insist on looking like sponges than pebbles. Even so, I am very encouraged. This is what I was looking at...

Nor that I was after an exact copy - just a starting point. It took all morning, because of waiting for paint to dry... an opportunity to go and pick up even more fallen apples - another hundred or so. That brings the running total to about 570 or more. This time I had to use a certain amount of caution - the wasps had reappeared and were burrowing into the  apples. I threw the apples (and quite a few wasps) into the garden waste collection bin, as when I lifted the lid of the compost bin there were hundreds of worm, clotted in knots, apparently trying to escape fro  the heap of rotten apples already in the bin.

After lunch we went on a little trippette, to look at Fiat Pandas. There is a great second-hand car place where you can wander round and look at hundreds of cars and try them for size. "Fiat Panda?" I hear you cry out in shock and surprise.

Yes, indeedy. We are seriously considering downsizing from the current Alfa something-or-other to the 2litre 4-wheel-drive Fiat Panda. The next stage is to find one to take for a test drive. It's almost as much of a seismic shift as when my Uncle and Aunt gave up Volvo Estate cars for a VW Passat. That might have happened over 35 years ago, bur I still remember the incredulous cries at this change to The Way Things Have Always Been. Ah well. Nothing stays the same for ever.

This car place is perilously close to Computer World and Hobbycraft. Oh well. It is the holidays, after all.

Saturday 2?th July - and another thing...

Saturday 28?th July - what we did

 I should make it clear; Himself it was who captured the catfood from the shelves at Waitrose. The cats haven't caught anything except fleas and goose-grass seeds for a long time now.

 There was a young lad playing a harp outside Waterstones - a very pleasant change from the usual run of buskers, and so entirely in tune (ha ha, an unexpected pun) with the day.

Handwriting is SO much quicker and far less hassle than typing... but I suspect not as easy to read...

Friday 27th July - It looks like it might rain

I may have scared the rain away;

even though the sky has turned grey and cloudy, and there are occasional rumbles of thunder, and I am told that there is a torrential rain storm in Chichester at the moment.

 We haven't seen clouds like this for a month. The faint breeze has become more persistent, and there is that smell of rain and thunderstorms in the air.

So why do I think that the storm will dodge around our garden? Because I have set out all the tubs ready to collect the rainfall.

I can't think of a way of hiding them from the weather without spoiling their chances of still collecting rainwater.

Earlier, taking advantage of the sudden drop in temperature outside, I picked up over 150 fallen apples, ranging in size from a cherry to - an apple. There are still a couple of hundred to collect from the ground under the tree (it hasn't been truthful to call it  'grass' or 'lawn' for some time now) and loads left on the tree. The birds have been pecking away at the ones hanging on the tree, so I reckon our apple harvest isn't going to be great in the end.

There now. What did I tell you? The sun is out again. I'll pretend I didn't notice.

We took the cats to the vet for their annual vaccinations and checkups and worm tablets yesterday morning. They were fairly resigned to the whole process and the vet said how well behaved they were and pronounced them fit enough for 15 years old. Today Leo is out of sorts - perhaps it is the worming tablet, or the injections, or the heat. I groomed both cats with a wet brush, and wiped their faces with a wet cloth, to see if it would give them some relief from the heat. Neither objected, so perhaps they liked it. Or perhaps they were too bot to bother to complain.

4pm here - time to ring The Patriarch; he has A Scheme for tomorrow, and wants to discuss...!

Thursday 26th July - what we did yesterday part 3!

Yeah, we haven't finished with yesterday yet!

The C1 bus takes you all the way from outside the front entrance of the V and A to Victoria station. Perfect. We sat and slowly melted as the bus jerked its way through the early rush hour - He sat next to an elderly man and discussed antiques and computers and how you used to look things up in books but now you just google. Made a huge difference to the antiques trade, he said. I sat nearby and people-watched; such a variety of people from all cultures... and clothes.

You would be hard pressed to know what the current fashions were anymore... long floaty dresses, short close-fitting skirts, retro fifties blouses, T shirts, short sleeves, no sleeves, wide-leg trousers, skinny-leg trousers...

The fashion shops, Burberrys, Joseph etc, are all displaying winter wool coats. No comment.

I mean to have a go at sketching this later, snapped while the bus was stationary at some hold-up or other

;

It seemed such an encapsulation of a London street corner. The plane tree, with the variegated peeling bark, the red telephone boxes, the railing, the bicycle...

It was a good day for sketching. This was across the lounge as we were having coffee and cake; four women. I think the two nearer women were trying to persuade the others to buy something... All very London and "modern" and bustling and like a magazine scene. It was an Apple tablet, of course. 

This was the scene outside the pub next to the theatre; we were sitting at a table belonging to the theatre bar. There were two huge empty wine-glasses on our table, left by the previous customers, which did a good job of making us look as though we were real customers instead of just seizing an opportunity to sit down.

The London "meeting for drinks after work, standing on the pavement in the evening" crowd was in full swing everywhere. 

There has been a great regeneration all around Victoria, making it a "happening" sort of place.

The Other Palace Theatre is part of the Lloyd Webber Group; there was a packed out musical called "Heather in the main theatre, but we were there for "89 Days", about a gap-year student in New York on a tourist visa (but working as an au pair) discovering that New York is not what she expected.

The studio is down, down, down down into what must be a sub-basement; a small performance space with a bar and chairs and tables... I don't think I'll go there again... too far down, down....

But I thoroughly enjoyed the musical, and thought there were some witty lines, both in the script and the songs, and the performance was slick and confident and engaging. The Edinburgh production will apparently have a larger band (although one each of piano, cello and violin worked very well) and a larger cast, and costumes (the cast all wore different black clothes and managed to portray their ever-changing parts very well). Well done everyone (and especially Clare, of course!)

Home - late - fed the cats - opened the windows (the house was like an oven, much cooler outside!) and so to bed. 

Thursday 26th July - What we did yesterday part 2

Before I leave the topic of the V and A Museum, I must just mention this;

the courtyard between the sculpture gallery and the main cafe in the red-brick building in the photo.

By the end of the afternoon the space was full of families enjoying a relaxed afternoon. You can see all the children playing in the large, shallow paddling pool - some in swimming costumes, some in underpants, and some just soaked through in their T shirts and shorts. I waded through the pool instead of walking round - when I took my shoes off, I found the paved area was too hot to walk on in bare feet. The water was luke warm - delightful - and deeper than I thought, so soon the hem of my long dress was soaked. No matter. It kept me cool as I walked round the rest of the museum, and my feet had dried off before I needed to put my shoes on again.

What a lovely, lovely place for families to take their children to! Free entry, toilets, cafe, seating, shade, sun, paddling pool - no wonder so many people come. And if they should pause and look at  some marvellous object on the way in or out, so much the better.

Oh, and I meant to mention this statue, close by the entrance to the courtyard, in the sculpture gallery;

Thetis is dipping Achilles into the Styx, (all except his heel, of course)

Achilles doesn't seem to be appreciating his mother's efforts. See, read the information label;

"The heads of Thetis and Achilles are portraits of the client's wife and baby". What a sweet idea.

from wikipedia re Thomas Johnes:  (he seems a Good Egg)

His marriage to his wife Jane, a beautiful and highly intelligent woman, brought great happiness to Thomas. They enjoyed a close relationship, sharing an interest in improving Ceredigion and a love of Hafod.

Their first child Mariamné was born 30 June 1784. Johnes was completely besotted with her and was closely involved with her upbringing. No expense was spared in her education; tutors from all over the world were hired. He shared an especially close emotional bond with Mariamné. He was heartbroken when she preceded him in death on 4 July 1811.

His son Evan was born in 1786, during the time his wife Jane had laid the cornerstone of their home. The boy died in infancy.^[4] 

Thursday 26th July 2018 - What we did yesterday - part 1

But first I must say, when I clicked on the blog to start this post, the picture that I drew of flowers  came up, and looked across at the fireplace where they all are, and saw

they don't look so happy this morning! But I can't easily go and get some water for them yet, as all doors to the kitchen are closed to prevent the cats escaping - they are due for their annual trip to the vet in half an hour and we don't want to spend that time hunting them round the house. At least they can't get under the bath anymore.

We spent the day in London yesterday - it was sweltering. I can't remember it being this hot since 1976, but at least we haven't started water shortages yet. The plan was to visit the V and A museum and see an exhibition called "The Future Starts Here" or something similar. Then to go to see a musical called "89 Days" at "The Other Palace Theatre", which has been written and is being performed by a group of students in and around Bristol University. My reason for going is that I know the lyricist, Clare Packham; she did her grade 5 theory with me, and I accompanied some of her violin exams (but chickened out of her Grade 8 - too many notes for the pianist)

We never made it to the exhibition - it's like looking something up in an encyclopaedia (remember those) or a dictionary - you meet so many interesting things along the way...

In a fit of extravagance after a particularly tiring morning at the Royal Brompton earlier this year, I took out a membership of the V and A, which gives free access to exhibitions, and also access to the Member's Room, a lovely, lovely lounge/restaurant on the fifth floor. At the time I tried to pretend to myself that I hadn't been totally reckless - the truth is that it was a brilliant idea. We had lunch in the member's room - He had steak, I confused the system by having two starters. All the dishes were excellent. Then we started. There were a few things we wanted to see;


Gloucester candlestick, falcon flagon, Serilly Cabinet,


and a whole load of things we didn't set out to see such as the Mirror Cabinet, glass virginals

this extraordinary wallpaper in the children's area of the silver collection

where some of the boxes had doors, with little showcases of silver models inside

and an exhibition of early computer generated pictures

and, right at the beginning of our visit, I saw a flight of stairs... Roman? or Greek? going nowhere...

Having trawled through various floors and rooms (how my mother would have loved the Gilbert collection, and also the Dutch items from when Amsterdam was the richest city in the world) we went back to the Members' Room for revivifying tea or coffee and cake, before heading to the theatre.

(Is this post too long? OK, I'll start a new one)

Wednesday 24th July - yesterday

Leaving a school where you have worked for fifteen or more years is slightly difficult - not the "leaving" bit, that was quite hard, but the actual handing over your security access key and walking out of the door.

Had I said good-bye to everyone, everywhere?

Well, that's that, I've gone now. Just endless folders on the computer, shelves of lists and lesson plans and resources, several hours of pressing "delete" or chucking stuff into recycling... and hopefully I'll be clearing a few inches of bookshelf space and a few bytes on the computer, and reclaiming a few hours of time.

They gave me these;

I enjoyed doing this rough sketch on the note-taking app on my tablet, using my finger instead of the stylus. The vase is a straight cylinder...

Then - time, time, time - but I felt cranky and out-of-sorts. Eventually, after lunch, I copied a quick water colour of the Venice Lagoon 

Result! I have learned how to do water by letting the paint break up as you brush over the paper! The tower is a bit fuzzy because I didn't wait long enough for the sky to dry. I'm still using the journal that daughter gave me for all these try-outs; there's something about a brand new sketchbook that is too intimidating. I have a method of avoiding the "I don't want to spoil the first page" syndrome which I can recommend; start on the last page and work backwards... Although some future viewer of my sketchbook might puzzle over why a relatively adequate start got worse and worse as they progressed through the pages...

Then He had the bright idea of going for a jaunt to Hove - no, not the sea front, but two of my favourite shops are on opposite sides of the same street - Lawrence, the art shop, and Ackermans music shop. Both with air-conditioning. So I had a splendid time in the shops, buying brushes and just one half-pan of watercolour (what is the difference between yellow ochre, which one art book suggests, and raw sienna? Almost nothing - the raw sienna is fractionally more brown. One writer states that the raw sienna won't make greens, so that could be it - using raw sienna might cure some of the dullness I am getting. Aha. I'll give it a go!) Meanwhile He prowled around in the sweltering sun, and found a water sports lagoon where you can go wakeboarding which looks like crazy good fun for lots of people... (not me!) 

The music books were just a selection for pupils - what might enthuse this boy, or that girl, and how to move a talented child onwards with technique... The "Dozen a Day" exercises that I used to do when I was a 9-year-old are still some of the best on the market. Book 1 is seemples, Book 6 would give me serious pause for thought!

I'm ecstatic that all three pupils passed their music exams; one will be delighted that she passed (a bit close, but she was touch-and-go), another will be happy with his merit, and the last might be disappointed that he just missed a merit (but he is very young, only six, and gets distracted by Everything!). I'm waiting for the written reports to get an idea of what actually happened in the exams. This morning's "eat the frog first thing in the day" was texting all the parents to let them know. 

Monday 23rd July 2018 - And that's (nearly) that

Taught two lessons today - the last two of the academic year. All that remains is to go to a leaver's assembly tomorrow morning and then I can turn my attention to ...

clearing out the teacher bags
deleting old school registers (GDPR)
sorting out my teaching resources
reshuffling my timetable
answering 30 outstanding emails

reading, writing, playing the piano, lolling about, sleeping, doing what I please

The long weeks of searing hot weather continue; at lunchtime I filled tubs of water as a first stage in the watering-the-garden process;

Let's do some sums;
the small red and blue tubs contain around 8 l water, and there are 3 of them
the big red tub takes 6 small red or blue tubs to fill
the green tubs take 4 small tubs
the big blue tub takes 3 small tubs...

that's 24 small tubs of water, at 8 l each which is 24 trips to and from the kitchen tap carrying a total of 144 l water, or 144 kg. I've used just about all that water now, watering the garden.

I've also been experimenting with going over a pen sketch with a wet paintbrush... (copy of a sketch in a "how to draw book")

and daring to risk adding colour to an ink sketch, using my wonderful colour-change multi-8 pencil 

(copy of photograph of view through staff room window)

  Hmm - I'm happy enough with these for now.

Saturday 21st July - Random Sightings

OK. The keyboard re-arrangement on my laptop is fixed! But I'm using the "mainframe" for convenience and speed.

The book is called "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles; I'm enjoying it, but find it needs to be read in small portions. Why? I'm not sure; perhaps it is many-layered and dense and vivid and idiosyncratic?   Anyway, it is the current book club choice. So far the book club is doing exactly what I had hoped - introducing me to all kinds of books which I wouldn't have thought of reading.



Anyway, back to the random sightings....

On Thursday night I thought I met a train coming down the steep hill that I was driving up to get to the school show. The hill is steep, the lane is narrow, the trees grow closely overhead and this huge, brightly-lit unidentifiable method of transportation came thundering down towards me, using a good deal of my side of the road. Once I had recovered from a simutaneous sudden dive towards the earth bank at my side of the road and application of brakes, and then rapid change down several gears and got the Corsa moving again, I was able to process what I had seen and conclude it was some kind of truck. Ugh.

Today, after work (yeah, some of us work on Saturday mornings, but this is the last until September whoop whoop) we were pondering where to go for lunch. He came up with "Lamingtons" in Bletchingley-  we were there about this time last year (17th June - I've just checked). It was only half an hour away, (through some of the beastliest lanes we have driven down in a long, long while - memo to self, don't follow the satnav through the back ways) just as we remembered it. He had smoked salmon and scrambled egg on toast, I had home-made quiche and salad.

Then, where to go next? Downe House, where Charles Darwin lived, is only half-an-hour away from Bletchingly, so we went there (down little lanes which require a whole new scale for beastliness - eroded verges, potholes, lack of passing places... I hadn't written myself that memo re satnav yet).

On the way, I spotted a Darth Vader mannequin in an old-fashioned telephone box - in Westerham, should you wish to check it out. The first link gives you the Westerham page - it seems Father Christmas is in residence. The second link gives you the google maps page - it's called Verrall's Corner on the A25. I couldn't get a picture of Darth Vader - the lights changes, and anyway it was all dark in there. It was a lady in a blue frock (the Queen?) on the day the google van went through...

Down House was very interesting - the house, the contents, the Darwin family. I even bought a guide book. You'll get much better pictures than this on the English Heritage website.

"The house is old and ugly" said Charles. But it had a great atmosphere.

The ground floor rooms are as they would have been when the Darwin family lived there, and upstairs an exhibition of Darwin's life and work. There were phrases of his "origin of the Species" on the walls - his descriptions were delightful. Also, he hated the sea.

I'm sure we used to play Downe House Girls School at Lacrosse when I was at school - well, not me, I was useless at lacrosse. The school is in Newbury now, but started here in Charles Darwin's house in 1907, after the family moved out.

We had tea and cake; I loved the little ants marching over the spoon marking the table number.



I don't think I have eaten zucchini - or courgette as I would have said - cake before today. This one had a lime and pistachio nuts and was delicious.

And in the spirit of Natural history, this tiny feather was caught on a roughness of the table; just a blur in the photograph, but a glorious miniature of yellow and green and grey in reality.

We came home through main roads, A roads and motorways. Took a scant hour and was a lot less taxing than the outward journey.

Friday 20th July - Morning Luxury

I baled out of attending a school assembly this morning, and am having a slow start to the day instead. The last two evenings have been taken up by the school show at one of the schools - the last time I was there in any formal role. (Halleluia).

Today is relatively straightforward. I need to be up and ready by 11.20 am to go to  a staff social at The Three Crowns (or is it The Crown - there's only one pub in that tiny village, and I'm getting a lift so I don't really care about the small details). And then be back in time to go to another staff social this evening...

I've just started reading "A Gentle
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Monday 16th July - Trucking on towards the holidays

No milk delivered today, so we thought...

until I spotted an empty carton down by the back gate later this morning.

How did it get there? Foxes - are they thirsty? have they discovered a taste for milk? Or are they just messing about?

It took me a while to search a bucket that was deep enough to cover a 2 litre milk carton but I discovered this one in the garden. It dates back to the 1980s, as it is part of the fittings of our very dated kitchen!
 

I'm hoping that weighting it down with a half brick might be enough to keep the milk safe.

The weather is still HOT.

The cat spent the whole day crammed into this cardboard box. How could she be comfortable in there?  How could she not be sweltering in there?

I'm double booked for two book clubs tonight, as they have both moved their nights. I'm glad that I've baled out of both of them; he's come back pretty tired from putting up curtains in daughter's flat, a long hot drive and a long hot detour away (blue flashing lights at Bury Hill), and I have taught nine piano lessons and gone to the dress rehearsal of the school show. And watered the garden - about a dozen or so 7l buckets of water to fill at the sink and carry around the garden!

So we are half awake, half asleep in front of the television, grateful for a cool breeze wafting through the room.