Today I caught up with last week's daily Lent email course...
and now I'm putting up this month's photograph of my tree, the little witch hazel in a pot, which I was planning to post on the first of the month.
BB took the picture for me on Sunday. Just look at all those leaves, all new and crinkly! Those are red tulips in the background.
The peony that had apparently started flowering last week turned out to be red tulips buried among the vigorous tall late daffodils. That's a bit of a relief!
'It will be finished for ChristmasNew YearEpiphanyValentine's DayEaster Day Bank Holiday Monday...' and so it was.
I could look back and see when I started this - or I could not... too long ago. I finished knitting it (after many fits and starts and adjustments) several weeks ago, but stalled out at the sewing up stage. Partly because I didn't trust myself to do a decent job, and partly because I always lose confidence in the fit, even after obsessionally measuring everything at least half a dozen times, and holding it up against myself.
It's come out fine! Not exactly like the pattern - I hadn't intended to choose the cuff option for the sleeves, but it looks like I have, and the original pattern has a lower neck, which I wasn't keen on, so I'm quite happy that this has come out somehow with a high neck. I was also trying to alter the pattern because I didn't care for the way the back was intended to be longer than the front - some kind of design statement? - but what will be, will be. I won't be able to see 'the statement' when I'm wearing it...
I just have to source some 2 inch buttons. At the moment those are stitch markers dangling from where the buttons are to go.
The day between Good Friday (sad, solemn, subdued) and Easter Sunday (joyful, laughing, exuberant) seems neither one thing nor another.
So I've been doing a bit of this (sewing) and that (reading) and the other (making a crockpot of soup, and a loaf of bread). In-between activities.
And all the time eyeing up the one Lindt mini egg left from last weekend, which I decided to keep until Easter. It's 8pm, I only have to hold out for 4 more hours.
Yesterday I caught the last bit of The Sound of Music, from when the family sings 'Goodbye, Farewell' at the competition and then escape. I don't think I've watched it for at least 10 years. I remember we were taken to see it in London on a school trip when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I was at a convent prep school, and I think I realised even then that the nuns who lead the trip were buzzing with excitement. We had to wear our summer dresses, white ankle socks, blazers, straw hats and white gloves.
Today this little clip caught my eye;
They dance so beautifully.
Our family used to occasionally holiday in Austria with an Austrian family, friends of my parents. Their children were the same age as us and they all spoke very good English. The children, teenagers by now, all learned the traditional dances (waltz, landler, etc) at school, as they were expected to dance them at the school end of year prom, clearly a much more formal occasion than ours.
It's raining, somehow appropriate for the mood of today.
Bernard Daddi (14th Century). Mary sits to one side, exhausted, John on the other, watching her. Jesus is no longer here; his body is just a grey husk.
Thank heavens, thank God, for 'spoilers' as they are called; we know, as they do not, that this is not the end, but the gateway to the beginning.
This is one of the pictures the Patrick Bringley discusses in 'All the Beauty in the World'.
Tenebrae singing 'Crucifixus' by Antonio Lotti (1687 - 1740) conducted by Nigel Short, in the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.
