Saturday 20th April - Farnham Sculpture Park

This was a bit of a treat in many ways. We collected a ready-made picnic (thank you, Waitrose, for making our sandwiches) and set off.
'Have we been here before'
'No, never, at least I don't recognise these roads... er, or maybe I do?'

Yes, we had tried to visit the Sculpture Park last year, but found the place was mobbed by visitors and we couldn't park within half a mile. This time we were much more fortunate.

This griffin looks s though he means business - I'm not sure he is really as fierce as he is pretending to be...

This little bear, made by a 6-year old, is not for sale!

These sculptures are harder to spot - a number of highly polished pyramids set in a clearing.

There were a number of skeletons around the place - this one is actually doing some work, others were just messing around, riding penny farthings as so on.

I look quite stylish, wearing a hat... 

This was perhaps the highlight of the whole trip...

let me zoom in...

A lizard, about 9 inches long, looking like a fully articulated Faberge creation, beautifully iridescent, slipping across the log and in and out of the bits and pieces on the woodland floor. We looked it up - an incredibly rare sand lizard, and the heathlands on the Surrey Hills is one of the few places it can be found. The sculptures will be there tomorrow and next year, but I don't expect I'll ever see a sand lizard again.



This picture above is from https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/reptiles/sand-lizard - it looked Exactly Like This. That's a Huge Big Wow.

Friday 5th October - Connections

The book club choice for last month was 'A Time of Gifts' by Patrick Leigh Fermor'. I had already read it several years ago, and enjoyed it then.

I think it may be one of the first books that Mummy read after her stroke; I have one of those penguin '40s' books of just the first few chapters (my brother gave me 40 of them for my fortieth birthday, rather clever, I thought). She loved the descriptions of the Netherlands, especially Rotterdam, before the war.

I spotted this book by Robert MacFarlane and downloaded it because it was only £1.99 and I liked the cover picture;

Then I discovered it is all about Robert MacFarlane's reaction to having been given a copy of 'A Time of Gifts' by a friend.... and the effect gifts of books have on the giver and the recipient.

My father, a couple of weeks ago, insisted on buying me a copy of 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' by Edmund De Waal.

At the book club meeting, one of the members commented that there is a link between 'A Time of Gifts' and 'The Hare', in that a descendant of someone that PLF stayed with on his travels appears in 'The Hare'. I will have to finish the 'Gifts' i order to make the connection.

I've just started 'The Hare', but stalled in the first paragraph of the preface (I nearly always read the preface - it can be the best part of the book!) where De Waal recounts going to a language school in Shibuyah, Japan.

I teach an extremely popular chant in my music classes, which goes;

Shibuyah! Shibuyah! Ha! Ha! Shibuyah! Hoh!

You then go on to add individual statements before repeating the chant.

I'd always thought 'Shibuyah' was a made-up word; it has a lovely sound and feel. And then the word leapt at me when I was least expecting it!


The chapter names in 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' are so enticing that I can't wait to find out more;

I ought to get up. It is nearly lunchtime. Himself has been busy fixing the gates back to the driveway; a job which has been 'on the list' for a few years. Every time he goes to the tool cupboard in the next room, I hear 'hohoho Merry Christmas' from the Toy Father Christmas that was in a stocking so many years ago. Its battery is lasting well.

Sunday 21st May - Half-term ahoy

This coming week is the run-up to half term...

Last week was the last (just about) of the shuffled rescheduled weeks. It took a fair bit of concentration to make sure I was in the right place - and during the week I managed to find

the missing pencil-sharpener/rubber (inside the lid of the piano where I had been teaching the previous Friday)

my mp3 player (in the bag I take to drumming on Friday evenings)

my "piano-teaching" pencil case, packed with all sorts of necessities such as reward stars, post-it notes, mini folding scissors, pic-n-mix activity cards, dice for use with the cards, coloured pencils, pencil, but no pencil-sharpener/rubber as I had already lost that (left behind in a school where I don't teach piano - how did that happen?)

I know that things have drifted too far from routine when I start losing things all over the county.

"Unusual events" this week were a school music festival, which meant moving one school to another day, and a day up in London for routine clinic appointments which meant rescheduling four piano lessons, to earlier in that week, or into the coming week. It all makes for a lively time!

The clinic appointments were all very reassuring - routine check-ups along the lines of "no change, carry on as you are". I had been a bit apprehensive (to be honest, each time I usually am) in case things have altered, so I left the clinic happier than when I had arrived. When we had arrived. Of course he came too!

Afterwards, after lunch, we caught the bus back into the centre of London, stopping off at the National Gallery. We have a celebration coming up later this year, and we're working on various scenarios. One is that we just announce a date and location for afternoon tea somewhere, and the gallery was a thought. I don't know, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for art. We had a look round the Chris Ofili exhibition  because it was free

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/chris-ofili-weaving-magic-national-gallery-irresistible-pagan/

but all the Titians and Rubens and Grand Masters were too colourful and too intense and too Greek Legends and Too Much. The only things that caught my attention were Frank Auerbach drawings and sketches in the Espresso Bar. I've tried to find the ones he made of Turner's painting of Calais Pier

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-calais-pier

but I can't. You'll just have to google around until you trip across one. Then we had a nearly-good cake and drink in the cafe. Through the window we could see an old friend.

Wherever we pick for the celebration it probably won't be the National Gallery!