Posted by: Author | November 27, 2009

Photo Friday: Thanksgiving

Please do leave your post url in Mr Linky if you join in ~ so we can all enjoy your photos. And please don’t forget to visit each other!

AND we have a NEW Photo Fridayer today ~ follow the link toTracey’s blog in Mr Linky.


Thanksgiving  (photo that shows what it means to you)

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in the UK ~ but that doesn’t mean we can’t be thankful. The most important thing in my life that I am thankful for is my family and friends. Without them, nothing would matter. It’s been a hard year, one way or another ~ with both P and I being dogged by ill health and bad luck ~ and family and friends have kept us going.

So I thought I’d sum up what I’m thankful for with some snaps of my grandchildren (age 3 and 6 ~ and just a few weeks old) ~ because to me these dear little much loved children represent unconditional love, exuberance for life, a sense of adventure and fun, playfulness, enthusiasm, potential, a non-judgemental attitude, a desire to learn, an appreciation of everything around and unbridled energy … and those are all qualities that I think we should all try to find in ourselves. BUT most of all ~ children represent HOPE, hope for the future.  Never lose your inner child.

 

 

 And last but not least, dear little Pumpkin (born on Halloween) who is just four weeks old tomorrow:

Have P and I each managed to retain our inner child this year? Unconditionall,YES. Although I can’t deny my inner child has had a few tantrums this year ~ and has pouted at the unfairness and difficulties that this year has brought. But it has survived ~ and as for P … well he acts about 7 most of the time anyway! LOL!

Photo Friday Advance Diary:

December 4th: Incredible close up… can you guess what it is?

December 11th: Patterned view.. such as a pile aligned bricks, or honeycomb.

December 18th: Preparing for Christmas / or Seasonal celebrations.

December 25th : Photo Friday takes a break (no official post) but a Christmas/Seasonal photo scheduled in advance might be fun ~ anything you like! Comments can wait until after the festivities!

January 1st:  New Year’s day video ! (Last year Photo Fridayers each made a YouTube video where they passed on a New Year message to each other ~  you don’t have to appear in the video yourself if you prefer not to, but we would like your voice over ~ you might like to say what you want 2010 to hold for you personally, and the World)

January 8th: Something spiritually inspiring

Posted by: Author | November 23, 2009

Random Person

I got the idea for my Random Person photos from Scott ~ when he takes pics of buildings or monuments etc he often notices a random person in the background later when he’s checking the photos out; someone he doesn’t know and didn’t notice at the time.

Well this happened to me recently ~ a photo quickly snapped of my son and grandchildren revealed a hat wearing stranger lurking in the background. He wasn’t noticed at the time ~ in fact none of us can recall ever seeing him before ~ yet there he is peeping over my son’s shoulder! How could we have not noticed him? LOL!

 

Posted by: Author | November 22, 2009

A year of smiles …

Alfs

It is  a whole year since my beautiful cat Alfie came to share our home. We chose him from the Cats Protection centre because he needed a forever home ~ and Milo (our existing cat who was then 6 months old) needed a sibling/friend  to keep him company and share his life with. We’ve never regretted our decision ~ not even once, not even fleetingly. We love Alfie to bits.

Since the very day Alfie arrived in his new home he has brought me much joy ~ in fact a whole year of smiles. There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t smile or laugh out loud at something Alfie Marshall has done, or admire his cuteness, or cuddle and kiss him, or play with him, or scritch and  tickle his tummy when he chucks himself on the floor at my feet. He is adorable. He is my boy. I wouldn’t be without him. (Of course I adore Milo too ~ but today is Alfie’s special day). And Milo has the best playmate ever ~ the two of them have such fun together.

So if you think you have room in your life for a cat, and enough love to give, and want a reason to smile everyday, and will be prepared to pay the necessary bills for cat food and annual booster injections etc that are part of having a pet cat ~ please consider offering a forever home to a homeless kitty. If you live in the UK the Cats Protection centre is a good place to start looking.

 

Please do leave your post url in Mr Linky if you join in ~ so we can all enjoy your photos. And please don’t forget to visit each other!

Today: Free Choice (your favourite recent photo and why).

A huge thank you to Elizabeth who e-mailed me a wonderful list of topics for our Photo Friday ~ I’ve scheduled some of her choices and will add the rest when I have a diary to hand with the dates on! I had been considering abandoning Photo Friday since so few of us take part now ~ but then I realised enjoy doing it, so I thought what does it matter if we are just a few? Newcomers are always welcome. Also ~ notice the video scheduled for 1st January 2010 (below), since you may want to prepare it in advance. It’s a bit of a Photo Friday tradition! When I first suggested in the past, everyone was horrified ~ then they all decided to have a go and said they really enjoyed doing it! Of course you can choose to put your video in a protected post if you wish ~ and then e-mail the other members the password ~ but last year, we let it all hang out! LOL! If you don’t want to appear personally you can just do a voice over ~ and maybe film something inspirational, or your pets etc. The film only needs to be a couple of  minutes long ~ we’re not expecting an epic! Whatever, have FUN!

Now for today’s photos: This is a photo I snapped (un-posed) of my firstborn son, cradling his firstborn (she was less than 24 hours old). My son J looks pale and  tired (he hadn’t slept the night before when Pumpkin was born) but you can’t mistake that look of love and pride. He’s going to make a wonderful dad ~ of that I’m in no doubt. I chose this photo because it makes me feel so happy to look at it:

Also: A bit of fun! A Photo-shopped pic of Milo and Alfie meeting Pumpkin:

Photo Friday Advance Diary:

November 27th: Thanksgiving  (photo that shows what it means to you)

December 4th: Incredible close up… can you guess what it is?

December 11th: Patterned view.. such as a pile aligned bricks, or honeycomb.

December 18th: Preparing for Christmas / or Seasonal celebrations.

December 25th : Photo Friday takes a break (no official post) but a Christmas/Seasonal photo scheduled in advance might be fun ~ anything you like! Comments can wait until after the festivities!

January 1st:  New Year’s day video ! (Last year Photo Fridayers each made a YouTube video where they passed on a New Year message to each other ~  you don’t have to appear in the video yourself if you prefer not to, but we would like your voice over ~ you might like to say what you want 2010 to hold for you personally, and the World)

January 8th: Something spiritually inspiring

Posted by: Author | November 17, 2009

I’ll never feel the same way about Noddy again …

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968)

Last night I watched the BBC4 film entitled “Enid” about Enid Blyton. If you have access to BBC I player you can watch it here (available to view for approx 2 weeks): http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nxkm8/Enid/

NB: Disclaimer: I don’t know how accurate the film Enid is, so all my comments are based on Enid as she is portrayed.

I’m sure the reviews of this film will abound and the opinions will vary widely ~ but I found it to be hugely personally nostalgic and it stirred up all sorts of memories for me, both good and bad.

It was a wonderful fast-moving nostalgic period piece (the BBC did an excellent job) and one presumes it is based on Enid’s real life biography, more or less. The lead role was convincingly played by Helena Bonham Carter:

The film showed Enid as having a complete dichotomy of personality; she could be stern, dictatorial, a liar, cruel, manipulative, selfish and self-centred, and insensitive to her mother, siblings, husbands and her own children ~ and yet to her readers she was sweetness and light itself.  At first the different sides to her personality are hard to reconcile but gradually, as the storyline unravels, the viewer can begin to understand what made her tick and then come to realise that we are all what our own life experiences make us ~ and thus judge her less harshly.

I was born in the 1950s and so my early childhood was very similar to that portrayed by the children in the film. Enid’s two daughters reminded me so much of my sister and myself that I could barely take my eyes off them when they were on the screen. Their hairstyles with ribbons, the sweet little dresses (so different from the mini-me outfits the children of today often wear) ~ even the fact that they were dressed the same (my sister and I were always dressed alike even though she was two years older than me) ~ brought back all sorts of nostalgic memories of my childhood.

Yet the film stirred up other less happy memories too.  The flashbacks to Enid’s childhood where she relived her parents arguing and unhappiness sadly echoed my own. Enid was supposedly devastated when her parents separated but my view is that staying together for the children can be (and was for me) disastrous. I can recall only too easily the icy atmosphere  that could be cut with a knife, that hung over my rather privileged and wealthy middle class childhood home. I can remember only too well the raised voices, accusations and slammed doors. I can remember vividly the uncomfortable  mealtimes when father talked at us rather than to us, while mother sulked. I can also recall praying that my parents would separate so I wouldn’t have to share their self-induced misery anymore.  I’m not sure I ever got as far as working out what the alternative lifestyle would be if my wishes were granted ~ but since they didn’t separate until some 14 years (when my much younger brother was 16 years old) after I’d left, I never got to find out. (Ironically, my father never forgave me for what he viewed as “abandoning”  my home and parents at such a young age ~ which is the opposite of Enid, who never forgave her mother for letting her father leave).  My own father cut me out of his life for years because he wrongly felt I had rejected him. My sister and I were also dismissed to our rooms when my father felt so inclined (Enid herself did the dismissing of her own daughters to their room). Even the death of the rabbit brought back an awful memory (Enid and her second husband Kenneth cruelly eat one of the daughters’ pet rabbits due to rationing of food) ~ I tragically lost a pet rabbit in similar circumstances when a neighbour ate it ~ life can be really shit sometimes.

As a child I escaped into Enid Blyton’s books; I consumed them at a rate of knots ~ and have often thought that they set me on the track of achieving the English degree I eventually went on to get.  Yet there was a darker side to my escapism, in that now as an adult I can see I too was repressing the unhappy reality of my young life and hiding in obsessive amounts of reading. It was escapism and repression for me too. I inhabited the fictional world that Blyton created, for similar yet different reasons.

Enid repressed reality ~ but she did it by writing.  Throughout the film we see glimpses (sometimes a little too obvious) that Enid inhabited a fantasy World. It seems that what she couldn’t face up to she repressed ~ and she then escaped from reality by creating a wonderful childlike existence in her stories.  She repressed her father’s so called ”fraternising with floozies” which was said to be the cause of her parents marriage failing and then she projected that attribute on to her innocent first husband. She was apparently haunted by what she saw as her father rejecting her ~ and yet she repeated history when she rejected her own mother, siblings, husband, children, and even betrayed her so called friends.

She continually professed to understand what children wanted, she said:

What children want is to escape to a magical world of adventure.

Well that was certainly true for me. She also said:

I know about children. I know about al the secret places they want to escape to.

Yet time after time in the film we see evidence that she failed to understand what her own children needed or wanted.

During the film there are many references to Enid’s mother being dead. When finally it is revealed that her mother died we realise that Enid has been pretending her mother was dead for years before the event actually occurred. She excuses herself by saying “She was dead to me from the moment I left home”.  Enid doesn’t think she did wrong in telling this lie because to her, her mother was as good as dead anyway. We learn that she didn’t see her mother for over 30 years, from choice ~ and also that her mother suffered from dementia for the last 10 years of her life.

One of the harshest and cruelest things that Enid is shown to have done, is deliberately kill her unborn son. We are left in no doubt that conceiving her unborn son by her second husband is not a joyous or celebratory occasion for her, so it is no surprised when she manipulates a fall from a ladder to rid herself of her unwanted burden. Her husband is heartbroken and shortly afterwards (maybe from guilt) she creates the character Noddy to console him ~ a cute little boy child who will never grow up. Hence my comment in the tile for this post: I’ll never feel the same way about Noddy again.

The film also touches (lightly) on other hot historical topics of that nineteen  forties and fifties ~ the defined roles of men and women, class distinction, war,  child rearing views of the era (that children were to be largely seen and not heard), prejudice and ideas about women etc. The common view was that Enid could not possibly have written so many books ~ because she was a woman. 

I’m sure that, like me, you are beginning to realise that Enid’s whole story writing life as an Author was fueled by her desire to escape into a world she created for  herself, and by writing so prolifically she was able to spend most of her time in it. There seems little doubt that her inability or unwillingness to face reality enabled her to invent this wonderful fantasy world in her books ~ and I’m sure that many other children (not just me) escaped into her books in a similar way. Tragically, her eventual decline into dementia (following in her mother’s footsteps) ironically allowed her to escape permanently into her own world, prior to her death.

Finally, although I abhor the kind of person that Enid is shown as being,  I do believe that we are all what our life experiences make us. That isn’t to say we have no options, once life has dealt our cards ~ we can still choose how we react (within reason). But without doubt, psychologically and emotionally, our past life has a huge influence on what we become and are. Therefore ultimately, I feel pity for Enid.  BTW ~ I don’t blame my parents ~ they did the best they could and fortunately, I handled things differently.

 Quote of the day: They fuck you up your Mom and Dad ~  Philip Larkin

(this poem appeared in the 1974 collection High Windows)

“This be the Verse”

 They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

Please do leave your post url in Mr Linky if you join in ~ so we can all enjoy your photos. And don’t forget to visit each other!


I’ve got a bit of a fun mixture for you today ~ ranging from unadulterated photos to photo gadgetry. I decided to be self-indulgent to celebrate that today MY WHEELCHAIR was collected ~ since I am now weight-bearing well enough to rely on crutches. And hopefully in the near future I’ll be chucking the crutches out of the window returning the crutches to the hospital too. Progress is SLOW but I’m getting there. I’m already polishing the dust of my stilettos!

Now for the photos: Sometimes photos turn out so arty that you don’t want to mess with them. The pic below is a close up I took of tree bark ~ I love the colour and textures and the version you see is completely original.

(Click on the photos with the edge outlined to biggify!)

tree at Burrow Farm Gardens

The tree itself:

Burrow Farm Gardens

And talking of trees isn’t this one fabulous ~ I can see it from my study window:

Tree from my study window

Below: A study in blue of the Bluebell Woods at Earlswood:

The Bluebell Wood

And boats at Sidmouth in water-colour:

boats at sidmouth water colour

Below~ my original photo:

boats at sidmouth (original)

Below: Warhol paints my husband!

Warhol paints P!

And finally, I couldn’t resist including my cheekly little version of  “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer (I just had to sneak Milo into one of the photos!)

Milo and Girl with a pearl earring

Oh, and I couldn’t include Milo without Alfie: this one is entitled “Double Trouble!”

Alfie double trubble!

 

Advanced Diary:

20th November ~ Free Choice (your favourite recent photo and why).

Any suggestions are welcome!

Posted by: Author | November 12, 2009

A must see ….

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968)

Enid Blyton

As a child I loved Enid Blyton’s books ~ I probably read every single one of them. Week after week I would trudge back from the public library with my arms aching from the weight of books such as : The Famous Five,  The Secret Seven or something from the St Clare or the Faraway Tree series ~ or whatever else took my fancy. Enid was a prolific author (check out her titles HERE. ) During her life she wrote around 800 books during a 40-year career.

But did you know there is a film coming out soon about Enid Blyton’s life? I shall be watching it for sure. It’s being shown On BBC television so unless you have access to that channel you may not be able to watch it.

It’s called “Enid” and is described as a dramatic television movie, set for release on 16th November 2009 on BBC Four. Directed by James Hawes, it will be based on the life of Enid Blyton. Helena Bonham Carter will portray the title character and the film will introduce the two main lovers of Blyton’s life. The first being Hugh Pollock, Blyton’s publisher and first husband, played by Matthew Macfadyen, and the second being Kenneth Darrell Waters, a London surgeon who becomes Blyton’s second husband, played by Denis Lawson. The film, set in the 20th Century, will explore how the orderly, reassuringly clear worlds Blyton created within her stories contrasted with the complexity of her own personal life.

Blyton cat 2

 Look out for a review of it here next week.

Posted by: Author | November 11, 2009

Lest We Forget …

On this day in history:

1918: Fighting in World War One ceases with the signing of an armistice between Germany and the Allies at 11 am.

poppy

The horrific experiences of the men who fought in the trenches is not forgotten.

With help from the BBC Radio archive, and sobering images from WWI – listen to the personal testimonies of a handful of the thousands of British Tommies who marched to the Western Front:   LINK

Lest we forget. RIP.

Posted by: Author | November 8, 2009

Remembrance Sunday

In Flanders Fields

Poppies

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.
Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

My beloved old grandad (who died aged 100 years and 4 months old in December 2008) held great store by Remembrance Sunday. Every year (even last year when he was so frail and over 100 years old) he would dress up in his Sunday best and watch the television broadcast of the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph (The Queen, government representatives and soldiers march to the Cenotaph (empty tomb in Greek) in London and lay wreaths. A two minute silence is held to remember all those who have died for their country in the First World War and all wars since. The “Last post” is played on a bugle to introduce the two minute silence at 11 o’clock and “Rouse” is played at the end. Other commemoration services are held in churches and at war memorials throughout Britain). It seems strange that this year, for the first time ever in my life, he won’t be phoning me to remind me to watch the service. I will watch it anyway ~ and I shall remember those who so bravely gave of their lives … and I shall also remember my beloved grandad, whom I still miss greatly. RIP.

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