The Gallery…’Love’
Posted under The Gallery
Love? MrSpud…without whom there is nothing xxx
Archive for December, 2010
instagram…new obsession
Posted under iphone photography, Photography
NEW LOVE…instagram, an app for the iphone discovered via Julochka a few days ago which intrigued, ensnared and entrapped me immediately. I love processing my iphone shots and have a variety of preferred apps for doing that. But instagram chucks in an instant ‘community’ of fellow addicts, and links in with Twitter, Facebook and all that jazz. So you can find your contacts, follow them, and easily upload your ‘art’ to your instagram stream and then choose where else to share it all at the same time. Love it, and love the simple ‘filter’ processing it offers. I could tire of the square format because sometimes square just doesn’t cut it. But I’m quibbling.
I especially love this one, Diggy in his Igglepiggle outfit just sifting through MrSpud’s toolbox, ready to ‘help’ assemble a bed.
Who else is an instagram addict? Who can be persuaded to join in?
If you liked that, you might like this ...
[Lens]baby it’s cold out there…
Posted under Lensbaby, Photography
Snow again. Not really that bad, especially compared with the rest of the UK, but enough to be a nuisance and the freezing temperatures are really getting to be a drag. So I decided to lie down on my back in the snow, crack open the Lensbaby, and take photos of trees. Chilly, but preferable to what was going on inside which was a ‘party’ organised by Bertie which involved praying to the Christmas tree, singing ‘calm songs’ and sitting in tents constructed from sheets, towels and drying racks. Very odd.
![[Lens]baby it's cold out there...](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5242/5273883311_b36fef0253_z.jpg)
![[Lens]Baby it's cold out there...](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5007/5274404852_e98507f96f_z.jpg)
Taken with the wide adaptor for the Lensbaby which I ‘quite’ like, but you can bend the lens without nasty bold vignetting around the corners. Kind of defeats the point of using a selective focus lens, surely? Harumph.
If you liked that, you might like this ...
Limbo
Posted under Witterings
I’m in limbo. We’ve bought our new house, we have the keys, it’s all ours…but we don’t live in it yet. We’ve moved in various bits of furniture which have been in storage for a couple of years, and boxes of photos and books and [oooooh] teenage diaries [mine not MrSpud's, I don't think boys keep diaries do they?].
We’ll move in for good in early January but, for now, we are pottering a bit between both our houses since they are only a field apart. I’m quite enjoying this limbo time, just adapting to the new house and finding out about its quirks, its characters and its limitations…all before we actually move in. We spent the day there today, doing a few jobs, measuring up, pootling about…and one of our cats joined us for a bit! He followed MrSpud up the field and then was manhandled in to the house for an inspection. I think he was a bit puzzled to be in a totally new house with familiar people, but we LOVED it! Felt like it had all kind of come together for a little while.
I am so excited by the house, and how it feels. It already feels like home and I know we have found our forever, family home. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s faintly overwhelming to be honest, but the basics are there: it feels like home, its light and airy, its peaceful and spacious. It feels like a happy home and that’s good enough for me.
Mostly, at this early stage, I am giddy because there is masses of storage. This will be the first move I’ve ever done where there is ample room for all our stuff. This will be my 21st house move. That’s a lot of moving. It will be my last house move. Of that I am sure. Until my children cart me off to a home of course but by then I won’t care as the packing won’t be my problem. Ha.
I’m raring to get going with all the work that needs to be done. I’m giddy with plans and hopes and aspirations. But mostly, right now, I’m in limbo. I don’t live there but, in my heart, I don’t live here any more either. Limbo, it’s not a comfortable place…as indeed it was intended. Roll on 2011.
Most Commented Posts
The Gallery..Sparkle
Posted under The Gallery
Sparkle…ah, the prompt immediately reminded me of these shots from 2 years ago. I took them in my hairdressers. Yes, really. I skipped in for a trim and this was the sight that I beholded…
Ah, a good reminder of why I need to suck it up and go back to London for haircuts. Firstly, because no one round here can cut hair and secondly, because you don’t get ‘fancy’ like this in the country. Sigh.
If you liked that, you might like this ...
The Circle of Life
Posted under Witterings
Diggy, yesterday, just before the start of the nursery Nativity play. Thankfully he was a ‘shepherd’ just like Bertie was last year, no last minute fiddling around with pillow cases and tea towels for a costume for me. Oh no…just a bit of rummaging in the the dressing up box. Job done.
Today Bertie performed in his first school play, ‘The Bossy Christmas Fairy’, that well known seasonal story (?). He was a fairy light. It involved a reasonable amount of sitting on the stage without fidgeting, a lot of singing (loudly and with great enthusiasm) and some dancing. He loved it and took it very, very seriously and told me he’d practiced it ’900 times’.
Diggy also took it very seriously and knew all the words. Sometimes he even took his thumb out of his mouth so we actually had a chance of hearing them. He really got in to Bertie’s play today and went dressed as Superman (you never know) and joined in with all the songs, despite never having heard them, and danced like a pro. Mostly he laughed like a drain throughout the older children’s production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’ … well, what do you expect with a character called ‘Bottom’? It’s like a 3yo’s idea of comedy heaven.
I wept a bit of course, but mostly I felt very nostalgic for my own childhood productions and, in a second, I was up there as an angel, a ‘green star’, ‘Fanny’, ‘the Prince’, ‘Old Green Grasshopper’ ‘Belinda’ etc etc. I didn’t really get this kick of ‘the old days’ last year as the nursery play is a very low key affair. But the school play is a much more professional affair, on a stage, with two showings on the day…just as it was during my childhood.
I remembered, oh so keenly, how it felt to be on the stage and overexcited, unable resist the temptation to look out at the audience to spot my mother (mostly) and (oh oh oh hopefully!) my dad. Sometimes neither could make it due to work commitments and I tried so hard not to mind. I’d understood from when I was tiny that my parents couldn’t always be at school for ‘events’ since one was a teacher and the other a police officer. But, honestly, it kind of destroyed me to look out and them not be there. Or, very often, neither would be there for the afternoon performance but mostly one of them would make it for the evening performance. And I’d be totally, totally GIDDY for the evening performance. For me, I was only performing for those special one or, if I was lucky, two people. I love the applause and the adrenalin, but what I really craved was for my parents to be there and to enjoy it and be proud. Right now, as I’m writing, I can remember the kick of pleasure I got looking out at the audience on the first night of an opera I sang in and seeing my mother in the audience. I knew my parents were due to come the following evening but, as a surprise, she’d come on the opening night…unable to resist seeing me sing in my first major opera role. Really, right now I can physically feel the JOLT of pleasure. I was 16 so, of course, I had to pretend I didn’t care and that it meant nothing to me…
I watched Bertie on the stage today, assured, confident, calm. But I saw him look out in to the darkness for a minute, slightly anxiously, searching for me. I’d told him I’d be there, and MrSpud for this evening’s performance. He couldn’t see me, although he knew I was there, I was too far back in the crowd and it was too dark anyway. But I watched his face and remembered how it felt. And I wondered how the years have skipped by so fast, how it has fast forwarded like this…so that now it’s ME sitting in the audience and not on the stage, giddy with excitement.
I remembered my First Holy Communion, age 7, standing around the back of the altar in a circle with the rest of my class and sneaking a look in to the congregation. There, at the front, were my parents and my Dad (a non Catholic) was kind of crouching down and not kneeling, head bowed, like everyone else. He risked a casual wave. I didn’t wave back of course, how could I? In church? Noooooooo. But I beamed, I’d had ‘my moment’. I was up there, on show, and my Dad was watching and was proud…and he’d waved. That’s all I needed.
Neither of my boys spotted me in the audience during their plays. It didn’t matter. I was there. They never doubted that I wasn’t, because I am always there. They didn’t see me, but I saw them and inside I was waving. Drowning in my tears. And waving.
Most Commented Posts
Snow Day…
Posted under Witterings
We have snow..blah…it’s really deep…blah….school is shut…blah….it’s really really annoying because I’m really really busy…blah…can’t get off the farm…blah…blah blah BLAH.
So we stayed home and the boys laughed at my pathetic attempts to light the fire. We homeschooled (geography, the Romans, literacy and maths…not bad for 3 and 5 year olds). We made stuff. We crocheted (well, me and Bertie did and Diggy just just up wool). We drew, we coloured in, we made a lot of hot chocolate and when we were all done with that we went for a Snow Day Walk on the farm and tobogganed until we were blue with cold.
And some of our number snapped some crappy photos with their iPhone.
Very cold pigs…
Very cold child (note sunhat…there is a winter hat underneath…he was just ‘trying something’)
Very cold horse water buckets…
Very cold office, where no work was done today…oh, and tobogganing child…
Another very cold child…note lack of gloves…
And then we came in and watched crap telly and all was one in the world.
Please let it not snow not snow not snow anymore. Some of us may have a significant birthday at the weekend and plans to go away without the children for the first..time…ever. The snow can go now. Thanks a lot.
If you liked that, you might like this ...
Channeling Daphne Du Maurier
Posted under Witterings
This is the first photo of the inside of our new house. I’ve had to convert it to black & white to protect the innocent. I’m not sure we’re ready for the moss green carpet. Which is everywhere. Apart from the kitchen (cream/brown swirly tiles) and the bedrooms (dodgy peach carpet). So here are the boys on the staircase. Bertie is obsessed with the curtains since they are all on those fancy pulley system things. I give in 3 weeks after we move in before he’s pulled the whole lot off the wall.
These are strange times. We own the house, but we don’t live there yet. I’ve never done this before, had acces to ‘my’ house before turning up with all our crap and house moving related tension headaches. I’m enjoying just wondering around it, getting used to it, the way the light changes during the day and its little ‘funnies’.
Mostly I’m enjoying getting to know how it feels. It definitely has a feeling to it, a kind of vibe if you will. It’s peaceful, very peaceful…not in a physical sense (although it’s also blissfully quiet, with no other houses visible from the it) but in a calm, grounded way. It feels mature, adult and kind of ‘resolved’and at one. It feels the way I hope I will be when I grow up.
I never met the previous owner, an elderly lady who lived there for the past 30 years or so. I know her daughter pretty well. But I have never got the sense that it was the old lady whose spirit is dominating the house. Perhaps the previous occupants, but the trail is cold for me there. I heard through the village grapevine that the house was initially build by a local builder for his daughter as a wedding present. Is that that couple whose spirit I can sense?
I’m not ‘that’ kind of spiritual person at all, but there’s a certain lingering quality of something or someone. It’s very comfortable, comforting and reassuring. MrSpud, early on, said that house reminds him of the novel ‘Rebecca’ and he’s so right. Not the plot, but the setting and the ‘feeling’ is very Rebecca. Perhaps it’s Daphne Du Maurier, who knows…I’m definitely channeling someone.
Do we leave bits of our souls and ourselves in the places that we live? Or are they just bricks and mortar? Taking the keys for the house from the daughter of the previous owner was a very emotional experience, for her and for me. I tried to reassure her that it was just a house, just the 4 walls…and that people make memories and not places. Deep down I was wondering if these are just platitudes we trot out because so many of my most precious memories ‘live’ in certain places, often precious homes, but are wrapped around individuals.
I’d love to to think that I’m right, that houses are just bricks and mortar and no more than that. But this house, our new home, doesn’t feel like that. It feels like someone, along the way, lined the walls with something of themselves. I can feel it and I love it. Despite the green carpet…
Most Commented Posts
One precious moment in time
Posted under Witterings
Bertie has had a serious hairchop. Not really intended, my fault for not paying attention when the hairdresser showed me how much he was intending to chop. His short crop makes him look younger, yet older, more serious, more schoolboyish all at the same time.
Mostly, though, he looks so like my mother. He frequently reminds me of my mother, something in his eyes and his teeth (oddly). There’s no one really left who remembers my mother, or who wants to talk about her. I’d love to really get down in to a ‘GOSH isn’t he like Mum, yes…isnt he…what is it exactly?” type of debate. But there’s no one left. Just me.
So, for posterity, I record here that he is SO like my mother and I can’t put my finger on it. Something in his eyes, his teeth, and his vivacious spirit is ringing all the bells for me. I know she would have so adored our boys, both of them…equally…fiercely. But I do think, very secretly, there would have been something about Bertie that would have rung the bell just a little bit, oh such a little little bit, louder.
One precious moment in time. Mr Bertie with the look of his never to be known Grandmother…and with more than a hint of how he might look as an adult.
xxx (from NanaSpud xxx)
Most Commented Posts
The Gallery – Celebration…alone time
Posted under The Gallery
Bit neglected this blog isn’t it? Just life ‘n’ stuff getting in the way but my head feels like it’s going to explode with thoughts which means I need to find some time and some peace to write.
All quite fitting because this week’s The Gallery theme is ‘Celebration’ …and I’m celebrating ‘alone time’. I need it, I crave it, I can’t get enough of it. Nothing restores me more than time on my own. I don’t need to be doing anything special, just pottering about is fine, even working if I absolutely must. But I need to be alone.
You can keep your spa days, your treatments, manicures, pedicures (with or without Japenese fish nibbling your toes), your nights out with the girls and all that jazz. I just want time on my own and then all is well in the world.
Alas the cureall Alone Time seems curiously lacking at the moment. Feels like I’m on a rollercoaster of school runs, work, house move related appointments, Christmas ‘stuff’, school ‘stuff’…it’s hard to know which is crowding out my inner peace the most…the people or the non-fecking-stop commentary of things to do/to sort/to think about in my head. I wish I could turn my mind off sometimes. I’d like to crawl in to my head and tell my thoughts to KEEP IT DOWN WOULD YA?
So, right now, I’m celebrating Alone Time. And I’m doing it in time honoured fashion…alone. So if you’re reading this, would you mind awfully if you just pootled off quietly and left me to it? I thank you.
x
