Ta-da!

After a little break I am back in blogging mode, it has been so wonderful to spend time with my family.  Youngest son has been home for the holidays, and daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter Poppy came and spent a whole weekend here at Granny's house, how nice was that!

Thank you for your patience while I've been away!

So what have I been up to then?

Well here are two cardigans that I have knitted for Poppy, sorry they seem to be the wrong way around!

And here I am, enjoying a lovely cuddle with Poppy!

And another thing I have been enjoying in my spare time is watching Heidi Baker on Youtube

Heidi baker is such an inspiration to me.  She is a Canadian woman, married with 2 grown up children, they have been missionaries for over 30 years, mainly in Mozambique.  They feed hundreds of thousands of homeless children every day and have planted thousands of churches.  They also have a heart for England, and Heidi and her husband both have PhD degrees from King's College London.  Go on Youtube or itunes and you will find a ton of Heidi Baker teaching.  I am currently reading one of her books, 

It tells a little about their journey, and it is so interesting I can hardly put it down.  Do go on Youtube or iTunes and be blessed!

This afternoon we have enjoyed a chicken dinner, and a little rest watching an old episode of The Waltons.

Enjoy your day.

Blog break

Just to let you know I am taking a blog break.  Youngest son will be home from university soon, and I need to prepare the fatted calf, and spend time with him and with all the family.  Sometimes you really do need to put some things on hold while you concentrate on the most important things.  I'm going to be doing plenty of this - spending time with family!  This picture of my beautiful granddaughter Poppy and I was taken on Friday.

I will still be reading your blogs, and leaving comments, just to let you know I am still around!

Does anyone speak potato?

I consider myself a fairly good linguist, as I am a fairly fluent French speaker, but try as I might, I cannot speak potato.

In the interests of growing a few potatoes on the patio, I have been doing a little research.  Now, I'm not thinking  of self-sufficiency or anything like that, just a sack of home-grown charlotte potatoes would be great.

But I am bombarded with potato-language like 'earlies' and 'second earlies' and 'maincrop' and 'chitting'. Is there a translation manual I could buy?   Or could my lovely, knowledgeable readers help me out?  I don't know how early and maincrop relate to a normal non-gardening calendar.

I really don't intend for this blog to become a book blog.  I want it to reflect everything that interests me, books, knitting, christianity, home, garden, everything, I don't want to specialise.  However I have read a really good book this week...................

It's a story about the bad old days of psychiatric hospitals, Esme Lennox is incarcerated into an institution at the age of 16, basically for being a bit odd, for not wanting to get married, and for not wanting to cut her hair. She ends up staying there for 60 years.  The story starts with her release, and her first taste of freedom.

The ending was a bit predictable and disappointing all at the same time, but that didn't spoil the book.

I am now in the middle of a very intriguing book called The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall....

about a man who decides to break away from his past, in his sixties, and live in a caravan on a big traffic island.  I've got a feeling someone really did that once, and died a few years ago.  Maybe that was her inspiration.  So far it is really good.  And it is in English, not potato-ese!

Book Talk

I have been reading a brilliant little book over the past few days, it was an early Mother's Day gift from my beautiful and generous daughter (who knows what her Mum likes!)

It is called 'Stop What You're Doing and Read This!'

It contains ten essays by writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith etc. about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken for granted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on our time and attention - and we are encouraged to make books one of them.

Here is an extract from the essay by Jeanette Winterson, one of my all time favourite authors.  

"To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time.  I don't think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime.  The total time of a book is more like uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon seim upstream to get home.

We have lost all sense of home - whether it's the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.

How can a book get me home?  It reminds me of where home is, by which I mean I am remapped by the book.  My internal geography shifts, my values shift.  I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am."

I might quote a bit more from this book on another day, I love it so much.  It reminds me why I need to read, and what reading does for us, how it changes us.  

There is also a very enlightening essay by Jane Davis of The Reader Organisation.  She initiates projects to get people reading aloud together.  She says:

"Read a poem alone and you have your own experience and imagination to touch the poem into life.  Read it with six others and you have six lives and six imaginations with which to inhabit this flexible human-shaped space."

I could go on and on, so I will restrain myself now and say buy the book, or better still, hope a loved one will treat you to it!

Carnage

Last night, Mr LFH and I went to see Carnage at Warwick Arts Centre.  It was a really good film, starring Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, directed by Roman Polanski.

Here is a video trailer.................

After the film, we went to the Mead Gallery, and saw a marvellous exhibition of modern art called The Indiscipline of Painting.  There was some brilliant art by Bridget Riley and Andy Warhol.  My personal favourite was a huge canvas by John Armleder, full of glittery drips, very similar to this work of his.......

The gallery holds a weekly knit, crochet and stitch group, and on one wall there were framed pieces of knitting that the group had created in response to the exhibition, like modern art in knitted form!  Here is an example of their work..........................

I found it very interesting, although it would be a bit too far for me to drive to every week.

Today, we are chilling out.  A big casserole is bubbling happily away in the slow cooker for tonight - pork and white wine casserole, based on Jamie Oliver's casserole recipe in Ministry of Food.  

I hope you are having a good weekend.

Technical hitch

I've just deleted my last post because sometimes the pics loaded and sometimes they didn't!

Instead here is a pic of me with my beautiful granddaughter when she came to call recently!

She has her granny's hair colour, hahaha, except Poppy's is natural!

Have a lovely day

Been feeling a bit under the weather this week, and wondering what to do with myself, until I read Tina's blog, and there I found my prescription - I need flapjacks and knitting!  She also gives a recipe for flapjacks here in lovely ounces, I avoid grams whenever possible!

We had such a wonderful holiday for our anniversary, we stayed here...

Holme Lacy House Hotel, deep in the Herefordshire countryside.  It is every bit as wonderful as it looks, and the food was amazing, beautifully stacked little piles of delicious morsels, with three courses every evening, plus coffee and petit four, and a full English breakfast every morning.  I'm really going to have to get back to regular walking every day to work off all that delicious food!

We did take some pictures, and when I am firing on all cylinders again I'll add them.  

Hope you're all having a good day.