Our original thoughts were to have been having a nice holiday, Italy, Venice were mentioned but of course we couldn’t do that. However my epically wonderful hublet and most favouritest other person daughter R made it really special, as did everyone else who contributed cards, messages and gifts.
I have enough flowers to open my own floristry shop. Fortunately the last lot to be delivered came in their own vase, we’d run out by then.
Then there were chocolates, wine, prosecco,. Even biscuits from my favourite little mate who calls me “biscuit”. Book tokens, West End theatre evoucher, chocolate tasting experience, gift voucher for a cake class with my favourite cake teacher.
Beautiful earrings, necklaces, candles, books on things to do now I’m 50, and a mahoosive lunch/ afternoon tea that was too much food for one sitting. One necklace rom R was of all our birthstones, aquamarine (February), amethyst (March) and Ruby (July).
Balloons that were sneakily made up in the garage, and a chocolate cake to die for delivered having been approved of by R.
Lots of messages, lots of cards and a video chat with my big bruv in the morning and a lovely video chat with R later on in the day.
I feel thoroughly spoilt and am extremely grateful for everyone’s participation.
We’ll go travelling next year when there’s even more to celebrate, our 25th wedding anniversary and R’s 25th birthday.
Might need to take about 3 months off work for that. 😄
Sunday evening I really enjoyed watching a compilation programme on BBC1 of highlights from stage musicals, Musicals: The Greatest Show, which was immediately followed by the O2 staged 25th anniversary production of Les Miserables, a show that we’ve seen in the West End, and one of the few that I have the soundtrack for downloaded on my music player.
Cast members from several West End shows like Wicked, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Hairspray, Six and others, sang iconic songs from the shows. And I knew the words to pretty much all of them. We’ve had a family tradition for many years now of going to see a West End show during the Christmas period, so have seen a fair few of the offerings.
I do like a good belter of a song, or one that is really catchy and sing-a-long-able. Even if I don’t know the words, I know the tune and was humming, whistling or making some random noises along to (probably to the annoyance of C). There were some spectacular performances that really got the hair on the back of your neck standing up.
The Les Miserables performance was exceptional. They’d make some adjustments to the performance to account for it being at the O2, but nothing of the drama was lost. At the end they had all 4 performers who had played Jean Val Jean singing together, which was actually pretty awesome. To be honest, I can’t remember which one of them played him when we went to see it, without digging the programme out, it was a few years ago now.
The last musical we went to see was Six, the stories of Henry VIII’s wives, factually correct but with a bit of a modern spin on the delivery. It was more like going to a rock concert than a theatre show, especially at the end when they encouraged everyone to get up on the their feet and dance, and get their phones out to record it.
We really have missed out on some spectacular theatre over this last year but I’m pleased that shows like the Musicals: The Greatest Show may have reached a new audience and enthused more of us to partake when we are able.
We do currently have tickets for Sister Act in August, featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Saunders, which was postponed from last year, so fingers cross that goes ahead. I will look forward to visiting the West End again and having a good old sing along.
You know when you know you have something, and you know where you last saw/used it, but for the life of you can’t find it when you need it next? That was me and a set of colouring pens.
Now, we’re not talking anything deep and philosophical or anything like that. We’re talking a set of colouring pens that I wanted, because I wanted to use a different colour, other than blue or black biro, to mark something off so that it was more visible.
I’ve had a set of colouring pens for ages, and I kept them with the squared paper that I used to write out #bellringing methods when I was learning something new. Every bell was assigned its own colour and I would draw out each lead end so I could see when a different place bell started. I’ve kind of moved on from doing that so much these days and use other methods for learning new methods that seem to work.
The pens however, were last seen with the squared paper, on the pile of books and magazines that are in the cubby hole to the left of where I sit on the sofa. That’s where they’ve always been and had no need to be moved anywhere else.
I have a nice new set up in our study with a new desk, chair, my laptop set up and my Holhem gimble ready and poised, and a nice shiny new stationery holder. The stationery holder currently has my post it notes, my favourite couple of writing pens, a calculator, my business card holder safely ensconced. There’s any empty slot shouting out for something to fill it. The colouring pens would do marvellously, and then they would be at hand for me to mark off things on my events calendar. But where the heck are they?
Having decided to look for said colouring pens two minutes before a video conference meeting was due to start, and not finding them instantly, I sat wondering for a while as the attendees for the meeting arrived. Hmmmph!
Meeting over, I then had several actions as a result and some other things to immediately attend to, so the search for the illusive colouring pens dropped out of my mind for a while. Then I went to sit down in my spot on the sofa and suddenly remembered that I had a mission to accomplish. Find those ruddy colouring pens. They’ve got to be there somewhere.
Books and magazines start to get launched out of the way. They can’t be far. They shouldn’t be anywhere else. They shouldn’t be this far down the heap. After a full on three minutes of frustration, I flopped back in my sofa seat. Grrrr. Where are those blasted pens?
Oh, hang on. There’s a couple of books in the pile that have fallen over. I’ll just put them upright again. Oh, and hallelujah! There are the prodigal pens. Hiding in the blackness of under the small coffee table that nestles amongst all these books and magazines. Hoorah!
I happily skip (well, more like lumber) off back to the study, tip the pens out of their zipped, plastic casing and decide upon which colour to use as my marker. Then, rather satisfyingly, plop them all into the waiting vacant slot in my stationery holder. Having used the red pen to mark off my events calendar, I add that to the collection, then sit back to admire my handy work.
Today was an epic day of activity for me on Ringing Room. This time of year we would ordinarily be #bellringing with a group of friends that we meet up with twice a year. Without being able to meet up for real we decided to try holding a virtual tower grab through the wonders of Ringing Room. On Saturday we had five towers to log in and out of that virtually had us travelling from Oxfordshire to Essex and back again. There are more towers on Sunday from Essex, Portsmouth and Nottingham. We may also try some quarter peals on Sunday morning as well.
So having spent an hour and a half in and out of various towers ringing all sorts of random methods, I then had a Cast of 1000 session for an hour and a half, where I was one of the students practicing spliced Cambridge, Yorkshire and Superlative Surprise Major, and some Lessness and Bristol Surprise Major.
Bearing in mind I’m nursing a stinking cold now as well, my brain was well and truly fried by the end of it. There was very little time between my Cast of 1000 ringing and the evening social Zoom event as part of the ringing weekend, so we cheated and C grabbed a chinese takeaway whilst I was ringing. Just about had enough time to eat it before logging back in to Zoom again.
There were nearly 20 of us on a Zoom chat, catching up as we missed out on the summer tour. We had a short business meeting as well just to think about plans for the year ahead, although its still unlikely that we’ll be able to have the summer tour this year either.
Its quite marvellous how we are all able to continue to ring and meet up with with people, albeit virtually.
Today was my first day back on the hospital site for 3 weeks. I was a little apprehensive about it I’ll be honest. Not particularly about being back at work after a week’s annual leave, but being on site, where there are people, lots of people and patients, lots of patients. I think I was more apprehensive about that than the fact that I actually had to go and sit in my old office to cover for my number two whilst she’s on annual leave, which meant being back with the team that I moved on from just over a month ago.
I went straight to my old office, and set up my laptop and settled back into the smells and sounds that are along that corridor. Then I went in to the main office where everyone else is and said hello. There were a few comments like “where have you been?” but some nice enquiries about how I was getting on in my secondment role. I asked after each of them and how they were getting on generally, and explained that I’d been sitting in my old office for a couple of days whilst V was on annual leave, so if there was anything they needed, to just shout. To be honest, they know what they are doing and are quite capable of getting on with it but every now and then someone throws a curve ball that puts things out of kilter so I was just here to make sure that they were ok. They don’t need me, and that’s fine.
I had occasion to walk through the hospital site where nothing much seemed to have changed since I was last here. Although there was the vaccine hub outside and new tented waiting area. There were fewer people wandering around, only people that absolutely should be here are being allowed in the front door.
At lunchtime I went for what used to be my usual walk around the perimetre of the hospital site. Sometimes that walk became a bit of a chore, doing it because I felt I ought to do some exercise, but also rather boring as you can’t go very far in half an hour. Today, it almost seemed like a brand new walk. The season has been marching on and buds are starting to sprout as the first throws of spring are imminent.
The sights and sounds of a busy hospital go on, with or without you. It was quite reassuring that there was some familiarity about it, even if it did feel a bit odd being here.
Cheating somewhat I know, but that’s how I remember Double Norwich Court Bob Major, by reciting First, Treble Bob, Near, Full, Far, Repeat. The purists amongst ringers will probably tell me that’s absolutely heinous, but it works for me.
I’ve never really been able to learn methods the “right way”. When I first started to learn methods, some 39 years ago, I would usually be presented with a table with 3 columns, the work of the bell, what happens at a bob and what happens next. No explaination. No mention of place bells, no clues to the method construction. I just learnt the work by rote. That’s just how it was done where we were. The locals didn’t know any different, so they couldn’t teach any different.
Now, fast forward many, many years and I’m trying to learn more complex methods and even, on the rare occasion trying to splice a few of them, and I really struggle. When I learn a new method I try my hardest to learn the start of each place bell but I don’t seem to be able to break it up that way. I learn the whole of the blue line by sort of rythmically reciting the piece of work. Given that generally I tend to ring round the front to middle bells (depending on how many), I have no idea what the back bells ststart with. I look at the work of the 2 and that, to me, is where the methods starts. When I ring the same method from a different bell, it’s like learning a whole new method all over again, although by the time I get to what I can actually recognise as where the 2nd starts, I can relax a bit. This does make it rather difficult to be able to just join in on any bell, or to ring on higher numbers as trying to recite a whole blue line can be difficult to remember.
This is probably the biggest thing that sets me back with ringing.
Not so long ago, I was about to participate in a virtual #bellringing session and the instructions were sent through via email and said that the other learner in my session wanted to practice splicing all the right place methods. I had absolutely no idea what that meant. When someone says to me that I’m (insert bell number of your choice here) place bell, they may as well be talking Martian in all but the very basic of methods.
Now, I’m a grown up, and you could argue that I should be able to go away and find out these things for myself and try to learn and understand what all this jargon means. I’ve tried. I’ve picked up books that claim to explain how to learn methods and within about a paragraph or two, I’ve switched off. Maybe I’m just not being receptive enough to the information that is being presented to me. Maybe it’s my own self-sabotage that says that I’ll never understand it anyway, so why bother trying. I’ve tried writing methods out, by place bells, to break them down to their constituent parts, but once the blue line “clicks” it all merges in to one long line and I have a job undoing it all again.
There are some methods that I can now recognise certain place bells, but that’s only because I’ve been ringing those methods for a very long time, and had the opportuntity to ring them from different bells often enough. However, as someone who can easily ring Cambridge Surprise Major, Royal and Maximus, I have no idea what any of the bells above 6th place does to start with. If I were to ring one of those bells, I would need to learn its start all over again and get to a place, or a pattern, in the method that I was familiar with.
For where I am in my ringing career right now, using cheats like First, Treble Bob, Near, Full, Far, Repeat for Double Norwich, and Two and a Penny, One and Tuppence for Erin works, but I guess I’ll have to put more effort in if I’m ever going to crack splicing the Standard Eight!
We needed to drop some documentation off to a friend for their signatures so decided to use it as an opportunity for our daily exercise walk. They live about 2 miles away, so it wasn’t going to be too hard to walk there and back. In fact we’ve done it several times, especially last year.
Having looked at the weather forecast for the week ahead it was declared that today would be the better day to do that.
We start by walking into town, then taking the footpath round the back of the University campus. This takes you northwards along the river and up through a park before joining the housing estate where our friends live.
As we’ve walked this route many times over the last 10 months we’ve seen the landscape change. We’ve seen it through spring and summer and autumn and now winter.
The river rises with the rain fall and floods the surrounding fields, then it recedes to reveal dried out earth in the heat of summer. The trees bud, leaf and become home to wildlife, then shed to reveal the abandoned birds nests.
The number of people we pass fluctuates with the seasons. Everyone and his mother was out in the summer. You ran the risk of being run over by errant cyclists who seem to think they own the footpath. Children who have no idea how to walk in straight lines don’t seem to get out of the way whichever side of the path you walk on. And dogs. Dogs on leads, dogs on the loose, dogs walking calmly, dogs getting hysterical at the thought the ball might get thrown any second now. Dogs that want to come and say hello, and dogs who look at you for help as this is the eleventybillionth walk they’ve been on today.
Only the die hards venture out in the winter time. Everyone wrapped up in hat, gloves and scarf. Breath visible in the cold nip of air. Hardly any birdsong. Everyone walking with more sense of urgency to get back home in the warm.
We get to our friends but of course we can’t go in. We weren’t even going to stop, just push an envelope with the documents to sign through the letterbox. They heard the rattle so popped their heads up at the window like meerkats on the lookout. Then came to the front door to say hello. We stood well back at the end of the garden path. We didn’t chat for long as didn’t want them standing on their doorstep, letting all their home’s warmth out. Then we trudged back home.
A slightly different route back for a change. Took us along the side of the railway line back into town. Didn’t see any trains go by. The footpaths were a bit mucky. By now it was getting a bit dark. I was getting a bit warm under all the wrappings. I was ready to get back home and have a nice cup of mint tea.
4.5 miles walked in an hour and a half (including chatting time). That’s my exercise for the day.
We have almost got to the end of all the Christmas food and hampers that we were sent. Friday is weigh in day for me so when I got on the scales for the first time of 2021 I knew that I wasn’t going to like what they told me.
My problem is that I don’t like fruit, of any kind, and I’m not a massive fan of very many types of veg or salad. And who wants salad in winter anyway, right? And I have a sweet tooth. So how on earth am I going to diet? Oh, and I have a desk job and am fundamentally lazy so any kind of exertion is unlikely.
We do kind of follow Slimming World as far as evening meals go, and I do try with breakfasts and lunches too but I’m not very good at counting syns and limiting treats. Quite frankly life, particularly at the moment, is too short.
I’m sure I’ve said it before about understanding the benefits of a healthier lifestyle but why is it easier to get into a habit of bacon rolls for breakfast on a Saturday than it is to eat salad and exercise?
One good reason for not exercising is that I just don’t enjoy it. I certainly don’t like the prospect of group exercise or jumpy about videos. I’ve tried do it yourself yoga and home workouts but they just don’t make me feel any better.
When I was in my early 20s I had a Jane Fonda workout video that I used to do at about 5am before getting on a train to work. I did actually enjoy that and felt energised (ok, I was 30 years younger and 5 stone lighter then which probably helped). Sadly I lent that video to someone and never got it back. I’ve tried looking online to see if it could be reproduced but couldn’t find the right one.
I do try to get out for a walk every day, but now I’m only clocking up an average of 5,000 steps per day. I don’t have to walk to the car anymore or around the site, which all helped clock up some mileage, but my commute only goes from the lounge to the study.
I did start hula hooping during the summer which was fine when I could do it outside but when the weather turned and it started getting darker, it was less tempting and we don’t really have enough space indoors.
I guess like a lot of things its all about determination. If I’m going to do something about my weight and health I really must make more time and effort.
During the first lockdown our daughter came back home to stay for a couple of months whilst she was furloughed. Along with her came at least a dozen pot plants. Sadly her larger ones that had to be left behind didn’t make it.
Whilst she was at ours she decided to do something constructive so undertook a free on line course about houseplants. She really got into it and every time we went for our daily exercise walk she’d talk about various types of plants and where they’re from and best suited etc. And every time we went anywhere near a shop she’d buy another plant. Even from the supermarket when doing the food shopping. Soon our house was getting over run.
For the last couple of years she’s given me plants for birthday, Christmas and Mothering Sunday. They usually come accompanied by a small piece of paper with hand written information about the plant. And some even have names. Howard the aspidistra is a firm favourite along with Monica the Japonica.
For Christmas we couldn’t spend the time together as we’d hoped so she sent our presents directly. Then she was concerned that the main present wouldn’t arrive in time so sent another one by next day delivery. Well, they both arrived in time and of course were both pot plants.
She’d even paid extra for a lovely outer pot for one of them which according to what she’d been told would be big enough. Well of course it wasn’t, but no matter, we can use it for a different plant instead.
Anyway, one of the plants already seems a bit pot bound and is distorting the shape of the pot its in, so we need to repot it.
His nibs decided that we would use our daily exercise to walk to B&Q to get some new pots and more potting compost. Sounds like a good plan. Kill two birds with one stone. It was only 2 degrees outside so I got dressed up in my big winter coat, hat, scarf and gloves.
Started off ok, nice pace, nippy around the edges but not too bad. Now B&Q isn’t exactly around the corner. The round trip there and back was 6.7 miles and took us 2 hours 22 minutes. And on the way back I was carrying the compost.
By the time we’d almost got home, my arms felt like they were going to drop off, my legs were giving up and I was actually now incredibly warm.
Just for a ruddy pot. This plant better like its new home once its been repotted. I for one can’t move now.
This is my next favourite corner of the house. Its in the new office space set up in the study where I can work from home.
Its not my favourite corner because it means I can work from home, but because the photos that were put on to canvas were taken by daughter before she really knew what she was doing with a camera. She went on to study photography at university.
I used to have these on the wall in my office at work but since I don’t currently have an office to myself, and I’m not always there, I didn’t want them getting lost or taken by someone else. I thought they would make something lovely to look at whilst I am working from home and after some inspiration. They also remind me of my favourite person.
If you Google “good things about corners,” you get a plethora of ideas about how to decorate awkward or empty corners, or design ideas for corner shelves. You also get quotes about turning a corner and such like.
I’m not sure that I’ll manage 10 interesting corners in my house as most of them are full of stuff and either untidy or uninteresting. I might have one more before I might have to move on to the next 50 by 50 thing.
Bells, Bakes & Bettering Myself 