Now and Then

It must have been about twenty years ago that I was given this mug. Best Mum in the World it says around the rim. It's chipped now, but still sits beside my desk, holding a selection of working tools. A precious relic, even if my sons, then aged about ten and thirteen, slightly marred things by telling me it was from the dogs.
There are other valued relics in a drawer, cards probably made under a certain duress at playgroup and primary school, later cards with entertaining poems and messages:
We promise we will not fight all day
'day' deleted, 'this morning' inserted.
'promise' deleted and 'try not to' inserted.
Flowers hastily felt-tipped over the deletions.
They were wise even in those early years, not making promises that were well-nigh impossible to keep.

In my own childhood Mothering Sunday started off with a damp fistful of celandines artfully arranged in an eggcup, placed on a breakfast tray with lukewarm tea and burned toast, carried gingerly into my parents' bedroom where my mother waited in trepidation for the whole lot to slide into her lap.

These are the things that I remember most vividly; the hand-made things that take effort and time and thought. These things are so compatible with the early traditions, domestic servants being given a bit of a break in the middle of Lent, the opportunity to go home for a quick visit, taking a few flowers along the way.

Later for me came some beautiful bouquets, thoughtfully, expensively sent - and my subsequent protests against commercialisation of a basically lovely old tradition. (But thank you all the same, my sons.)
Later, for my mother too, came more expensive gifts, meals out and other appreciations of her mothering, but after her death I found a ribbon-tied packet of hand-made cards from me, including a graphic depiction of the Titanic:
'Happy Mother's Day Mummy, and I hope you like this boat'.
She obviously did.

So, Happy Mothers' Day to all mothers and mothers-to-be who have yet to appreciate the joys of the hand-made card, the hand-picked flowers and the soggy breakfast tray.
These are the treasures that will out-live the commercialisation.

It's Raining Men.....

I have always believed in a basic equality of the sexes. Both men and women are capable of changing nappies, cooking a meal, driving a car, fitting a plug, earning a living, doing a bit of grouting.
And then my horizon changes.

I need men as I have never needed them previously, but I must immediately qualify that by saying that what I need is the physical strength that men represent.
Whatever happened?
I'm a mere seventy-two years old, and suddenly I have trouble getting the top off a child-proof bottle.

So I face facts and admit that I'm weak, not because I'm female, but because I'm old. I know quite a few men who can't get the top off a child-proof bottle of paracetamol - and they are old too.

I face facts and pay for the tough jobs, like emulsioning ceilings and painting guttering twenty feet up in the air, and I pay men to do them because there are not so many willing and able women.

Then I really have to bite the bullet and pay a lot of money to have a chimney relined. I admit that I am not able to haul a great sinuous length of stainless steel up on to the roof and slot it down the chimney.
Would I ever have been able to do it?
No.
Would I ever have wanted to do it?
Possibly yes, when I was under thirty years of age and could have saved myself a thousand pounds by doing so.
Was I ever capable of doing it?
Almost certainly not. I would have cracked a load of slates and probably fallen off the roof in the attempt. But I just might have considered myself capable.

Now, mellowing into old age, I am becoming prepared to admit my limitations, my slight helplessness, my wimpish femininity.
A geriatric girlie, at last.

Looking Hard

At Christmas my lovely daughter-in-law, knowing me to be a scribbler at all levels, gave me this special sketch book. Entitled 'One Sketch A Day - A Visual Journal', it is exactly that. The space for each day's small sketch is numbered, and there are a year's worth of spaces.
I started on Christmas day, and have drawn a quick sketch every day since. I am determined to complete the year.
I've drawn in the house, in the garden, in the place where I work as a volunteer, at the bus-stop, at the station - anywhere my daily routine has taken me.

I am seeing things differently. I am looking very, very hard at the details of my life, at the complexities of everyday objects, at the miraculous patterns of leaves and twigs, flower buds and fungus. It takes no more than ten minutes a day - maybe fifteen if I indulge in a bit of colouring-in, but in that time I feel my thoughts and vision changing.

Jenny Woolf, in her lovely travel writing, describes 'here' the happy effect of discovering previously unnoticed details in the background of her own photographs. It's easy for this to happen in photography, impossible in drawing.

Things I have spent even ten minutes studying, looking at really really hard are now etched into my visual cortex, so that as I lie in bed at night I can still marvel at the complexity and perfection of a stalk of sprouts. (Fond as I am of spouts, I had not appreciated the way they spiral round their main stem, presumably reacting to changing light. How clever is that?) Oh, the joy of sleeping alone, to be able to lie in peace, conjuring images of sprouts!

The jackdaw shown in the sketch has also appeared in written form in my blog 'here'. A few days ago he posed unwittingly for the time it took me to draw him, becoming increasing irritated by my failure to move and provide food, occasionally stamping his feet and frequently shouting at me. I feel I have him pinned down now, in words and images. I know the way his feet work, and the fact that some of his feathers have frayed ends. He knows that if I am visible, even if immobile for a while, it is worth stamping and shouting, as food will surely come.

I have studied and sketched the elaborate canopy of the railway station, the details of a bridge in the park, lots of architectural fragments, some elaborate Victorian candlesticks tht I've dusted for years but never really looked at, and lots and lots of details of my about-to-burgeon garden.
A great daily exercise.

Uphill Struggle.

Here are my son and daughter-in-law this morning, a glorious morning, plodding steadily up one of the many hills in the beautiful place where I live.
I sat in the sunshine, watching them, realising how closely their efforts resembled my own in recent weeks.
It's been a long, hard and infinitely tiresome plod to get back on line, and I have no intention of adding to the boredom factor by writing about it. I will just say that those 'change your provider with one click' adverts are a little misleading.

So, no blogging since mid-January, because I could only access my neighbour's broadband signal by crouching up against my bedroom window - which is all right for the odd emergency e-mail, but for nothing else.
After several weeks of not blogging I have turned to other writings, revisiting some old, unpublished works which appeared to me new and fresh, almost unremembered. I have become immersed in lengthier writing, and I have a new journal form as well. So I have to think, as all of us do at some stage, why write the blog?

The blog reaches parts that other writings do not; in particular, people whom I have come to regard as friends in cyberland. You know who you are, and I'm really sorry if you thought I had deserted you.
The blog is the most direct form of writing I have used. There are journals which are entirely my own, but over many years there has also been a surpring amount of published work. This has always had an editor between me and any readers, so that I have felt, and still feel at least one step removed from it.
The blog feels permanent, while other published work, even in book form, is essentially ephemeral. Unless the whole system collapses, or someone else manages to wipe out Relatively Retiring it will stay there, perhaps accessible to future grandchildren as yet unthought of (as far as I know).
The blog is intensely personal, and sometimes it is therapeutic. It is probably the one form of public writing which can be carried out in total freedom, although I, like many of us, have attracted trolls, or at least one particularly malicious troll who stopped me in my tracks for a while.

Having stopped, because of trolls or technology, it's not easy to get going again, but like my young folk here today, I will plod on. The pull seems irresistible.

Bored Games (or How Not to Go Minimalist in One Day)

A friend who has an admittedly small collection of books on how to declutter tells me that in order to do it properly you have to completely empty the room.
Easy peasy.
I did that the other day, after Mr T. the Decorator arrived on the doorstep asking if he could bring forward the proposed work on my sitting room. Bring it forward to the next day, he thought, whereas I had been thinking about it sometime in a couple of months, maybe when it was warmer, when the light was stronger, when I could possibly face the upheaval.

So, of course, I said 'Yes'.
And promptly broke all my New Year Non-Resolutions by climbing on a ladder to empty the top shelves of a high ceilinged room.
Down came the board games, the jigsaws deemed impossible, the big old art books of Flemish painters, the catalogues of exhibitions long past, the tattered story-book relics of my childhood with illustrations that I may want to look at again, my father's collection of books on wine (one of my sons might want them) and countless other treasures I haven't seen for years.
The room was emptied in a few hours. Decluttering is easy.

Stuff is dumped on the kitchen table, on the stairs, in the hall, in the study. On the kitchen table sit several clocks, a Victorian desk-set, a collection of cast-iron money boxes, a couple of tea-caddies, a big brass candle-stick, an Edwardian writing cabinet and a box my father made in order to impress my mother when they became engaged.
Do I want to keep them?
Yes. Of course I do, even if the clocks keep different times and chime throughout the night. The brass candlestick was a Christening present, the iron money boxes came from a family foundry.
Important stuff.

In the study is a great cardboard carton of board games, some probably missing essential playing pieces. I will have to check them all.
There's Monopoly.
My experience of Monopoly is that it goes on far too long and brings out the worst in competitive people. A board game that very quickly becomes a bored game for me. Monopoly can go to a charity shop, and so can many of the others, except for Pictionary, which is funny and fast and not very competitive unless you really want it to be.
I look at Escape From Atlantis, complete with its Atlantean Swirler, six each of sharks, sea-monsters, octopuses and dolphins, twelve boats with sails, 37 different plastic sections to build an island, and no less than 48 Atlantean tribesmen in four different colours. The little tribesmen must escape the sinking island and get to the safety of the coral reef, through a sea laced with danger.
Ah, the memories.... of wet afternoons in the caravan when it took half an hour just to set up the board, and less than a second for a frustrated loser to kick the table and collapse the lot.
Atlantis must stay, and Jenga and Scrabble even though I now play Scrabble on-line (anyone want to play?). There are a few other interesting things, when I look again. Othello is good, and someone might fancy Trivial Pursuit again one day.

The carton becomes marginally lighter,
The books, of course, are a different matter. What I will do is look at each one before I decide if it goes back on a shelf in the freshly decorated room or, possibly, to a charity shop.
Possibly.

Then there are the jigsaws. There are a couple by Thomas Kincade, Painter of Light with fiendishly complex villages and harbours full of twinkly lamplight. I do not like to be defeated by a jigsaw, so I might keep them for when the weather is too bad for me to get into the garden.......

All Change

The earth has tilted back towards light, there are snowdrops in the churchyard and the indoor jungle that is my porch bursts into abundant life.
Blackbirds are fighting in the garden about food and potential nesting sites and, presumably, sex. The place is full of birdsong in the mild air. Even in the darkness of evening there is a robin proclaiming his rights.
It feels like a fresh start, this year more than any other I can remember.

I do not do New Year Resolutions, knowing perfectly well that in my own case they don't last until Epiphany. This year there are things I will not do, which include not clambering unaided and unsupervised on the pergola and the shed roof, not treating myself to a chain-saw, not even a small lady-sized one, and (hopefully) not trapping myself in the attic in an otherwise empty house.
Additionally, I will try not to work until I'm dotty with exhaustion, not to watch day-time television, and not to eat anything made of wheat.

There are reasons for this.
In a wonderful coming-together of events coinciding with a new year, all of us, both sons, both their partners and even I have new jobs. Mine is modest but important to me, theirs are exciting and important to other people.
We don't read horoscopes. My older son tells me it's bad luck to do so, but if we had done we would probably have seen the stars lining up in auspicious patterns in the last few weeks. I hope all other Capricorns have had a similarly cheerful start to the year.

Fresh starts are invigorating.
In the depths of the old year I had a rather frightening health scare. It pulled me up very short indeed and made me take stock of many aspects of my life. It made me sort out the paperwork and tidy my knicker drawer.
It makes me appreciate who is really important to me, and to make sure I tell them so - one way or other. It's not easy, in a very English way, to tell people that you love them, so sometimes the approach in oblique and laced with humour - but I think they know.
It makes me appreciate more than ever my home and garden, and the peace and freedom that are there as well as the hard work that both take to maintain. The balance of peace and work is important and the danger is in overdoing the work so that it's hard to appreciate the peace. I must do better, but that is a vague sort of ambition and not a Resolution.
I value the ability to think and work from silence, and this becomes more powerful with time. What, in the early stages of widowhood, could seem like emptiness, now feels full of potential. I never know what I'm going to think or write next!

It makes me appreciate those who read here, and who are kind enough to leave a comments.
So, somewhat belated Happy New Year to you all.

In Appreciation of Sons.

Long ago, younger son reluctantly dressed for a Victorian party at school, his older brother investigating something more interesting beyond the camera's reach.

From before their births these two have stretched me in every possible direction, physically, emotionally, intellectually, financially.
I feel very privileged to have experienced life with them.
They have taught me so much, and taken me to places where I would rather not have gone, as well as to a great many wonderful, enriching places.

From the very beginning they were such distinctive personalities, and as they grew I appreciated more and more their essential differentness from me.

They were always looking outwards, upwards, beyond. Where I was often preoccupied with the next meal, the ironing, the next day at work, the next bit of commissioned writing, they were immersed in the past, in dinosaurs and Vikings, medieval armour and Robin Hood.
Their heroes were truly heroic - Mighty Mouse, who could conquer the world, Superman, Spiderman, ditto. Seemingly innocent creatures with huge hidden skills, the power to transform and to right wrongs, punish the wicked, ensure that good triumphed over evil.

They looked out to the stars, to the limits of space and time. They had duvet covers that were printed to look like the control panels of space ships and their bedroom curtains were emblazoned with silver and gold stars and planets.
Their interests extended under the sea, to the creatures that live in wet darkness, eating each other. Predators were great!
They looked to the future, beyond the horizon, beyond the petty restrictions often imposed by home and school. They knew their world was huge and they wanted to be out there, fully immersed.

My husband was used to peace, time for reflection, studious reading.
I liked the miniature, the delicate. Jane Austen and Barbara Pym were my favourite authors.
They liked things big: dinosaurs, jungles, sharks, whales, earth-moving machinery, waves, mountains, Knickerbocker glories - the bigger the better. For bedtime stories they wanted Hobbits and He-Man, Transformers and King Arthur.
So my husband and I had our horizons widened, deepened, extended in every direction.

I learned about marine biology, astronomy, the effects of zero gravity, geology and so immeasurably much more.
They learned some reasonably good cookery skills and, just before leaving home, how to iron a shirt.
I hope they also learned that they are hugely loved and appreciated.

Happy Christmas to all Mothers and Sons.