The first of a new show X is hosting – 4 critics of various media – very good – nice and relaxed and unjolly. He looks so much better now he’s abandoned his toupee and has short back and sides (and no top!)
We were having an ice cream cone and my crown came off my front tooth – I looked v. nasty – praise be my dentist was kind and fitted me in next morning. He’s now away for 3 months – so I hope it lasts that long. I don’t like him and don’t think he’s all that good at finding holes – I actually have to tell him – but he made such an excellent half plate for X, I feel I must stay with him in case I need one (sad day that will be!)
We thought she’d be staying a night or weekend but found she’d planned a 2 week visit. She’s an amazing person actually – she must be 76-ish – absolutely exhausted us. She’s evidently a graduate from Reading, horticulturist, violinist and pianist – this came out bit-bit only. She also had a motorbike back in the 1920’s when it must have been quite amazing for a woman. It was rather sad actually as I think her visit to her son was not a success – I don’t think they got on and living alone she talks non-stop and knows it but can’t stop!
I have had my hair all cut off – never before has it been shorter than X’s and completely but completely straight and grey – I had second trim yesterday and felt so self-conscious I wouldn’t go out in the evening and feel I should get a wig. It’s the first time in 43 years I‘ve had straight hair.
I fear Mrs. X has misguidedly worked madly to give family all the things they didn’t have. I think they’ve all had anything they wanted and they had to go to town to potter round the shops the first Saturday home as there were definite withdrawal symptoms.
We could weep for you over the flat – are they all as delayed as this, or did you just happen to hit an exceptionally bad scheme? I don’t wonder you’ve taken to drink-making and window-sill forestry. The former for its near-immediate relief and the latter to lengthen your time perspectives!
The man came to cut the hole in the roof of the dining room and it has certainly vastly improved the room. It was a threatening morning and sure enough, when he had got the old tin off and was just arranging the first sheet of plastic, up came a squall and blew the other sheet out of reach against the chimney and knocked his ladder half down into the bargain. So I had to hop up and help hold things down until he got them screwed. Even then it couldn’t be finished with the second sheet of plastic inside as in the process of removing the soft-board batts insulation etc. there appeared a large electric wire diagonally across the hole. So an electrician had to come to fix a couple of junction boxes on the rafter at the side of the hole.
We’ve had the power put on our section. I would have had the water put on too but when I applied to the Council I was told I couldn’t have water connected until I had a building permit. When I said that seemed rather unjust as I was paying a water rate the man said, ‘Yes, but that’s the rules’.
God speaks
We were so taken with the beauty of the patch all over again that we started talking about seeing the Lockwood man to discover the current price of houses and I spent two wakeful but happy hours planning all the things I would grow until the good Lord suddenly said in a loud voice, ‘This is very foolish – if you could do all that now you certainly couldn’t for more than two or three years, and what about all the other things you want to do?’ – so I stopped planning and went to sleep!
We had a couple of men here yesterday renewing the guttering of the house (known in the Yellow Pages as Spouting – a term which foxed me for quite a time when I was looking for them). They got it done in a day which was quick, and hopefully they have made a good job of it though it hasn’t rained enough yet to put it to the test. I had hoped that the copper which they were taking down would be so valuable that the whole thing would more or less be paid for, but no such luck. The estimate for the copper was only about $100, though the price per kilo was quoted as $2.80. I didn’t manage to get hold of an odd foot of the stuff to weigh it and work out whether I was being swindled, but in any case it would have been difficult to work out how much the copper weighed and how much the paint on it!
There is a funny little room with no windows – I think the previous owner built it on as an extra space for his opossum skins to hang and dry out – which is going to be easily adaptable a a darkroom with very little trouble – and I’ve managed to pinch the electric lead to an outside light which he had for his kennels and we don’t need, to provide the power for it.
They live in a house which we once considered buying (as do a great many people here!) – with a bog of a field next door in which I could quite easily have drowned when I went to look at it in midwinter.
[Re house just sold]
I hope to goodness they enjoy it – it’s going to be a squeeze, I think, with 3 grown sons and a teenage daughter: and outside will be worse since they own a car 3 feet longer than the carport, tow other cars, a small van, a horse float, and 2 horses, besides which he normally brings home the Firestone van which he drives for his job! All that on our hilly and bending drive will cause a few problems of priority on a Monday morning, I fear. But as we have left $9000 with them on mortgage repayable over about 7 years, I trust they are going to enjoy it. Mrs. X certainly didn’t want to contemplate another move, she said.
We had a very pleasant little party for 30 ‘close relatives’ to meet – spoilt by the boyfriend of one bridesmaid who spent the next 24 hours with his arm round the girl and had nothing to offer the party – he was the gate-crasher of all time!
We’re having a Pimps and Prostitutes party. I’ve made a horrible pair of shorts for it: in red shower-proof very shiny material with a black zip and black lace up the sides, to be worn with no panties, tights and black boots and a black blouse tucked into bra straps and a packet of cottonwool in the bra to provide a cleavage! I tried them on the other day and the effect on X was stunning – I hope I’ll be safe!!!
On Saturday we had a really good party at our place – a Christian Passover feast. We didn’t start till 11 p.m. when I got home from the Revue but X had prepared all sorts of Jewish dishes and we had a service and then the food. We had 4 guests. Then at 2.30 we went for a walk in the botanical garden. Lovely.
They entertain madly, which they both enjoy, and I’m glad they seemed to have acquired a lot of musical friends, who are very easy to amuse as they do it themselves!
I don’t think I’ve written since the ball – it was a great success. Everyone dressed up in fantastic costumes and had a fabulous time – one chap dressed as a traffic cop and, I gather, had a wonderful time on the way there and home telling drivers what to do. He ticked off a taxi for double parking, asked 2 people coming out of the pub if they were planning on driving home and actually stopped one couple and asked to see their licences! I bet he enjoyed it.
We had our pre-Christmas-break dinner for our Thursday group – an admirable contributed meal, to which my appointed share was only a green salad (which is of course the one thing we never eat!) However I have now got half the French dressing which I concocted from half the spice jars and bottles in our cupboard left over in the frig so some time I shall have to buy another lettuce, to use it up. I made two bowls full and it all went so I suppose it got a pass mark.
salad dressing
The Xs came to dinner and bridge – we don’t work on the same channel and he and I usually clash as we have quite different ideas about what’s funny. But they play bridge much like us and it was pleasant.
At our dinner party after a detailed discussion at dinner on birth control (X had just come back from a vast conference in the Philippines of it – he was asked to go by the Government and report to them – they’ve evidently had incredible results – all by blackmail and bribery – $50 if you’re sterilised after third sort of thing!!) and of course from there to abortion – at one point she apologised for him and asked if I’d like her to change the conversation!!! – we then got onto what sculpture was going on the front of the new cathedral.
We had a ‘rags to riches’ ball at the college about a week ago. It went really well. It was a do it yourself affair; bring your own grog and a plate and a home-grown band. By way of fancy dress I went in my dinner jacket and bowtie etc on my top half and shorts and holey socks below – it didn’t feel proper at all!
I laughed and laughed at your journey home from the party – obviously the sooner one of you moves the better – I always feel so let down when people aren’t as nice as I thought they were. It’s just as well it wasn’t his shoe I upset the wine in!
We have a strange party in prospect next month – re an elderly Methodist lady. She has been a widow for some years, and last year had a most unfortunate second venture into matrimony. I don’t know what happened, but it lasted only a month or so. Now she is to try once more! – with another elderly Methodist whom they knew in their first marriages.
She came too as we had our wedding-present dinner to X and her new Y. I was so glad that we did it in one of the houses we go to, instead of spending $30 each going to to the pub in the village or somewhere. As it was we had a most splendid meal and could move around to talk more easily. It was a pity that Z was ‘cantankerous’.
Did you know I’d taken up potting fairly seriously? I’m about to embark on buying a wheel. I sold $20 worth of bits at a recent country fair, so I’m getting all inspired to make my fortune!
I had a good time at bridge. I was playing with X (who was our President at the time we were building our rooms, and I was secretary-treasurer). She is much better than me, but I managed to stay awake, and not make too many mistakes in the calling, hopefully. Anyway she congratulated me (with a little too much surprise in her voice to be entirely complimentary) on playing one or two hands brilliantly, so that was all right.
I rashly and regrettably put my name down to do a mask making course, so this Saturday and Sunday was taken up with the first half of that. What a messy do it is – I didn’t enjoy having Vaseline all over my face, then have bits of plaster they use on arm setting etc. stuck all over my face, 4 pieces thick, and the subsequent steps. We continue next weekend and paint and model on our mask taking one of the moods of his characters in the play. [Otherwise described as] For our mask making we put masses of glycerine all over our faces then stuck 2”x2” patches of gauze all over our faces, then the glue and more gauze and let it dry. Mine was far too wet and had to be dried with a hair dryer before it could be lifted off. One of the men has written a play for about 5 or 6 people and all the masks they use through life, and is hoping we will produce ones he can use, on a stick I suppose, to follow it through. I hope it all comes to something – it’s booked to be shown at several different places later in the year.
Mask making
I’ve joined X’s adult drama group – we went this week – only about 8 of us and great fun. He reduced us all to one level by making us hop round holding one foot and pushing imaginary things about, then gave us speeches, poems etc. to read on a stage complete with mike and recorder – rather good agony as everyone was asked to criticise afterwards. He most amicably chopped us all down to size and I wish I’d ‘had a go’ half a century back!
I am sending this in an envelope so as to enclose three of the pictures which I managed to take at X’s. I managed to make these last week before we went away, by putting one of the camp tables up in my shower, and propping the enlarger on top of the loo – not very comfortable but my darkroom has really worked its way to the top of my list of jobs now, apart of course from the spring work in the garden which is just beginning, and preparation for three meetings of various sorts and a two day conference all of which are due to take place in the next fortnight!
I don’t think I told you I’d knitted a long cardigan for myself on my machine. Apart from the fact it took some 2 weeks with several undoings, not one and a half hours the women in the advertisements say so gaily, and it doesn’t match a think I’ve got, I suppose it’s a success!
My table in the sitting room is covered with all the papers re my father’s forebears, then my ironing is at the ready and the latest Gibbons stamp catalogue has come from the library and so I’m catching up on sticking in the ones I’ve got but didn’t before know the date of issue – and then… my playroom is covered with bits of polystyrene and models galore – rejoice with me – I’ve got the commission!
We got home 6.15 – ate and got to bridge at 7.15. Even X joined me in a whiskey – we must do it again – first I put him into 6 no trumps which shook him – and he made it – he then put me into 7 diamonds which as he’d given our opponents a quite wrong meaning to my initial call – shook me even more. However everything opened and shut and I made it, and we made another small slam we hadn’t called!!
I wonder if a homeopath Dr. would help if t’other can’t – I was put off in Toronto when I went to one with swollen glands and recurring throats and he asked if I found it difficult to keep my feet covered in bed as I was tall! Mad I thought then but really v. sensible.
It doesn’t sound as tho’ your sinus trouble has really cleared up. I went to a German? Dutch specialist and he drilled a hole through the top of one (inside!) of my nostril through to the sinus. I think I found it a relief at the time, but it was about as bad as having miles of stuff put up your nose!
Our electric blow fire finishes me and we seldom use it now – it stirs up all the dust and blows it at you and dries up the air at the same time most cleverly.
I’ve got my hearing aid – X’s altered as he’d used it no more than 3 times. I can’t think why they didn’t cut all the hairs out of his ear, it must have been impossible to put in. I find it very easy and don’t notice it, and have nearly forgotten to take it out before getting in the bath, which is the one thing that kills it. I don’t really want it but I do have the TV louder than other people like to have it.
The dr. found an unexplained ‘black spot’ on his retina. He told me he’d never seen anything like it before. As a matter of course X commented that he did often think he saw mist coming out of that eye and sometimes when he looked at the board at school he’d see a word, and when he looked again it had ‘changed’.
The mist…
The medical was to check on some swelling in an unmentionable place which our doctor here had thought might be worth having minor surgery for. However the surgeon assured me that as these things go mine had not gone very far and it’s all quite benign – so we decided to let it be for the present.
Unfortunately I got into such a stew about coming in here, getting the kids looked after, etc. I ate back all the weight (+some) that I lost whilst I was ill. Much as I hate to admit it, I think Weight Watchers is the only way for me to go. I just read an article on tension and I seemed to have 3/4 of the symptoms to a greater or lesser degree – so maybe a change to a new outlook on life would be a good thing as ‘1066 and all that’ would say. But how does one change a whole outlook on life? Start by losing weight I suppose!
The Registrar when he had finished his examination started off by saying, ‘Well, I’m glad to say you have nothing untoward growing there’ or words to that effect. I had of course wondered so it was cheering news that he thought it was just old age!
I got a stinker of a cold in the head which lasted most of the week and turned into a loose cough, rather of the graveyard variety, which I still have with me though I am hopefully on the mend.
I’ve had a stiff shoulder: after a time I went X’s doctor who ‘manipulates’ on the side – but he said it was just a strained muscle and gave me a week’s course of pills which he warned me might upset my digestion. They did nothing for the shoulder but were most effective in their side effects which started as they were finished and so far remain in full flight. I shall now have to go back to my own doctor and see if he can give me something for my middle which doesn’t cause any more joints to seize up!
We also asked X what good it was doing for mankind to know about these extraordinary birds which use compost to keep their eggs warm. And there doesn’t seem to be any answer, except ‘It looks good in one’s CV’!
And I suppose it teaches her something about scientific method, which is probably good for her and could be applied later in life to some really useful research.
Compost warms eggs
X phoned the other night to see if we’ll be seeing them over Easter for long enough for her to do one of her psych. tests on them – last time she did this she sat on the stairs outside their bedroom and heard them planning awful things and didn’t tell the fond parents. They weren’t amused!
I must do a little practice on my bass recorder as we have a new player with us who plays a flute and is much better than we are, in that he plays at sight everything we have laboured on for years without getting much better! Still, very good for me to have some incentive to practise, I know quite well it is lack of practice which is why I never get any better, but don’t manage all the same to do it!
The Professor is rather dry but with an obvious interest in the subject and the odd ray of humour: ‘Now to come to another aspect of English; I’m going to write an obscene word on the board. Er… just give me a few minutes to think of one.’!
If you need to put any stamps on letters to us and the Stephenson rocket ones are still about, could you use those? They tell us scrounging is the first thing to learn as a teacher!
This is a new sort of letter which I hope in a moment to illustrate – not done with my word-processing program but with another called ‘gem’ which includes a facility for ‘painting’. One of the problems is that it shows no margins and does not seem to wrap around like the W.P. And another is that I can’t see how to go backwards except with the mouse, which is not very accurate.
No news here re X yet either – he has another gruelling weekend with umpteen interviews – he was told unofficially at 11 p.m. that the ‘assessors felt v. positive about the application’ – I s’pose it could be positively NO but he didn’t take it thus – I fear he’s going to be very hurt if turned down.
I spent two days making a spread sheet on the computer summarising my expenditure for the last two tax years: only to find yesterday evening when I turned it on again to add a bit that the first year has disappeared altogether. It’s maddening: but at least I have one copy printed out to prove that I did do it once! I don’t know why it happens, but think it is something to do with being given the choice, when you start to save the programme [sic] between making a back-up and ‘Over-writing’ which the book says ‘Use with caution’ without explaining why. Or it might be because I thought to save time by making a copy of the first programme and then deleting all the figures to leave the description of what I had spent them on, and then renaming that with a new file name, and filling in year 2’s figures. Perhaps I forgot actually to copy Programme 1 when I had loaded it, so that it was the working copy which I deleted. Anyway it was very annoying, and undermining to my self-confidence!
Also have an arborist coming this week to trim a large maple tree in my backyard which hangs over a rather troublesome neighbour to the East. This woman lives alone with 2 cats and a very belligerent noisy dog. As far as anyone knows she has never worked. Her resident man left her about 4 years ago. She occupies herself by reporting the neighbours to the City at the least opportunity – though I think that now the City people don’t bother to listen to her!!
We both went to have our hearing tested a week or so ago, and I have just ordered a thing to fit in my left ear, which is apparently worse than the other. It remains to be seen whether it is going to help, but I do find that I have to ask X to repeat herself more often than she asks me – though (privately, of course) I think that that is because she is so deaf that she keeps the radio on too loud which interferes with my hearing her the first time!!
Have you heard X has remarried? A doctor 2 years widowed – I hope he’s a better bet than her first disaster – he sounds nice, with a mind of his own, as he proposed after they’d known each other 3 weeks.
He’s about X’s age – his wife suddenly upped and ran off with a friend of theirs about 2 years ago – so he’s married a charming widow (twice widowed) of about 60 and they appear to be enthralled with each other and madly happy!
She tells me his sister- who we knew and her husband, a solid little solicitor whom I liked, but X made disparaging noises about – have separated – 4 young too – tho’ I s’pose the twins must be 16 now.
X gave us a gorgeous lunch today at the hotel. It was beautifully and lavishly presented and as [partner] said coming in, ‘I’m having a holiday. No lunch to get and I ate so much that I shan’t have to give you much for supper’!
Look after yourself – I sometimes wish you had someone to look after you – but I doubt if you’d let them!
X still lives there and still happily married to the rich old man who was a great friend of Y.
She’ll probably end up getting a brilliant degree and marrying this vicar bloke or someone similar! She says there’s nothing but friendship between her and this ‘wotsisname’ but X seems to think otherwise. We shall have to wait and see.
He said his wife went back to UK for a holiday and took $3000 with her and so liked being home and everything was so much cheaper she’d put down a payment on a house and bought a coloured TV and he was now going back too!!
I agree with you, I think he’s a honey, not a ball of fire, but then he was regular Army!! He’s always been the same, and far too nice for X in my opinion.
I was fed up with X – he’s really been smoking much less lately but he must have had 8 in the evening even when I demurred politely. It’s difficult as if I make him mad he’ll just be foul and that makes her asthma worse.
She was difficult to make progress with. You couldn’t see her face as she wore a lot of make-up; she hardly said a word the whole time, and it was very difficult to prise X away from her – he was being super-protective the whole time. They did not appear to talk even to each other very much – so it’s very difficult to form any opinion about the whole affair. It must have been very terrifying for her – rather like being thrown into a tankful of piranha fish I should think.
Meeting the piranhas
In company they appear to be quite close and equitable, but I’m afraid X does not get much joy out of his marriage, and the peace is only maintained by a good deal of self-control on his part just refusing to get upset by her more pathological traits.
I went up to see her that afternoon and discovered that X (her husband) had gone to sleep on her bed, a state in which he remained the whole half-hour or so that I was there. I think he must be very difficult to live with, because is he manic depressive, and liable not to take his pills into the bargain.
They have a son who married 3 years ago and went off the rails a few months later departing with an ex-girlfriend and leaving his wife in an advanced state of pregnancy. This largely I think through sheer immaturity: he was probably finding it difficult to make ends meet. Anyway he came back and his wife forgave him (one up for Rome – she’s an R.C.) and the whole family moved to a 30 acre patch to grow vegetables.
I’d have been v. frightened if I’d had X’s hoax phone call, but what a disaster shooting herself.
We had to go to the new house because a couple of young trees we’d ordered had turned up and needed planting. The rain got steadily heavier. We spun out the journey having lunch and saying hopefully that it was getting lighter. But eventually it could be deferred no longer so I donned my shower-proof mac and dug the holes, drove in stakes and spread roots and applied manure and filled in – apart from a few minutes when the rain changed to sleet and I cowered behind a bush – while X sat in the car morally supporting. We drove to Woolworth’s and bought a bright orange towel to dry my hair – and drape over my de-trousered legs while X drove home. But I kept them (the trousers) round my ankles just in case she had an accident and I needed them in a hurry!
orange towel for modesty
X phoned t’other night to cheer us with the news that the sewage is coming up through the front lawn at the house! It’s time it was pumped out – so we hope it’s just that and the Jehovah’s Witness hasn’t misled us – Y was full of praise for his uprightness (?!) so we hope for the best.
We had great manoeuvres yesterday getting the van out from its ‘hard standing’ as I had to take it for a warrant of fitness test. Putting it back is easier being downhill – except that at one critical moment the jockey wheel fell out having been unscrewed too far and I was left holding the front up until X could put it back!
On the whole the general impression of this Christmas has been almost completely secular, spurred on by that fat chap in red urging everyone to make it a ‘cracker Christmas’ by spending more than they can afford. A bit sad, really, and I suppose it is no surprise that the news this morning is dominated by the number of children in hospital as the result of drink-inspired ‘domestics’.
I set to and tidied up the rhubarb and this afternoon put some on to cook – come an hour later there was a suspicious smell – it must know I don’t really like it!!
The FIRST time I took it out going round the bay the gear lever came out in my hand, very NARSTY- fortunately it freewheeled round the corner and to the curb before stopping. However the firm was most efficient and have replaced the gear lever with a new one. Plus the light system for the dashboard that fell to pieces on X’s feet (glad that wasn’t my own effort too!) and now we hope for the best.
I daren’t try and hang any more paintings – I was fixing something in my glass-room and getting down I found my standing leg gave way and me and chair fell in a heap on the concrete floor – felt sure I must have broken something, but praise be only more bruises.
Apologies if my typing takes a sudden dive like that at intervals. One of the Shift controls has broken and although I have got used to using the other, the broken one can’t actually be removed and every now and then jiggles itself in play in that irritating way. As my machine is now twenty-five years old and Swedish to begin with, and long out of production I gather, there is not much to be done.
Far worse is Old Jordans which was called the Hostel was turned into a conference centre and then became a hotel and has now gone seriously bankrupt and the bank is insisting on them paying up a very large loan. It’s on the open market for sale but it has so many restrictions on its use that only a charity could buy it. Luckily George Fox lived there (?) and William Penn who is buried in the graveyard. So Pennsylvania will probably come to the rescue. It sounds like the wrath of God!
X had a couple we hadn’t met coming to tea today. I got held up gardening in the morning and had to dash out to get my glasses in the afternoon. I trod on one pair and dented the other ones when I fell over so was in a rush – and did everything wrong; the biscuits didn’t look right, the cake leaked through the moveable bottom all over the oven and I forgot to put the lemon it it – so it’s so dull I didn’t produce it today, I ran out of icing sugar icing some Russian Squares then this morning I did shortbread and dropped scones and …’no, I won’t eat anything, I’m on a diet’!!
Did I tell you that I ran into a rock which had fallen off the bank at the sharp bend which is called ‘the devil’s elbow’? The car bounced a foot into the air, and I discovered that it had a hole in the gearbox, and the gears were not connecting any more. We had so many things on this week, it seemed, that I had to hire a car to keep us going – which was expensive, and perhaps not entirely necessary, because now the hire car has gone back and Bill the local garage man has made ours work and says it should be OK over Easter. He had ordered and obtained a secondhand gearbox as required by the insurance assessor, but when it came yesterday it was the wrong shape and didn’t fit. Maddening. So he took a large hammer to ours, and apart from the fact that the gear lever nearly runs into the passenger seat before it goes into first and second, it seems to work nicely! Knowing when and how to take a hammer to it is a great art in these days of ultra-complicated motors!
Poor X. I know what a mess it can make leaving the cap off the oil, having done it once myself. But over £100 is certainly adding insult to injury.
The ancient Mini sounded a very questionable convenience from the garage, especially after I had looked up ‘HGV’ in my dictionary to appreciate the horrors of finding yourself in front of it with no power. I hate it when one hears the hiss of brakes behind one, and finds the mirror completely occupied with a Mercedes symbol or whatever, sitting a yard or two behind ones back bumper.
It worries me that you find it easy to go to sleep in the bath, having had the experience of not being able to get out and fearing the same for you with no one to shout for. Perhaps you need the equivalent of tramways ‘dead man’s handle’ which you have to hang onto on pain of a shattering bell if you loosen your grip. That ought to stop you going to sleep.
I got ‘Reflex’ from the library, and enjoyed it and since then have read another of Francis’ books, called ‘Risk’ which I also enjoyed. There didn’t when I looked that time seem to be any others of his on the shelves. Anyway, I must ration myself – the library obviously regard them as second class literature since they charge for them – 30 cents a time, superannuitants 15c. I am intrigued to know by what standards they decide which shall be rental books, and which free. I suppose that John Wyndham for instance (who is free) has a serious idea underlying most of his writing, as Neville Shute (also free) often did – but then quite a good case could be made for Dick Francis as a ‘serious’ novelist portraying psychological development or something, and not merely as a writer of thrillers.
We went to see X’s play. It got an incredible write-up for a 7-man show in a really scruffy little theatre. Only 2 people mentioned by name were the nun who is on the stage all the time and X who is on 99% of the time: ‘Young X was simply splendid in his unflappable arrogance.’ He had to embark on Ave Maria without so much as a tuning fork by himself – he seems to have managed not to get cocky about it.
The wind has resolutely refused to blow enough to sail my new little Giggle. We drifted about for an hour and I failed to make any headway to clear the rocks at each side of the little bay we had launched in – but just enough to drift me backwards onto a couple of motorboats! However a man and a small girl in an aluminium dinghy offer to tow me clear – which saved me getting the sail down to row myself. Ignominious but useful!
We’re being just so lazy you wouldn’t believe it. Can you imagine us having a cup of tea in bed and playing trial hands of bridge?!
I’ve gone a trifle mad this week and bought a knitting machine – the one thing I’ve never wanted but I’ve been looking for a jersey for months – all mine I brought out have collapsed – and when I asked the woman in the meat shop where she got hers she told me she made it on a k. machine and swore by them and told me the kind she’d just got and I saw a 4 month old one advertised at nearly half price – the woman had got a big commercial one and couldn’t spare the time to work two tho’ the one I bought takes double knit and the big one won’t. It will pay for itself with about 6 jerseys. I also bought 56 lbs of clay so I can try this cold cast bronze lark – tho’ it sounds vastly complicated. I’ve got a book all about it from London. In fact they sent me two by mistake but I fear that won’t make it twice as easy. Just off to buy my first wool, feeling vaguely guilty as I’ve got a shirt for X ready to cut out and still about 30 yds of material – quite apart from the clay – I think I’ll get 1/4 ox and box of beans and go into house arrest for a year – lovely!!
We did several sketches on the holiday – she working with water colour and me with the new crayons she gave me, which you subsequently paint over with water rather like a magic painting book to produce what looks like a watercolour! You can if necessary add another layer and repeat the process to change the colour (since it’s not easy without more practice to guess what a first mixture of crayons will produce). As always the difficulty seems to be to produce lifelike greens, toning down the rather violent ones in the box. Our last sketch was of an old barn up the valley. She was okay in the car but I wanted to be nearer so sat out and got much attacked by those horrid little black flies (which people call sandflies but they are more ‘forest flies’) – which produce lumpy bites the next day and have only just ceased to irritate a week later. I had to do the colouring afterwards at home from very rough notes it got so unendurable. But I was quite pleased in the end with the sketch.
By evening I get at my piles of natural wool – 45 ounces – I bought to make Aran knits for all the grands for Xmas – I’ve done a long sleeved one of immense intricacy for X’s birthday. (I must have been out of my tiny mind – about 3 patterns all going at once.)
I have stopped spinning for the time being to use up an old offcut of canvas web trying to make a small wall hanging with cubes that you see different ways (a la Escher) – but I fear it may not be going to work since the lines are not precise enough – partly because of the difficulty of making a line on a diagonal out of tufts fitted into vertical and horizontal squares; and partly because the wool is about a inch and a half long when slotted in, and wavers about.
Hmm…
I made a pair of mitts for X, out of a black lambskin which I had cured (wool inside) I reckoned she might be glad of them next winter down south – always assuming that she can get into them – I couldn’t get any patterns anywhere locally, and had a guess based on some gardening gloves. I wondered whether I ought to treat the skin with silicone car polish, or something, to make it waterproof, as I have a feeling it may get a bit gooey, like wash leather, in the rain, but eventually decided to chance it. At least the sewing, in special oiled silk, should hang together.
He turned up himself, and spent a whole afternoon hand digging 3 ft deep, starting at the road frontage, and on and on to the link up with the sewage pit, commenting the while that he must have been drunk when he put it in as it was so crooked, and when he was at school his father told him he had to keep at his lessons or he’d end up digging holes all day, and now at 35, having done just that and got University Entrance, here he was, digging holes!
Wednesday 27th. Now there is actually going to be a post out today, the first since last Friday, (things are not what they were in my young days, when the postman used to struggle to our door on his bike, two or three miles from the post office with another two or three to go beyond us on his round, on Christmas morning!) so I must really get this finished at this session!
I thought I would type this morning to show off my nice new nylon ribbon. Of course, having fitted it last night, I noticed that the faint one I was replacing appeared to have been used one way only, and should really have been rewound upsidedown – so I put it back on the spare spool and put it away in my desk drawer – where I then discovered another half-length, which had never been used. So I now have about a year’s supply. I haven’t been able to get a ribbon on the right spool for this typewriter, which is made in Sweden and now 25 years old and always have to rewind the new ones onto the same old spools, which have both had replacement lugs added by me with Araldite to make the reversing apparatus work! Sometimes the ribbons I buy seem longer, and overflow my spools – hence having a half-length one put by.
It sounds a very go-ahead school. Last month they laid on a Victorian day ending with a ‘swep up’ [=grand!] tea at the house of one of parent’s parents – with all the family silver out and some of the parents dressed as maids in frilly hats and aprons. I was able to find some old pictures of my Great-grandmother with the maids in the garden of her house when she first moved into it, new. The kitchen up the back stairs was then the conservatory, and the maids lived and cooked in the back basement. Pretty horrifying really.
Your 2 people who nearly died having been in hosp. goes back to the days the babies had at hospitals died – until it was found the doctors went straight from working on dead bods to producing babies without washing.
Just had a call from the library saying they have ‘A man called Intrepid’ in for me, have you read it? I gather it has references to the set-up I was working for at Woburn Abbey. I can hardly believe I’ve been involved in so many exciting things. I really do mean to write some articles entitled ‘It’s funny I’m so boring’!
Listening to secondhand gramophone records was one of my standard ways of spending Saturday afternoon in my first two years in London – only the place to do it in those days was at Foyle’s in the Charing Cross Road. I can’t remember what they cost – of course they were all 78s and I think you could buy a new 10” for half a crown (remember what that was?!) so I suppose you could get a 10” for a shilling and a 12” for two, or thereabouts.
It is one of the memories connected with Christmas which I have, that there used to arrive a parcel of crystallized fruit every year, sent by Dad’s brother. The ones we were least fond of were the pears, and the firm favourites were the apricots. But if you got more than one of those a year you were definitely cheating!
Filed words 