A Nice Day Out

My daughter's girlfriend's grandfather has just turned 90.
A party was arranged to celebrate.
He thought it was just going to be a few close relatives but his daughter planned a surprise
 by inviting relatives and friends that he hadn't seen for many years.
I didn't know him and had never met him but he was pleased to meet someone from the old country. 
He's a lovely chap, originally a Londoner from Hackney, spelt with a capital A!

It was held at a winery in the Swan Valley.

A mere 25 minutes from Perth, Swan Valley is a must for your "To visit" list. 
World-class wineries, breweries, distilleries, 
gourmet artisan goods such as chocolatiers, honey producers, ice cream and nougat makers,
handcrafted wares, bustling markets, vibrant studios, 
and superb eateries make for excellent days out.

The birthday boy was thrilled to see so many people turn out to help him celebrate.
We had a great time, and afterwards a few of us went on to another winery to sample a few wines. 
Well you have to don't you!

Polly x 

G'Day

Greetings from Oz 

I'm back in the land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder? 
You better run, you better take cover.

Hands up if you sang that while reading it, I sang it as I typed it!! ha ha

Yes I'm back in my second home with my lovely youngest daughter.
The temp. when I landed was a sunny 26 deg.

We're drinking wine and cooking dinner, 
well my daughter is doing both, 
I'm just drinking!

Polly x 

Remembering

Project Linus

The WI (Women's Institute) support many good causes. My branch of the WI currently supports Project Linus, a volunteer organisation that aims to provide a sense of security and comfort to sick and traumatised babies, children and teenagers through the provision of new home made patchwork quilts and knitted/crocheted blankets.
When I started volunteering at the Salvation Army 6 years ago they had bags of wool that people had donated, all colours, and all weights. We volunteers were asked if we would like to knit 6'' squares which would eventually be made into blankets, but they didn't have a plan for what to do with them after that. I think I have knitted hundreds of them because I was the most ardent knitter, but I don't crochet and I didn't fancy sewing them together. As there were no volunteers to do this the squares just sat in a cupboard in carrier bags. 
Then I joined the WI and asked the Salvation Army if could have them for the Linus Project. They said yes and so I set about crocheting them together. I didn't really know how to do it but after watching a YouTube tutorial I sort of made up my own stitches and began. I became a thing obsessed. 

I started by sorting them into colour piles, then arranging them on the dining room table or my bed, taking photos of the finished layout. There were enough blues to make two blankets. 

Next I did the bright yellow with splashes of green and beige and a multi colour of red, green and yellow wool. I continued matching similar or contrasting colours until I was left with random colours that sort of went together. 

It was enjoyable, and very therapeutic relaxing watching Netflix whilst piecing them together, but after making 11 blankets I don't want to see another square for a very long time!!

Having said that when I finished the last one I felt slightly bereft, I like to have a project on the go, then ...... the Chair of my WI asked if some of us would like to make quilts!! 

Now, over 40 years ago, 48 to be precise, my firstborn daughter arrived and I thought about making an heirloom quilt for her. I had the same idea when my second daughter arrived 2½ years later. The idea popped into my head again when my daughters met their respective partners and again when my grandson was born. I suspect you know where this is going don't you? the idea has always been there but I never acted on it!! So when the chair asked us about making quilts I thought what a good opportunity to learn. 

This was my first one using material gifted and some of my own. I used 36 6" squares. 

Instead of the traditional wadding and a backing material I used fleece, which gives a nice soft comforting feel, and warmth. And instead of nice swirly patterns which show up on the backing I did straight criss-cross lines. 
I was very pleased with my first attempt.

This second one was more difficult. My daughter gave me the material which was left over from a number of her dressmaking projects. Most of it was rayon and silk, difficult to work with and frayed like mad. I used small amounts of super glue on some of the seams, I just hope it stays together! I have since found out that there is a Hi Tack glue that can be used to stop fraying. 

This little pirate cot quilt was made from a couple of pillow cases that one of the WI ladies gave me.
It was quite difficult.  

To get the finished quilt the right size I needed 25 6" squares. I wanted to use as many of the images as possible but some of them were close to each other so it was tricky.  I had to piece a few oddments together. The material also frayed like mad.

I used a pretty pale blue fleece backing and joined them by stitching "in the ditch" 
(where the squares meet).

So the blankets and quilts are ready to go. We are taking them to the Linus co-ordinator this week. 

I'm going to continue making them because I have been given so much material.

A bit of advice at this time of year - don't wash you car a couple of days before bonfire night, 
I did and two days later it was covered in a fine coating of bonfire ash!!

I'm off to Australia at the weekend to visit my youngest daughter. 
I almost forgot to arrange my visa!

Polly x

Gunpowder, Treason And Plot

Who was Guy Fawkes and why have we been celebrating his attempted act of terrorism and treachery for over 400 years? He was born in Yorkshire in 1570. After his Protestant father died his mother married a fervent Catholic and Fawkes converted to Catholicism. He later left for the continent where he fought on the side of Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch reformers. He also tried to get support from Spain for a Catholic uprising in England, without success. It was during his travels that he adopted the name Guido, shortened to Guy.

So why and how did he achieve such notoriety? It could be argued that it started when the Pope of the day failed to recognise King Henry VIII's self-serving reforms on separation and divorce, or with Henry then severing ties with Rome and appointing himself head of the Protestant Church of England. Protestant rule continued and strengthened with the reign of his daughter Queen Elizabeth I. When she died without children her cousin James VI of Scotland became King James I of England. After decades of persecution English Catholics hoped that James would be more tolerant of their religion, his mother after all was Catholic. This was not to be and so 13 men decided that violent action was the only answer.

Under the leadership of Robert Catesby the group drew up plans to blow up the Houses of Parliament hoping to kill the King, maybe the Prince of Wales and the members of Parliament who were making life difficult for the Catholics. They acquired barrels of gunpowder and stored them in a cellar under the House of Lords. Fawkes was tasked with looking after the gunpowder.

But as the group worked on the plot it became clear that innocent people would be hurt or killed, including some people who fought for more rights for Catholics. Some of the plotters started having second thoughts and one of them sent an anonymous letter to his friend, Lord Monteagle warning him to stay away from Parliament on the 5th November. The letter reached the King and his forces made plans to catch the conspirators. In the early hours of November 5th the authorities stormed the cellars and found Fawkes with 36 barrels of gunpowder and fuses. If their plan had succeeded it would have been carnage.

Fawkes was arrested and the gunpowder was removed. Such was the relief that the King was safe bonfires were set alight later that night, thus starting the tradition of bonfire night or Guy Fawkes night. The tradition was added to by the burning of an effigy of Fawkes.

Many years ago children used to collect money to buy fireworks by walking round the streets with a stuffed dummy in a wheelbarrow chanting "Penny for the guy".

Under torture Fawkes identified his co-conspirators. Four were killed attempting to escape. The remaining eight were imprisoned in the Tower of London before being tried and executed for High Treason. They and Fawkes were hanged, drawn and quartered.

The gunpowder plot struck a profound chord for the people of England. Today the reigning monarch only enters Parliament once a year for the State Opening. Prior to the Opening the Yeomen of the Guard search the cellars. 

Remember, remember the 5th of November

gunpowder treason and plot.

I see no reason

why gunpowder treason

should ever be forgot.

Polly x

Halloween

Happy Halloween

Courtesy of http://www.powerpointhintergrund.com/

What To Do With Matilda

Approx 41 years ago I bought Matilda for my youngest daughter

she had a baby roo in her pouch and my daughter loved her,

even when she was grown up she didn't want to part with her.

Then my daughter emigrated to Australia and there just wasn't room for Matilda.

But then my grandson took a liking to Matilda and so she moved into a new home.

Baby roo was lost somewhere in transit.

My grandson is 13 now so Matilda has spent a few years in the attic.

After a tidy up in the attic a few weeks ago I decided that it was time for Matilda to go to another home.

Along with Scooby Doo I took Matilda to a charity shop but .......

they couldn't take her because she didn't have the CE label
declaring that she met the necessary safety requirements.

I had forgotten that toys didn't comply with safety directives all those years ago.

So Matilda came back home and I took her to the tip.

noooooo ........ was I really going to lob her into a mucky rubbish skip, 

no I was going to place her in a container along with other toys and dry household items.

However as I was walking toward said container with Matilda's brown eyes looking up at me 
I had a moment of deja vu, all the happy times my daughter had spent playing with her

all the years she has just "been around"

I couldn't do it, I brought her home. 

So what do I do with her now? 
She's currently wandering around my bedroom.

IT'S JUST A STUFFED TOY, why am I being so sentimental about a stuffed toy?

it's just one of many my daughters had.

I guess toys have history too. 

Have a good weekend

Polly x

A Good Read

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself. But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. 
After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. 
Grief stricken and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. 
His childhood village was haunted by a fierce presence: a tiger who escaped after the zoo was bombed and was befriended by a deaf mute girl who fed him under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for. 

This is a lovely, magical, story. I liked the characters and felt very protective towards the tiger.

A Good Read

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Artist Elaine Risley, in her late fifties is revisiting Toronto for the opening of a retrospective of her work. This rekindles vivid memories of her childhood and teenage years. Her strongest memories are of Cordelia, who was the leader of a trio of girls who were both very cruel and very kind to young Elaine, in ways that tint Elaine's perceptions of relationships and her world, not to mention her art. 
Elaine’s early years were nomadic but not unhappy: the family moved around with her entomologist father. When she was seven, he took a university post and they settled in the Toronto suburbs, but her family was rather eccentric, and she didn't quite fit in, exacerbated by her being a tomboy and the fact she never really had the opportunity to make friends before. As children Elaine and her brother played marbles; Elaine kept a prized cat’s eye marble in her red purse. The cat’s eye later appears as a common motif in her paintings. 

I think Atwood is a very good writer, having a keen sense of human experiences but I sometimes struggle to understand her books. This one I enjoyed and understood it!

Menopause

Menopause, oh dear what a state to find oneself in. Defined as the end of of fertility, it is a natural biological process that occurs most commonly between the ages of 45 and 55. For many women it heralds a new era of relief because they no longer need to worry about pregnancy. But for others it represents a time of misery and discomfort that can last for a year, two or three years or even longer. Years of hot flushes, disrupted sleep, low energy levels, and, for some women, anxiety or feelings of sadness and loss. It has to be the worst design flaw in the history of design flaws, I mean, I get that the child bearing years are over but if I had designed the female body it would just settle into comfortable retirement without all the side effects. WHAT IS THE POINT OF A HOT FLUSH? 
It starts with a few seconds of feeling pleasantly warm, but that pleasant feeling is swiftly followed by the face turning lobster pink and the body temperature gauge spiralling out of control from cold to roasting, resulting in a barely controllable urge to tear off all your clothes and dive into a freezer. I have seen a cartoon of a couple outside their home with snow on the ground. The woman is lying on the middle step of three steps leading up to the front door, the snow has been cleared from the door to where she is and her husband is telling her to get a move on and thaw the third step before her hot flush passes!! That sums it up very well. 
Thank goodness for HRT. I was taking it for 16 years until, in 2008 my doctor persuaded me to come off it. I struggled for the following eighteen months. I tried Red Clover, Soya products, Black Cohash, St John’s Wort, Sage, Ginseng. I even bought a strong magnet that is worn next to the skin, but nothing worked, the hot flushes were relentless. A pink face and perspiration dripping down the side of my face isn’t a good look in any environment, so my doctor agreed to put me back on a very low dose. It keeps the symptoms nicely under control.

Polly x

Birthday Treats

I had a wonderful weekend in Birmingham celebrating my birthday. Earlier this year I decided I wanted to go to the Miniatura Dolls House and Miniatures show at the NEC over the weekend of the 30th Sep and 1st Oct. My daughter then said she would like to come with me, not because she is into miniatures (she had a look around but isn't passionate about them) but because she had thought of a surprise birthday gift to add to the weekend. My youngest daughter and grandson knew what it was and said I would love it, "It is so you" they said. So on Friday we set off. I had been going over all the things I like, my interests, books I read, theatre trips, days out, I just couldn't think what the surprise was. When my grandson was younger I could get him to tell me secrets by tickling him, but now, aged 13 and 6' 2" that doesn't work anymore!! Besides I did like the idea of a complete surprise. As we neared our destination my daughter asked me to close my eyes so as not to see any signs, which I duly did until ...... turning off the main road she said "ok mum you can open your eyes now", we were driving into ........

Oh My Word, I was like a 6 year old, I was so excited, of course what better place to take a chocoholic than Cadbury World. On arrival we were each given a Curly Wurly, a Chrunchie and a Milk Chocolate bar. 
The tour around the factory tells the story of the beginnings of chocolate when the Maya Indians and the Aztecs used it as their special chocolat drink and coca beans as currency.  
Christopher Columbus is said to have brought the first cocoa beans back to Europe but they were ignored in favour of more exciting treasures on board his galleons. 

The Spanish Conquistador Don Hernán Cortés was the first to realise their commercial value. Emperor Montezuma had introduced Cortés to his favourite "chocolat" drink.
The humble cocoa bean was to become the downfall of the Aztecs. In 1520 they perished at the hands of Cortés when the Spanish attacked a peaceful Aztec festival. Montezuma was killed and despite forcing the Spanish out of the city and regaining their strength, the city fell, marking  the end of the Aztec civilisation. Cortes was made Captain General and Governor of Mexico.  When he returned to Spain in 1528, he loaded his galleons with cocoa beans and chocolate drink-making equipment. 
Some of the earliest cocoa makers were apothecaries who became interested because of cocoa's supposed medicinal properties. Apothecaries founded by Fry's of Bristol and Terry's of York, later became well-known names in chocolate production. 

John Cadbury began by dealing in tea and coffee in his Birmingham shop. Mr Cadbury not only provided employment, he bought a substantial amount of land around the factory and created Bourneville which provided housing, a school, a hospital and leisure facilities.
After more freebies - Double Decker bars (mmm love them) we boarded  a lovely little train for a ride through a winter wonderland grotto, and then onto a chocolate making demonstration. More chocolate - chocolate sprinkles in a small cup with a choice of two toppings, we both chose popping candy and mini marshmallows - mmm divine.
It was about this time that my phone rang, it was my surgery saying that my doctor wanted to arrange a telephone call to talk about my cholesterol!! Oh dear, I suspect it is quite high, the last couple of weeks have been a bit stressful, we are having a new kitchen fitted, I don't like upheaval and I have been comfort eating. I will be talking to my doctor on Friday, I know what she is going to say.

Back to the tour. 
This lady was showing us how chocolate was prepared prior to putting into molds. Before mechanisation it was all done by hand and was quite a long process. The liquid had to be cooled by scraping it back and forth over a cold slab, then all air bubbles had to be removed. If it isn't prepared properly the chocolate will stick to the molds.

Decorating chocolate teapots for sale in the shop

The tour ended with an excellent animated 4D show taking us around the Cadbury site. Sitting in inter-active seats that made you feel you were really moving and wearing 3D glasses it was very realistic. The rollercoaster was so realistic that when it broke and plummeted downwards my daughter closed her eyes! 

All good things must come to an end, our fabulous day ended with a scrumptious cream tea

We couldn't finish it all, they put some of the cakes in a box.

This was my first visit to Birmingham so we drove into the Bullring to have a look around.

By the time we got back to our hotel we were ready to polish off the cakes with a lovely cup of tea. 

Saturday was the day of the miniature show. 

I wasn't disappointed but it wasn't as big as I had expected it to be, 

but there were still lots of lovely miniatures.

A retro 1960's house

I am in awe of anyone who creates 1/24th scale

This diorama was truly exquisite

The terraced houses at the back were made from tough cardboard document boxes, 

with just the fronts decorated and holes cut out for the doors and windows

How clever

Sit in the park and watch the world go by

or have fun on the beach

Isn't it all absolutely gorgeous

I always ask if I can take photos and most people say yes. 

This lady said yes if I would put a donation into her Air Ambulance tin, 

which I thought was a very good idea.

I have heard of people taking photos and then passing the work of as their own.

I didn't find the bathroom or kitchen furniture I want but I did buy another lovely chandelier

this one is for the library.

I'm waiting for the call to tell me how bad my cholesterol is :-(

Hope you have a good weekend

Polly x