Mum

Or: please let one of these mostly adult children pass a driving test soon.

"Mum, could we nip over quickly to Boulderworld."

"Now?"

"Is that ok? L (boss) says she needs my bank details."

Mum gets coat.

"Mum, could we nip over quickly to Boulderworld?"

It's 4.30 in the afternoon. We live in a north suburb of the city. Boulderworld is so far on the south edge of Belfast that it's nearly not Belfast at all. In less than an hour all the arterial routes between here and there will be at a nightly standstill. It's 4.30pm and BB starts at 7. My men are at Boulderworld climbing or, in this one's case, working, three nights a week. Tuesday night not being one of them.

"Now?"

"Is that ok? L (boss) says she needs my bank details."

Mum gets coat.

We get there and back before the traffic slows to its nightly standstill. We are home in time for dinner, uniform donning, and BB. We discuss life, the universe, and all things driving. And we see a sunset that isn't visible from the sofa where I can be found under my coat at 4.30 most afternoons.

One day one of these mostly adult children will pass a driving test, and then where will I be?!
 

A weekend

Prince Charming and I had breakfast together this morning (it was still Saturday when I started typing this!) to the sound of Radio 4 while our mostly adult children slept on. It was the start of a good day. When boys emerged, one studied and t'other helped me clear childhood clutter toys. In my head there will be one room completely cleared and completely cleaned each 2022 month. Forward, I suppose, but methinks this first room is going to be greedy for some February!

Not all 'in my head' things come to pass. In a new Meadowplace order, we are realising that these mostly adult children of ours have minds of their own which must be respected. So the blast to the coast after lunch was just the two of us. This is recently new, and we are adjusting! We did nonetheless love breathing in the last of the daylight all the way from Ballintoy to White Park Bay and back. It's not so far, but being in week 4 of a six week ankle recovery time, it's far enough! It transpired over Christmas that we have four front steps and not three. Who knew?

And here is some progress thus far. The sock was doing well until it became clear that I couldn't really go on knitting joyful rounds indefinitely. So now it's stalling. Fortitude needed for the next bit, or just some concentration. Both of which sound like a lot of effort! The second panel of Mum's tree blanket is nearly finished, though. Size 4 clogs for scale. The book is a proof copy of Francis Hagan's latest novel. FH is novelist and poet, psychotherapist and local English teacher... in the school where I work! Leaving for America is a poignant and increasingly teasing tale, written with Shakespearean scope and beauty. I have to read it very slowly. And this chromebook is my chromebook, to paraphrase the Bard himself.

 Can I tell you about the bags? The red one is A4 size which is perfect for the pattern for Trees. It was bought for its size at a craft fair that I must have gone to with my mother in 2002. I only know this because I got it to keep my first antenatal notes in. It hadn't been used since 2004 when it became redundant after the second now mostly adult boy was born.

The little white one, book-sized but also perfect for sock-things, was bought in July 2019 in a gorgeous bookshop in Germany, as you might have guessed. That was our last time out of a UK country (except for the quick drive across The Border that I had to do last Saturday - which was another quite nice day). We were on holiday with three friends and stayed in a centuries old watermill. One of the friends is a German teacher, and she did translate the Nietsche for me. I can't quite remember it now, but maybe you'll work it out!

I do hope that you might be having  a lovely forward-looking weekend, full of breath and joy in whatever makes you smile. I hope she won't mind me quoting it but the hardest working woman I know, who has an enormous heart full of big pain-won faith, said this, crowning my good day, forward...right out the door, to the barn with prayers God will overwhelm you with His blessings this year. This entire year. XO

First Sunday in Advent 2021

Friends, bloggies, countrywomen, I am curled up on the green sofa here feeling deeply deeply grateful for the grace of our year that turns and turns again time after time, bringing us back to the same gentle points of pause. The places where, no matter what that year has brought or wrought or wrangled, you can start again. Happy First Sunday in Advent.

I love November. I say this every year! I love November. It has no agenda for us in our house - no birthdays, no big events, no demands. It has become my time to marvel at the big, bare, bleak skies and just breathe. However - this year I have noticed with awe the colour of it all.

We have had spectacular sunrises and sunsets in this northern part of our northern Ireland. Mind you, maybe we always did and I didn't notice because I wasn't spending as much time down on the shore and beyond. So, here is my rather fanciful idea for the start of my Advent...

I wonder if the vibrant, glowing, sky-illuminating colours of this November's skies could paint all the emotions of the last year - all the joys and all the pain and all the hope and all the persecution. It could all be written on the clouds, laid out, inspected, recognised, declared. And even if some of the beauty was a terrible beauty, too much of a beauty to take in, it was still beautiful.

And haven't the skies been recognised as declarations for so many generations of thinkers? A young man who achieved great things after years tormented and chased and abused could still say, " The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands." (Psalm 19)

The week after Jolly was here I spent a lot of time wondering why I had used the word "command" when I was describing our dusk walk down at the shore. At the time I hesitated over it and couldn't explain to myself why it was nonetheless the only word that I knew I needed to choose. I decided eventually that the closest I could get came from a passage that our assistant minister had talked about earlier in the Autumn. "But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. "

I think that the command for me recently has come from my November skies and I'm taking it as my Advent word this year. I'm going to try to let all those colours of the year settle as I make some attempt to take stock. I'm going to heed the instruction to take "a long thoughtful look" at what is over my head, and in it. I'll declare all those emotions as the skies declare their Creator God, and we'll finish another year together, He and I.

Happy First Sunday in Advent x

(Apologies for my generally depressed and depressing thoughts! It's been a tough old time here, and I do know that I really need to get over it all! And you know that the Bible bits are from Psalm 19 and the Message version of the first chapter of the letter that Paul wrote to early Christians in Rome. And I'm also still sorry for the rubbish pictures from my phone which is still all cracked and still held together with sticky tape!!)

Second weekend in December is the third weekend in Advent

I forgot that last weekend was Hurricane Tree update weekend. It was completely bare at the start of November so it's still waving gloriously naked branches to the thrill of the cold air, and will be doing just that for quite some merry time. We've been doing much the same thing in our swimming group, and will be doing just that for quite some merry time! My house has to go into sELF isolation for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year before a little hospital thing I have to do, so that could be the end of my winter sea adventures - not sure my courage will survive so much de-acclimatisation!

So what I'm doing does still involve as much swimming as I can fit in. Yes, it's really cold now! But the exhilaration is more than worth it. The loving acceptance of this group is pretty huge too. That has quite unexpectedly become as important as the swimming. 

What I'm also doing is being utterly absorbed in the world of sons. Their difficulties at school are myriad this year, and thankfully they are coping valiantly, most of the time. I'm finding that my coping strategies are as simple as they are difficult. Remembering to breathe very deeply at difficult times, making myself get outside to walk, and praying. Also, deliberately finding things in which to rejoice and for which to be thankful. 

I was "chatting" virtually to two very good friends last week about how you can get through most days by just doing the next thing. But, and this is my tenuous link to today's Gaudete Sunday, life is so much better if I can make the next thing, the simplest possible next thing, as beautiful and enjoyable and joyful as I can. And we've had a gorgeous weekend, with lots of simple joys. Gingerbread and candles have dominated today!

So that's what I'm doing in December: swimming for the next two weeks, finding joy in the small things, and praying as thankfully as this small human mind can. Waving my bare branches with as much exhilaration as I can!

Here's the maple that was still so gloriously clothed in at the start of November. What I'm reading, just to keep my little archive is Ali Smith's Winter (have just finished Autumn), the annual Christmas Mystery, a wee Agatha Christie sneeky short story from Mattman's Midwinter Murders anthology when he's not looking, and I'll be escaping into Winter Solstice anytime soon! Getting to the end of the Psalms. I'll miss them.

And what I'm making is still Cushla's Comfort Blanket, though it definitely at least feels like a blanket now. I'll miss it too when it's done! I gave up on the baubles for work colleagues - I'm leaving a box of oranges with a chocolate orange on the staff table instead! And I finally made the two zipped pouches - hoorah! They are all bagged up ready for my Santa run this week. I'm going to deliver everything I need to this week so that we can have our hibernation with all jobs done. 

 I do hope you've all seen our Emmanuel God and his hope, peace and joy in this Advent. And I wish you all great love as our journey to Bethlehem gets closer to its destination. Exciting! And just because our Advent season seems to be all about the videos this year, here's one I was asked to do for church!

Christmas hygge

 At our Hookery Zoom last night (doesn't that have speedy and artisan connotations? Balls of yarn flying with abandon through the cold dark skies) we were making plans for our virtual Christmas party on 23rd December. Which turns out to be the night before the night before Christmas, or Christmas Eve Eve, or Christmas Adam (because Adam came before Eve*) or in fact Little Christmas, if you live in Denmark! Which we don't. Although the joys of Zoom do allow us to be in Newtownabbey and Glasgow all at the same time. 

So, Sun One came along just as I was Googling a nice picture to go alongside the Hookery facebook invitation to our Little Christmas Party (you can see how we love a pun), and to my wonder and astonishment he had never heard of hygge. What have we been doing in this house? Half an hour later, after hundreds of unbearably beautiful Scandi images, he decided that it was a middle-aged woman thing, based loosely on gnomes. I was appalled. Thankfully, as we went through the front door this morning and I declared that no, hygge wasn't a thing like the windowsill tomte or the door wreath, he did manage to grasp the abstract noun idea of a feeling or a lifestyle. Why didn't you just say that last night, he asked. I'm pretty sure I did.

All this to explain why I came across this hygge webpage this afternoon - Christmas hygge being still in the search bar and dinner being not quite ready to be cooked. It is the opening quote that I'm really very struck by this evening:

“I hope you find some time this week to get really, really quiet.  To curl up in a big cozy chair and watch a movie you’ve seen a million times before.  To hug people you love.  To wrap up in a warm blanket and read a good book. To drink hot cocoa from a Christmas mug.  To stand outside in the crisp night air and marvel at the stars. I hope you find the time this week to sit silently in front of your life and contemplate how magical it really is, before we turn the page and greet a New Year.” – Mandy Hale 

What a wonderful thing to stop and sit silently and contemplate the magic of our lives. To find joy in the small things, and the big. And to be thankful. I seem to be spending weeks drifting from one thing to the next, but I'm going to stop now, and sit silently. Just as soon as dinner is cooked...

*All credit to Hookery Miranda for the Christmas Adam. She's very clever!

Preparing for Advent 2020

 Every now and again I go on to Instagram to check in on my sons' virtual worlds! I had a browse this afternoon, pretending to myself that I was putting parenting before dishes and not just surfing the waves of procrastination. One of them had posted a picture of our Christmas tree, stating the location as Lapland, North Pole, and announcing, "Here we go again!" I'm not sure if that was typed in a tone of excitement or resignation, but I'm hoping it was more enthusiastic than prematurely cynical! I'm too afraid to ask him.

Now, I know that we have always been very strict about 1st December being the only acceptable first mention of all things Christmas related. This year, however, we have been switching the lights on for days. I think the whole nation feels the need to be at least bright, if jolly is too ambitious. 

We went ahead with our Preparing for Advent morning on Saturday. We put the usual reflection and cookery on to this youtube playlist, but kind and talented folk also gave us musical and skincare videos, and the schools SU worker for our area made us a video about her work. And then we zoomed. Are you feeling jaded with zoom? I don't do more than one a week usually, so the opportunity to connect is still manageable. I was still amazed by this zoom though. Everyone was so open and honest that it felt as if we nearly were all sitting in our circle, listening supportively. It was such a blessing. 

We're not trying to find new ways to do many other traditional things at all. We are going to take a year off planning and parties and panic, and sit as quietly and attentively as we can in this Advent journey to a Covid Christmas. We're grateful for the hope of a vaccine that could mean that it will be just this one bare year. This is the video that I put up. Dedicated to Mary Kathryn, to whom I always mean to send my little Northern Irish accent!

The Enormous Turnip (Pumpkin)

 Everything seems to come down to fairy tales at the minute here! This week I've been remembering one of my very favourite stories from when the strawberries were really very small indeed. We loved the repetition of the list and the final triumph and joy. Why I remembered this one this week was this:

I had promised myself that I would buy the very first pumpkin that I saw this year, not really expecting to find it on the 27th September! Usually they only appear in supermarkets here for Hallowe'en and you need to buy one before they all sell out. But they are never quite as beautiful, or as huge, as this sublime specimen! This is the most wonderful pumpkin I have ever had. It is hugely enormous, and just as perfect. It makes me ridiculously happy. And it was the smallest of the three sitting proudly outside the grocer's shop last Friday!

It has given us lots of pumpkin curry, lots of pumpkin soup and a tray of pumpkin seeds, which I burned. Oops. And you can see from the carving that in fact it could have yielded still more, had I not been worn out from scooping and watching the clock for last night's boy activity taxi run.



Raggedy Elf #2 was fifteen today. When I first started blogging he was pre-school and waddling out the front door of Strawberry Land in his father's too big shoes. I seem to have said, back then in 2009, that I caught a glimpse of what he would be. I think I'm still only cathing glimpses...

Happy Birthday, young man of mine. And happy October to us all. Autumn must surely be the season for which blogging was invented. And in the northern hemisphere, it's here!

Fairy Shoes for Freya

Goodness, is it already September? I didn't ever tell you more about my weekend of Edinburgh blue skies that turned out to be a most blessed time with the outrageously generous Sandra of Thistle Cove Farm. Of course you will have read all the detail over at her place ages ago!

Well, from the blue skies of May to the purple shoes of September. A friend is celebrating the arrival of her first grandchild and, despite the fact that I studiously avoid making baby presents due mainly to my utter ineptitude, I thought I would flick through all my books and rifle through my basket to see if I could "cobble" something together. I found a pattern for booties in Marie-Noelle Bayard's Crochet!, and had just about enough yarn left over from the only other baby present I ever once upon a time made.



I have time for just such a whimsy as this as I am currently at home from work knitting myself together after a very little medical thingummy in August, which may also explain why I found myself back downstairs at 2am the other morning, wide awake and ready to "cobble" a tad. The little shoes, the midnight hour, the need to have not a wrong stitch, all reminded me of one of my favourite Ladybird books from my childhood.



So there I sat feeling somewhere between the cobbling elves and the wife from the storybook. It made me smile that the picture that stands out most in my mind forty years and more since I read and re-read this book is the one of the woman sitting making a little thing. Obviously I had aspirational hopes of crafting greatness even in the bleak days of Northern Ireland in the 70s!







It's all still ineptitude and aspirations of greatness, or at least of not very many wrong stitches, but here are two little fairy shoes for Freya! I know that her grandma, who has neither great big ears nor teeth, will like them! I'm putting a copy of this very edition, re-released by Ladybird in with the shoes. Grandma will like that too!

All of which really just makes me think of my high octane suns, the strawberries for whom I never made a single thing because I just wouldn't have had a notion sixteen years ago. Blogland has everyone looking so very marvellous, so very A*, all the time. My two boys are more raggedy elf than anything else, but they are becoming very wondrous young men, and here in the once upon a time of the Meadowplace it's all about them really, all the time.

FoolsFest

Ages and ages ago we used to take small boys into Belfast every May Day weekend to watch the Festival of Fools. I'm sure I've blogged it before. Street performers doing hilariously and often terrifyingly insane things in every little square around the town. Then strawberries grew up, and expressed opinions. Years passed!

Last weekend, however, we deemed ourselves not quite too cool for a fool, and in we went again! Hoorah. There were fools; there was hilarity; there were tricks; there was food in very trendy watering holes.

Two of the acts we saw were in the square opposite St Anne's Cathedral, which had obviously allowed itself to be filled up with a bit of foolishness for the duration.(1 Corinthians 1:25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.)

Nonetheless I must confess that to see pictures of fools you'll need to insta Jojo, if that is indeed a thing. My camera phone died because I was taking so many photos of the ground in Writers' Square. It will come as no surprise whatsoever to you to learn that the ground in Writers' Square is covered, absolutely covered, in quotes from Northern Irish writers. Had I made this connection? Ever at all? Hey ho no nonny nonny.  Who wrote the poem in the first shot? Answers on a virtual postcard!





Nice pictures

I did promise a nice picture next time, in apology for my political rant. These are lovely memories from July 2010 when the strawberries were small and blond, and I was neither middle-aged nor portly! We were on our way home from Brittany. This is what our minds' eyes see when we think of ND. Love to Paris x

Sunday Night Blues

 

Fraises update: Mattman is in full GCSE swing with his German oral tomorrow und mein Jojo ist in Rom. It's hole in the whole time again and the Irish exile candle is lit! So here are some Sunday night yellows to cheer us all up. Surely Easter will come soon...

Answers on a (virtual) postcard, please!

We live quite close to a suburban university campus, and there is a lane that links the campus to the boys' school. This is most convenient as it allows school pick-ups to happen in the university car park rather than engendering traffic chaos on the dual carriageway that fronts the school. Sometimes one of my boys will come out at the usual time with the other not expected for another hour because of some after-school activity, mostly GCSE revision sessions for Sun 1 these days.

All this to explain why, now and again, I find myself in the campus café, slumped over an enormous cardboard cup of tea listening with attempted enthusiasm to endless tales of schoolboy misadventures. For an hour.

The café is suitably named Einstein and it has exactly this sticker on the wall facing the sofa where I found myself slumped last week. Jo and I looked for it when we got home. He did think it ironic that such a statement on creativity should be displayed in such an utterly empty picture. I was just pleased that he could use a word like ironic...

But the question is: was Einstein right? Far be it from me to consider questioning his scientific genius. No, no, no. I can't even use a word like quantum. I just thought about this quote all the way home, and it still wafts about in the often utterly empty space that is my head. Surely this quote stands on lots and lots of assumptions that we might not actually accept:

Do you have to be intelligent to be creative? And what is intelligence anyway? Can we not all have light-bulb moments, regardless of either our creativity or our intelligence? I think I wholly disagree with the greatest genius of the twentieth century. Hmm. Maybe I just need to drink more university tea!

Happy Mole Day!

I had no idea that 23rd October was Mole Day, until last year. Hitherto I had presumed that moles were found in annoying mounds under your camp bed or somewhere on your person. Having been diplomatically advised against Chemistry as an O-Level choice however, I can still not give you a coherent explanation of this third type of mole. I understand only that it involves atoms and cake-baking competitions in school science departments! A key element (see what I did there?) seems to be remembering the cake-baking competition the night before.


This is one of the reasons why I'm struggling to offer up particularly heart-felt thanks this week. So, with a conscious effort and despite the fact that Jo only started baking (and decorating) his entry at 9pm last night, I am nonetheless grateful for two boys who show such enthusiasm for such things. Mattman came up with this year's idea on this very date last year when Jo didn't get ranked at all!


So, yes, I'm very glad for two boys who like school and moles and taking part enough to weigh and mix and wash and cut until really far too late into the night! I'm grateful for schools who still give our children opportunities to do things other than tests and assessments and target-setting. I'm grateful too for Prince Charming who, despite a ridiculously stressful day at work, could throw off that level of responsibility and get down on the floor with scissors and glue. And I am most extremely grateful, after all that effort and very sore feet at midnight, that the child did get joint second place. Thankfully plans for next year are already afoot/apaw, and thankfully we seem to have agreed that some forward thinking could be useful...


The rest is harder. I seem to have put my own paws into It. When I put my foot in It, It does usually happen for all the same reasons and It does usually come from all the same faults, but this doesn't ever appear to make me wiser or better or just quieter really. So, I am trying to be thankful for people, for opinions, for decisions made for all the right reasons. For faith and trust and the authority of good men.


I'm not succeeding at that level of gratitude though, if I'm honest. I am genuinely grateful for folk who have said nice things about me and made me feel better about myself, but that isn't necessarily where growth lies, is it? Back to the preceding paragraph then! Maybe I should try to be grateful for opportunities to do something different, a bit like the Mole in the Wall. Maybe I should be grateful for an opportunity to practise respect and tolerance and patience and submission. And be very, very grateful for a God in whom I can place my doubts and fears and know that He at least is smiling over me hard.

The Lord your God is with you,

    the Mighty Warrior who saves.

He will take great delight in you;

    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,

    but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Zephaniah 3:17 (918!)

This is the year

This is it. This year I am going to get to 1000 gratitudes. Years after reading Ann Voskamp I am tying up this loose end. You're getting fourteen today and they're all about the boy who is fourteen today: my baby!

847. So glad we got you, Jo!
848. Grateful for your uninhibited, undeterred, unstoppable gift for life,
849. for that energy, that high octane, morning to night, sun-hot burning go!
850. Grateful for your faith that burns hot too,
851. and for the bravery that took you two miles down the road, and light years out of your sub-culture, on your summer team.
852. Amazed that, like your Old Testament name sake, you have been strong and very courageous so many, many times, but especially when a bad thing has come your way every single time Dad had to travel far away this year.
853. Thank you, protecting Lord, that your hand is on this boy and on his life, because if it's going to happen, it happens to this boy.
854. Deeply, viscerally grateful, that as your name implies, you have redeemed me so many times in so many ways.
855. Grateful for how you stand up to me and hold me to account.
856. Grateful that you are the king of the one-liner put-down and that you can cope in the jungle that is school.
857. Grateful that you can bake.
858. Grateful that you can drum. Grateful that you can drum loudly? Hmmm.
859. Grateful that at fourteen you're not embarrassed to hug your mum, in public, in front of friends. I will totally understand when you don't!
860. Grateful that you've made nice friends, and that you know you can fill the house with them. Hospitality is a sign of the Kingdom, and all that. But after a weekend of parties, cake and noise? Let's just get through the week.


Happy birthday, big baby boys everywhere!

Swallows and Russians

It is pitch dark here now by nine at night and there is a crisp, clean beauty to the air, even in the heat of a sunny day like today! September is coming! Thus, two hasty posts before Sunday on "What I did in my Summer Holidays". In preparation for Modern Language GCSEs this coming year, poor Mattman has had to be thinking the same in German and in French.

MK mentioned Swallows and Amazons a little while ago, and I promised pictures of the day we spent on Coniston in July. Gratifyingly at least one son seems to have enjoyed it! Coniston Water is where Arthur Ransome lived with his second, Russian, wife when they returned to England and the Lake District from Revolution. When you take the cruise boat they point out the house where they lived, very close to the shore. I can't believe I didn't get a picture of it- though, given the quality of the next two pictures, that's perhaps not surprising at all.

Beyond the boat the island, for it is an island, is Peel Island, and it is widely accepted as the inspiration for Wild Cat Island in Swallows and Amazons. Ransome and Evgenia were visited at Coniston by Ransome's old flame Dora and her husband Ernest Altounyan. Ransome taught the Altounyan children to sail, and the seeds of the famous literary adventure were sown. The secret harbour of the island may well have been this, and there was a little craft navigating its careful way in as we passed. You'll need to navigate my poor photographic skills just as carefully! Maybe you can just see the rocky outcrop marking the entrance to the inlet...

There's a wonderful article on Ransome's life here, but I'm disappointed firstly that I can't remember the tales of Evgenia's eccentricity that we were told on the sailing, and secondly that nowhere on the Wondrous Wide Web can I find much beyond her jewel-smuggling to fund the Comintern! Ransome was certainly much, much more than a nautical story-teller. Read the article: it's a very exciting tale full of Oscar Wilde, Trotsky, foreign correspondence, and love lost and won! (Much easier to read than S and A. I gave up when I tried to read it with younger boys.)

We had gone to Coniston, not for Swallows and Amazons, but for John Ruskin. His house is here too, higher up from the shore and kept now as a monument to his life and work. I realised when I got there that I had assumed Ruskin to be mainly an art critic whose greatest achievement was his championing of the Pre-Raphaelites; how wrong I was. That will be for another time, but here's his bedroom turret, which I loved.