Some photos around the house taken today

Tina's March Project

Tina over at Tina's Weightloss Journey has set me the task of taking a picture somewhere around my house to show what it looks like in March, so this afternoon accompanied by Banjo and Rusty -

I set off round the house (not, it has to be said, a very long journey) and noticed that the camellia bushes down the side are starting to flower - Banjo thought I was photographing him of course, he's quite used to it.

Banjo and the Camellia -

spring comes at last to my home in Bristol

This is a view from the street -

My home on the outskirts of Bristol, March 2010,

with Rusty on guard

- and Rusty wasn't taking any chances (on being excluded from the photograph, that is).

Under him on the pillar is my house name - Avonsong - so called after a song written by John about the river Avon, one of many beautiful and catchy tunes from "Clifton Town", an opera he composed some years ago about the Bristol Riots of 1831.  It was staged successfully at the Bristol Old Vic in 1989 (I think I've got the year right).

-oOo-

Photo Finish

- from Lonicera's non-digital archive

Avonsong and the cats in years gone by

Back garden with greenhouse

and camellias in the foreground

Rusty and Banjo in June 2001, when they were 2 months old.

Banjo didn't like those glass grapes, which I adored,

and within a short space of time had learned to

knock them off the windowsill. 

After the second time they were too badly chipped

to display again.  Lesson learned.

-oOo-

When no news is bad news

When you haven’t heard from a bandit blogger in a while, I’ve learned that it’s probably going to be for one of three reasons.  (I’m assuming the bandit is female, because a high proportion of them are – and I can’t speak for men.  Never been able to, come to that…)

It could be that something has happened in her life that has made it too difficult for her to share her news – too busy or too sad, and all you can do is visit her blog every so often waiting for her to come back to life.   (I follow some Chilean blogs, and I was worried for a week or so when they didn’t blog after their terrible recent earthquake.  Such a relief when they returned to cyberspace.)

The second comes from a reluctance to own up - her weight is becalmed and she’d rather blog when she can report on something positive.    

If she’s gone into reverse and is gaining weight, then this is the worst for a bandit.  She lurks in the shadows, reading the other blogs – she’s hooked after all, and wants to know what her virtual friends are up to – but feels increasingly inadequate as she notices they are leaving her behind.  Run to catch up?  No, it was ever thus before being banded – no good at keeping up with the rest of the crowd, that’s why she got into this mess in the first place. 

(If only she just carried on telling us about other aspects of her life which are alright, and understood that bandits can’t afford to be competitive.   To mangle a good old-fashioned saying, there but for the grace of the lapband go they.   Take their band away and they’re as weak a new born kitten as we are.)

For the moment my case is the middle one – I’m drifting, with weight more or less level (ish).  Two weeks ago I had gained a kilo, and Taunton Hospital considered this enough of an emergency to leave me to the tender mercies of the dietician for a good pep talk.  She reassured me that keeping level is not bad anyway, and suggested a food diary.  So in addition to eating the biscuits I shouldn’t be eating (at work – I don’t buy them myself), I’m having to write down in a little notebook that I’m having them, for her to look at and wag her finger next time.  Double punishment.

I draw the line at putting in the calorie values – I did this for years when I was busy zooming up and down in weight… little rows of bright blue A6 sized notebooks lined my windowsill, choc full of lists, recipes, exclamation marks, self-loathing or jubilant comments, my weight written precisely in the top right hand corner of the page, and “P” for ‘period’ every so often – as if that made much of a difference… 

I’ve SO had it with treating the process as a project.  Sorry bandits, I’ve done this for too long, and I find the subject immensely, utterly and crashingly boring - there are so many other topics with which I would rather be occupying my mind.  All I can do is try to follow the main precepts (which I'm clearly not at the moment):  buy wisely, take my time eating, chew thoroughly, stay away from the high calorie foods… and read the other blogs to know I’m not alone.  And of course it’s important to encourage other bloggers – I know well what a difference a good comment can make.

Thank you so much Robin (My Journey into a New World) for your Sunshine Blog award – I will try to deserve it.  I wish I could be more inspirational – but all I can say for now is thank you so much to the followers and blogger friends.  Please keep faith with me and continue to read me from time to time if you can stand it.  I always check out new followers to see what they have to say, and often join their lists of followers.

This I know – and I speak for myself alone:  there’s no point being slim when you’re old.  Please help me be strong, be brave, be resolute.  Before it’s too late.

-oOo-

Photo Finish
– from Lonicera’s non-digital archive
.
Spring, a time of hope and renewal

I took these two at Glastonbury Abbey some years ago.  When the slides were returned from the processor, they were very underexposed and I could barely see the subject. Disappointed, I left them to one side.  I’m so glad I didn’t throw them away, because today thanks to digital technology, I’ve been able to transform them by lightening them, and to observe with surprise that they’re reasonable images.  If only other aspects of my life were as easy.

-oOo-

Post Office Adventures

When you want to send a letter to someone – do you put the stamp in the top righthand corner, and with an air of finality, thump it with your fist, saying to yourself, “right, that’s done, I’ll post it tomorrow and they’ll get it the day after that”?? Well, maybe you shouldn’t take it all for granted.

When I returned from my trip to Argentina last year, I did the usual thing that untidy travellers do – dragged out the presents to distribute, the knickknacks to show off, the dirty clothes to be washed… and then abandoned my half unpacked suitcase in the spare room, to the delight of my cats who are evermore on the hunt for new and exciting places to sleep.

Next I wrote my thank you letters and e-mails - and there were many, for so many people had been extraordinarily kind and accommodating. After that I checked my photographs (for “checked” read “straightened”, and thank you to Photoshop), printed off pictures and consulted my list – oh yes, I’m one of those nerdy list makers – to see who had asked me for a copy of the original book whose translation I had been promoting, who wanted prints of my pictures, who had requested information I didn’t have at the time, and so on.

In due course, and in stages over the following weeks, I had various parcels to post to different locations in Argentina. One Monday morning in mid December two of them started their arduous journey to different addresses in Patagonia, the first of which contained several stoutly wrapped bars of bitter chocolate laced with strong chilli (…I know, me neither…) requested by a 15 year-old friend, Tomi, who couldn’t believe such a thing existed and was keen to try it; the second was a padded envelope for Carlos Espinosa, the journalist who had helped me set up my trip, containing a DVD with several hundred pictures taken during my visit, and a Spanish translation of one of the ‘Just William’ books by Richmal Crompton, the series written between the wars about the adventures of an impish English boy aged 11 and his gang. This richly comical saga for all ages had been Carlos’ favourite as a boy, and I was delighted to have found one of them on the internet.

My two parcels disappeared into the maw of the international postal office system and perhaps got to Buenos Aires when this country’s revered institution was having a particularly bad week, or perhaps one of its workers denied time off at Christmas – but when the new year came and went with no sign of them I started to worry that the jaundiced employee was both a chocoholic and a bookworm.

On 13th January Carlos e-mailed me to say he had received two (!) parcels from me: one contained the book, with a written note advising that a second parcel containing photos was on its way, and the other, much larger, was very torn and shrink-wrapped, with a polite note from the national post office, part of which said:

"Dear customer,

The consignment delivered herewith has been damaged by other parties and was received by us from its country of origin in its present damaged condition. Conscious that your post is important and should be received in good condition, we have proceeded to shrink-wrap its original packaging and contents…."

This damaged envelope had my handwriting all over the outside, and nestling inside were items totally unknown to me: (1) a Christmas card addressed to one “Kitty”, wishing her a merry Christmas and happy new year in very shaky Spanish, “with kisses and hugs from Ken and Jean”, and (2) a calendar entitled “Scotland’s Artists 2010”. There was no sign of the DVD in either package. A couple of days later I posted off to him another padded envelope with a second DVD with my pictures, this time with his address all over the disk in indelible print.

Stick with me, because the story gets even weirder.

Ten days later on 24th January an envelope was popped through my door in Bristol by the postman, along with other post – it was a padded envelope, completely unsealed, containing the missing DVD, and was addressed to me in a neatly typed label, from Shanghai, China.
.

Carlos was as mystified as I was, but the thick plottened: On 15th February his son was sitting in the garden and a Renault 18 car drove up. The driver got out and called across to him “Is this the Espinosa household?” On being told that it was he handed him an envelope and said “this appeared at my house”, upon which he got back in his car and disappeared. Not knowing the preceding goings on he didn’t think to ask him anything else. The envelope contained my second replacement DVD and a card from me sending my best regards to Kitty…

So why did the previous DVD get sent to China, and who knew my address to send it to me in England??? Oh (sigh) never mind.

Meanwhile, back to the first parcel to Tomi, which contained the chocolate with chilli –

By mid January, a month after posting, it still hadn’t arrived. I realised that if the first one had been purloined, chances were that the second one would be too, but I decided to risk sending another, speculating with grim amusement on the unpleasant surprise the post office worker would have received on taking a bite out of the chilli-infused, ultra bitter chocolate. The second parcel I sent was even more heavily padded – enough in fact for it to look quite consistent when I wrote in clear black print on the outside that the package contained “Zapatos Viejos” – old shoes...

Well folks, the jaundiced one turned out to be me and not post office workers on either side of the pond, because Tomi received both parcels together, and had a wonderful time alternately devouring the chocolate and gasping for glasses of water, not to mention the fabulous street-cred he gained when he shared some of it out with his friends.

So it all got somewhere in the end, probably thanks to the goodwill of persons unknown in both Patagonia and China. The well-travelled DVD wasn’t giving up its secrets, and fearing a Chinese sense of humour that might have introduced a virus into the DVD, I threw it away anyway.

Carlos was for once saved the monthly tedium of the usual long queue at the bank when he went to pay his utility bills thanks to Richmal Crompton’s “Las Travesuras de William” which I had sent him, and didn’t mind in the least the strange looks he got, not even when he attracted the attention of the security guard who demanded to know what was making him laugh. Carlos volunteered to read him a particularly funny paragraph, but was disappointed when the offer was sternly refused. Ah well, their loss.

-oOo-

From now on I would like to introduce a sort of signature to my posts, the idea for which I have got from a gentleman called Matías Vieira, whose blog Patagonia, Chile, el Mundo, (http://matiasvieira.blogspot.com/), contains many beautiful photographs taken by him, of Patagonia and other travels. He lives in Punta Arenas, Southern Chile, and though his text is in Spanish, the content is mainly photographic, and of a very high quality at that. He always finishes his posts with an old photograph or postcard taken from his family archives, and they are a fascinating window into the past.

While mentioning Chile, I would also like to express all my sympathy for and solidarity with the Chileans who have been hit by a very severe earthquake this weekend.  Our thoughts and prayers are with them.

I’ve recently purchased a second-hand Nikon scanner which is designed for scanning slides and negative film. I’m no tecchie, and the setting up phase has been horrible, but I’m there at last, and for the past week have been enjoying scanning 20 years worth of slides. It’s been like meeting up with old friends again, and has reminded me of why I always referred to it as my “belovèd hobby”. Of course the non-digital pictures were less sharp, and sharpening images electronically doesn’t always work. On the plus side I can crop them to a more pleasing composition. What I would like to do, in future without all this verbiage, is to include a couple of non-digital images at the end of my posts, with explanations if required.

Photo Finish
– from Lonicera’s non-digital archive

All the fun of the fair

-oOo-