Category: Memories

Esther Chiltons prompt Crazy.

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Wifi is back on and I am trying to catch up.

Esther Chilton has another prompt using the word crazy. I wrote about this trip with my hubby….

So many crazy things! Cycling home to my mother in laws house over the pennines springs to mind. It was after an easter camping trip. It snowed heavily as we started home over main roads. It was about 45 miles to cycle. But there was a steep hill to climb at the end. We were heading up about five miles of steep hill. Unfortunately the snow had other ideas. The road had been cleared until we got halfway up. Then we were faced with snow drifts and snowbanks. Even with our combined strength (we were on our tandem with a bike trailer carrying our gear) we realised it was crazy to go on. So a twenty mile detour back down the hill was the only solution.

The place where we stopped? A village called Turn!

Compassion?

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I just wrote this in response to someone complaining about people being on benefits. I’m trying to point out that you don’t have to look disabled to be disabled, and most people would not choose to be poor.

I gave up working to look after my hubby because of his severe PTSD and my health started to deteriorate. I tried to set up a small business but couldn’t earn enough to manage and when he died I was left with my work pension and a bit of savings. My Diabetes had never been good and two and a half years ago I started to shake. That turned out to be Parkinsons disease. For several years I’ve had to wear a mask at night because I suffer from sleep aponea. I lack strength in my arms because of a frozen shoulder and the spasms from Parkinsons in my arms and legs. Now I might have heart failure after several years of atrial fibrillation. I used to be able to cycle up to 100 miles with hubby and was quite fit.
In all that time until I gave up work to look after hubby, I was only unemployed for 6 months. I have full pension contributions.
I appreciate that there are some people that don’t want to work, but would you know about my disabilities if I hadn’t just told you? I know I’m deteriorating but I want to keep going. There are a lot of people out there with hidden disabilities.
Why do we always complain about benefit claimers when 80 men in the world have as much money as half the world’s population? That’s 4,000,000,000 people? Many of these billionaires inherited their money and avoid paying any tax? The poorest don’t chose to be poor. Imagine yourself going to a food bank once every two or three months and getting 3 or 4 days food? Or desperate people renting houses they can’t afford in poor or moldy homes. Would you choose that?
I’m sorry for this long comment. I can tell you about all the hospital visits I keep having to attend. The scans and blood tests. I try and keep going. Life is difficult. We all have our crosses to bear as they say. It’s that old thing of don’t look at the speck in someone else’s eye and not see the beam of wood in your own. It’s easy to criticise but we need more compassion.

Mid afternoon

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What’s your favorite time of day?

I can’t post a picture because my WiFi is not working. But I can describe mid afternoon. On a sunny day, a gentle breeze. A patchwork of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. There may be a scent of rain after a passing shower. Ideally I would be looking out over a valley with a small stone built village at the bottom next to a stream. In my memory I can see large oak trees, ash trees, beech and weeping willows. There are blue or purple hills in the distance.

Birds are singing. Robins, blackbirds, skylarks. Looking for food for their broods of fledglings. Sounds of running water from the stream and ducks quacking as they glide across the local pond.

The UK can be overwhelmingly green in the spring and summer. Autumn isn’t always as colourful as fall in America. But what it lacks in reds and oranges is made up for with fruit ripening on blackberry bushes, raspberries and the mushrooms snf other fungi in the hedgerows. And I love a quiet winters afternoon with white snow.

The hedgehogs will be sleeping on autumn days, waiting for cool and misty evenings. Life can be calm in these dreamy days. It’s not all wonderful but I’m thinking of an idyllic day.

Gerry Anderson programmes

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What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

I remember so many Gerry Anderson classic TV shows from my childhood. The first ones were puppet shows:

Fireball XL5

Stingray

Thunderbirds

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

Then mixed puppet and live action

Joe 90.

Then sci-fi live action

UFO

Space 1999

I also watched

Dr Who

The Tomorrow People

White Horses

Star Trek

Blake’s 7

The Champions

Department S

The Avengers

Is it any wonder I’ve always been interested in Science fiction?

Yellow at the lake

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I enjoyed painting this a few years ago, I used a phone app to change the texture of a photo then worked off that. This is acrylic on canvas. I keep meaning to do a few more pictures like this. It’s just deciding what images to work from. I’ve hit a bit of a block recently so I’m hoping if I do something like this it might encourage me to do more.

It hasn’t changed

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What’s your favorite recipe?

It will always be trifle

Ingredients

Jelly powder or cubes to make up about a pint of jelly. Choose your favourite flavour.

Fresh fruit, I use raspberries, blueberries or strawberries.

Blancmange powder or if preferred custard powder to make a pint.

Pint of milk.

Two tablespoons sweetner or sugar.

Fresh double cream, choose how much you want.

Toppings, can be glace cherries, or chocolate sprinkled on top or hundreds and thousands.

Make up a pint of jelly /sugar free jelly with about 3/4 of a pint of boiling water and a little slosh of port or sherry and add raspberries or blueberries or strawberries or a mixture of all three (I don’t use sponge fingers as they are too sugary.).

Let cool then store in the fridge overnight to set thoroughly.

Next mix blancmange powder or custard powder with a small amount of milk from a pint and sugar or sweetener to taste.

Put the rest of the milk on to boil, as it starts to boil carefully pour into the custard or blancmange powder mix, stir it in and then pour back into the pan, bring to the boil while stirring and let it thicken on the hob over about a minute.

Turn off the heat and let it cool. To stop it being too hot to pour onto the jelly (it will melt) place the pan of custard/blancmange  into a larger pan of cold water (without getting the mixture wet) this allows it to cool, stir it every few minutes to stop it going lumpy and setting. When it is cool enough pour over the jelly.

Finally whisk the cream into stiff peaks and put on top of the custard/blancmange.

The sugar free version is nice to have if you are diabetic but still want a treat.

Serve in nice glass bowls if you can. This gives 6 good sized portions.

Inchworm

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My friend posted a video of a caterpillar stretching and then the back end moves forward to meet tne front so the middle of it rises up in a hump.

I posted the question “Inchworm” and she agreed.

Then I remembered a song “Inchworm, Inchworm, measuring the daffodils?” from a film I watched in the 1960s. So I googled it. It’s actually “measuring the Marigolds”. It’s a film with Danny Kaye from 1952 about Hans Christian Andersen.

Wikipedia says:

The song’s lyrics express a carpe diem sentiment, with the singer noting that the inchworm of the title has a “business-like mind”, and is blind to the beauty of the flowers it encounters:Two and two are fourFour and four are eightThat’s all you have on your business-like mindTwo and two are fourFour and four are eightHow can you be so blind?

Subsequent verses include the lines “Measuring the marigolds, you and your arithmetic / You’ll probably go far” and “Seems to me you’d stop and see / How beautiful they are”

Loesser wrote a counterpoint chorus that, sung by itself, has become popular as a children’s song because of its arithmetical chorus:Two and two are fourFour and four are eightEight and eight are sixteenSixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

In the film, a children’s chorus sings the contrapuntal “arithmetic” section over and over inside a small classroom, dolefully and by rote, while Andersen, listening just outside, gazes at an inchworm crawling on the flowers and sings the main section of the song. Loesser loved the intellectual challenge of such contrapuntal composition, which he also did in other works such as Tallahassee.[1]

Travel, Esther Chiltons blog prompt.

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Transport; I wish I could still cycle, but I stopped a few years ago. Driving a car didn’t help, the more I used the car the less I used the bike. That was because I had a accident that damaged my bike so it came apart while I was riding it a year later. It took a year to get it fixed and in the meantime I got the car. I used that for work and to travel further with my hubby. I did keep cycling for a few years, bur as I say I gradually lost my fitness and confidence. I still have the bike, it’s in my house. It’s a classic, I hope one day someone else can use it.

Written for Esther Chiltons prompt “Travel”,

Top ten movies

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What are your top ten favorite movies?

  1. Close Encounters of the third kind. Good Sci-fi movie from 1977
  2. The Theory of everything, biography of Steven Hawking.
  3. Goodbye Mr Chips. 1940s film about school life.
  4. Shenandoah, western with James Stewart.
  5. Harvey, James Stewart and a giant invisible rabbit
  6. How to train your dragon, animated film.
  7. The cat from outer space, 1960’s Disney film
  8. Born Free, set in Africa about a lioness called Elsa
  9. Jurassic Park, because Jeff Goldblum is in it.
  10. A fish called Wanda, Madcap caper.