World climate day

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Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

There may already be one?

A day to celebrate the Earth, a day to spend thinking about how to improve and support the world. Trying to clean the rivers and seas, reducing pollution, supporting poorer countries so the world uses greener and safer technologies. Actually caring about the land under our feet. Working out how to capture carbon and start to reduce gobal temperature surges. Hoping that the richest people get involved too.

Why? Because it’s needed, it could be the most important holiday that we ever create.

Doodles on my easle

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I do have a propensity to draw or paint on anything. So this happened a while ago. I also painted a large ammonite on the dining table that was losing it’s varnish. I painted it and then revarnished it. The ammonite was one we found on a beach near Whitby. The actual fossil is up on top of a bookcase, out of my reach.

Why the eye and the face with the streaming hair? Just a couple of things I’ve doodled over the years.

Fifth of November

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Annual celebration in the UK.

Looking forward to seeing fireworks on November 5th, bonfire night in the UK. Also known as Guy Fawkes night when he tried to blow up the houses of parliament several centuries ago. Children say the rhyme “remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot”. Nothing to do with the American General Election thankfully! And something people actually enjoy X

Names?

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From the fuzzy grey of my brain I seem to have developed a need to think of an unusual name that I could, if I ever wrote a novel, use as a character.

This normally happens when I’m half asleep, it might be a continuing dream. And like a dream, I think of a name and then almost immediately forget it!

I don’t have a list, I didn’t think of writing names down. But I think each name is a little complicated, perhaps having several syllables. Is this normal? Is there a name for it? (like nominative determinism, where a person’s name relates to their job… A Mr Kitchenn as a cook for example?)

I am trying to think of names….

Buttercup Sylvester

Pamela Praline

Humphrey Othello?

Or maybe

Martia Stephinkos

Greg Carlos Carlisle?

I think I come up with better ones when I half asleep.

Thanking God?

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I just read a random post on Facebook that said if someone I knew was dead that was younger than me, that I should take a few seconds to Thank God for Saving me!

I thought about this and replied:

“This is really upsetting, I have lost people recently and to think someone could be so crass as too say they weren’t worthy in some way? Also what about all the innocent  people that die in wars, hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters? Was that because they didn’t pray enough? I’m proudly agnostic, I don’t pretend to know the “truth”.”

The point is that whoever wrote it does not know the people I’ve lost, cannot say if they were good or bad. Their deaths were random. A big finger didn’t come out of the sky and strike them dead.

When someone you know dies, it’s a body blow, it’s overwhelming. It’s not a competition to see which one of you is a “winner” in some deities eyes. And if I could bring them back for one second I would. Maybe I’d be more inclined to pray, but I can’t, so I won’t. We don’t live in a fairytale.

2019 remembered, Biggley!

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Trump Mania 2019

I just found this Staffordshire flat back ornament I decorated at the British Ceramic biennial back in 2019.

Whoever designed it came up with a quirky idea of Trump on a boat, legs facing backwards, the symbol of the crucifix and people weeping next to it? A monkey and a possible tea chest. There is a lion as a figurehead at the front.

I don’t remember what it was meant to depict but it’s certainly a confusing image. How did he get elected? Is he running away from the world? Is he a clownish figure? Five years later I still don’t know!

Kitchen cupboard

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Just saw this on Facebook, from the 60s or 70s.

We had a pale green cupboard, I think the same sort?  I remember the crinkly glass in the windows. We also had a cool pantry room, I don’t remember a fridge. I’m sure I remember my Mum stuck marble patterned plastic on the cupboard to make it look better. I’m not sure it did? I think it was sticky back plastic vinyl that she used? I may be wrong. We also had a boiler and mangle and a free standing top loading spin dryer, the water collected in a bowl below it’s nozzle. It dried better than my washing machine now.

We didn’t have fitted kitchens then.

The Moon landing

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What historical event fascinates you the most?

It’s fantastic that in my childhood men landed on the moon, not once but several times. Using computers that barely had the memory of a pocket calculator.

The race for space started after the second world war, when Wernher Von Braun went from Germany to America to continue research into rocketry. In the meantime Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and his Russian team were working on the problem in the USSR.

The teams gradually designed rockets that could travel into space. There are many books about the space race that are worth reading, telling the tale of the triumphs and tragedies that happened as the race continued. First one country took the lead then the other.

It all culminated one July day in 1969, I remember being bought downstairs to watch the landing. I hope to see people go back there.