New paintings and regular art updates.
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?
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.
What’s your favorite recipe?
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.
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]
I decided to write a poem on a poetry page on Facebook. Here it is.
I would like to be brave and post something here.
But my poems are mostly spontaneous.
An explosion of thought on the page.
My mind dances around thoughts,
Spiralling into nooks and crannies.
Flying across the landscape of my brain.
Hopefully landing safely and intact.
What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?
I can do without my phone, but I need to get into my house, my car, my shed, my garden gate.
I’ve only ever been locked out a couple of times, the first when I was a child, in that case it was my mum that had slammed the front door shut (it had a yale lock), only to remember she had left the keys inside. I was fairly small and a bit of an athlete so I ended up climbing in through the downstairs toilet window. I managed to let us all in.
The other time I was sharing a house, I left my keys somewhere else and only realised when I was outside the front door. That ended with me sitting on the front doorstep for a couple of hours.
Now I’ve told you I’ve probably jinxed myself to do it again. Luckily I have the number of a locksmith on my phone (which I don’t always keep with me!)
We were asked to write to the prompt future and as I don’t have a crystal ball I decided to look back at what our future selves might remember.
“In future when people look back at the first quarter of the twenty first century what will be remembered? A first black American president, increasing global temperatures? Will the remember the global financial crash with Lehmann brothers? Bird flu and Sars then a global pandemic of Covid 19. Massive forest fires, huge hurricanes, tremendous tornados? The deaths of famous people including Queen Elizabeth the Second. Madness of global leaders? Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, so many wars.
Will our future selves see a disintegrated world, a dystopia bought on by the lack of interest in pollution or global warming. Big business using its powers to continue to push oil and gas and plastic use? Will our seas fill with more pollution or the pollenating insects die off so crops fail.
Will they see this part of the century as depressing, or will we take the future into our hands and pass on a cleaner and greener future to our children and their descendants?”
What traditions have you not kept that your parents had?
We always had a traditional Christmas tree, decorated with glass baubles, lammetta to look like icicles (thin strips of shiny metal tassels) also dodgy Christmas tree lights which would regularly stop working. It was a treat to be allowed to decorate it with my mother’s help. I think we always managed a tree with nicely placed ornaments and would then add bits of cotton wool to represent snow.
Scroll forward a few years. Now I rarely have a tree because of my cats. They like playing with the baubles and breaking them. They have also knocked the whole tree over. I haven’t given up on the idea. I even think I could hang a tree from the ceiling just to keep the cats at bay!
Hubby used to ring me from work in the evenings, he worked a late shift for several years. He didn’t go out to work till the afternoon and came home after midnight. I worked a day shift, so we really only saw each other over a late night meal or at weekends. Then his firm changed the shifts, so he had to start an hour later and finish later too. They also made the workers take a day off in the week and have to work Sunday mornings too. It was awful. That telephone call was our only communication in the evening.
He hated the job and was being bullied. He went to work on a motorbike and a few times when he got home late he was so exhausted he would fall off it. He used to say that he did more work than two people. Sometimes they would take on new workers but they could not keep up with him and some would not come in the next day because they could not cope.
I was so glad when he finished there. We managed to spend few good years together before he died.
I realise now why I can cope without him in the evenings, I spent so many years waiting for him to come home, and that’s why I struggle to sleep at night, my mind expects him to return later.
Now I’m tired all the time, I try and do things and end up shattered.
I get fed up of having to take tablets everyday. Sometimes they have to be tweaked to adjust how my body copes with things. Currently I’ve stopped one type of tablet and have started on something new. All this takes time to get used to.
Life consists of doing a few things to try and keep contact with friends, but not really being able to cope with day to day tasks. My sister bought me a jar and bottle gripper a few weeks ago. It’s been a godsend because I’ve lost strength in my arms and hands. People of a certain age will have heard of Pansy Potter, the strong man’s daughter. I used to be really strong and, able to pick up heavy weights or open tightly closed jars, what happened to me? I’ve suddenly realised I have got old. I don’t mind looking old, but I wish I was able to get back some of my fitness. I know it’s important to keep moving if you have Parkinsons, but it’s hard when you feel tired. I want to go back in time. I want my life back.
Sorry, moaning over.
Mallaband-Brown