The things of Christmas

I have been SO busy arranging the carol concert - but it all went well. We made £6000+ for our funds - well, minus quite a lot for expenses - and £1000+ for charity, so that was good. We probably won't sell as many tickets for our next concert in May, so a little cushion of profit will help to fund that one. Then we do an all-for-charity Come and Sing in June and after that my 3-year stint as chair will be over nearly two-thirds done. Hurray. 

Meanwhile, other people have done other things. Littlest Granddaughter made a robot (above) for her best friend - designed by her and partly made by her, though her mum helped. 

She and her mum and the other grandparents also went to see the show her dad is in, in Birmingham, and she sat on a throne after the show. You can see how she's posing. I hope she's not going to be an actor. I mean, we need actors. But corporate law probably pays better. 

And Biggest Granddaughter played the part of a charger in a panto at church. I didn't see this show so don't know the context. 

I'm off down to London again tomorrow to visit Daughter 2 and do some dishes. When I get back, I'll start concentrating on things such as decorating the house, currently a bit bare. 

 

No rest for the reasonably good

You have no idea (or maybe you have) how much organisation it takes to make a big choir run smoothly. How did anyone do it before email? Or perhaps the real question is: was it much simpler before email - where every decision has to be run past the seven members of the committee? I, as chair, do most of the stuff. It would be easier just to be a dictator. 

It's even easier just to be a back-bencher, as I am in my other choir.

The picture above is my final (I hope) arrangement of the seating for the concert, just in soprano1, alto 2 etc order. The peculiar shape is because of the constraints of the church where we perform. For the previous two concerts I allocated specific seats to specific members, and of course this meant that some people weren't sitting beside their friends. Sigh. This time I'm trying a free-for-all (what could possibly...?) apart from some people who need to sit in the front, or whatever, for various reasons - mainly of infirmity. I do tend to think that at the point when I can't walk very well (for reasons of age, I mean) I'll probably bow out of the choir. I mean, I say that now (at 75). I may feel differently when it's me!

Son and family came for the weekend and we went to the Botanic Gardens light show with Daughter 1 and her offspring. Here we are standing in a tunnel of fairy lights. 

And here are the children toasting marshmallows. Which were a total rip-off -three big marshmallows on a stick for £7.50! This included a dribble of sauce, post-toasting. But the children enjoyed it. 

It was very pretty. 

And a bit wet. 

Another day they went to a climbing wall / trampoline place. Here is nimble Medium Granddaughter up a climby thing. Rather her than me. 

 

And in London, Daughter 2 took Littlest Granddaughter to see her daddy's company doing a children's show. Her daddy, meanwhile, has been in Birmingham most of the time since the beginning of October, doing a Christmas show, and will be there till mid-January. Daughter 2 has been doing a lot of single-parenting. 

And now I must go and write more Christmas cards. Still too busy!
 

Clothes pegs and sundry events

Big Granddaughter (12) is writing (and drawing) several graphic novels - as you do - and when she was here last weekend she decided to make a small "Worms and Shakespeare" booklet. No idea what inspired her - well, Shakespeare, obviously. I give you some extracts. 

I like the ruffs.

Littlest Granddaughter was taken by Daughter 2 to visit the other grandparents in Nottingham, where there's an impressive wintry display at the local garden centre. Son-in-Law 2 is still away at the Birmingham Rep for another six weeks. D2 is a noble person. 3 months of single-parenting. 

And I ... have been busy with stuff like making four Christmas cakes, writing cards, organising my choir's Christmas concert... you know the sort of thing. 

British traditional Christmas cakes are rich fruit, ie with lots and lots of sultanas, raisins, chopped peel, glace cherries, almonds, so the mixture is very heavy and stiff. For, I would estimate, 48 years, I struggled to make the cake tin lining stay in place while I filled the tin with this concrete-like, sticky mixture. Then a few years ago I had the idea to use clothes pegs. You can remove them when the tin is half-full because the weight of the cake holds the paper in place. 

I was telling this to a group of friends the other day - mainly to find out if everyone in the world did this, and only I was stupid enough never to have thought of it (no, it turned out) - and one of my friends, a highly intelligent person, said, "Do the clothes pegs not melt in the oven?"

I'll put it down to temporary absent-mindedness. 

 

On! On!

How is life so busy? How do other people manage to post every day? Anyway, I went down to London again on the train - nice views, see above - to try to be slightly useful to Daughter 2 while her husband is at the Birmingham Rep. I'm not terribly useful really, since Littlest Granddaughter reasonably enough prefers her mum to do things for her, rather than her elderly granny. However, I collected Littlest from school one day, did some dishes and cleaned out the guinea pigs. 

This is Chingford, where Daughter 2 and family now live. It's really quite nice - it doesn't feel at all like London, but rather like a small town. Which it was, of course, though has now been swallowed by London. But just along the road from D2's house you're in the Essex countryside. 

I did do a small amount of gardening, though it was rather cold. Can you see me down near the bottom of the garden, doing some minor weeding? I'm the black lump near the slide, or as we'd call it in Scotland, the chute. 

The way home was brightened by kittens! 

Very cute. 

Son and family came for the weekend I got home, which was lovely. Then,  after rather more socialising than I had time for early in the week, I had to get stuck into the church magazine, of which I'm the editor (it's not finished yet), and quite a lot of choir stuff. Mr L and I took our banner up town to attach it with many cable ties to the railings in the street outside the church where our concert is, St Cuthbert's, as is normal, but we then got an email to say that the council, which owns the railings, has decided that no one is allowed to put up banners any more. So the next day we had to go up and unattach it, but the church admin chap has allowed us to fix it to railings outside the church door, which is invisible from the street. This won't be as good, but it's something. 

Considering the ghastly things with which the centre of Edinburgh is currently cluttered - a big Christmas market which cuts off the view of the Castle, a huge Ferris wheel, a terrifying spinny thing that sends people round and round AND UP AND UP - the council is being a bit pot-calling-kettle-blackish. However, there are worse things happening in the world. And how. 

Meanwhile my other choir, the one of which I'm (thankfully) not the chair, is having its concert a week on Saturday. I've missed quite a few rehearsals through being in London, so I should really do a bit of practice. Not today, however! On! On!

Cleopatra

Littlest Granddaughter had a wear-your-own-clothes day (as opposed to school uniform) to raise money for Children In Need. So she decided to go as Cleopatra. "They're my own clothes," she reasoned. Well, true. 

On Saturday, we had a lovely walk with our walking friends. One of us always takes a photo of us on any available bridge, so I took a photo of her taking a photo of us. 

It was the walk along the river that Mr Life and I did the recce for a few weeks ago. Mr Heron was there this time. 

It wasn't so pretty as when we did it before, because most of the leaves are now off the trees. 

But we had a great time anyway. Good company, beautiful day and lots of laughs, so the 6 miles passed easily. And then we had coffee at the Visitor Centre. 

Tomorrow I'm back off down to London to spend time with Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter while Son-in-Law 2 appears at the Birmingham Rep. 
 

Drawings

It's been a fairly uneventful week. I've mainly been hand-quilting my rainbow quilt, which is to cover a single bed and is thus, by my standards, quite large - certainly the largest I've done. I'm having fun, though, just quilting it to please myself, not to any particular pattern. 

But we did go to an exhibition of Renaissance drawings at the King's Gallery - everything here is from the royal collections. (Why does one family have so much? Hmm.) First, we had coffee in the cafe, which has nice views out on to the hill behind. Sustenance and then art. 

The drawings were amazing, not least because they were on paper and had survived 500 years. (I don't imagine that anything I do will survive me by 50 years, let alone 500.) Mainly they were sketches for later paintings, some of which are now lost (or, who knows? maybe on someone's wall somewhere). The one below is by Battista Franco. He lived from 1510-1561; not all that long. This is the flagellation of Christ, so not exactly cheery. But doesn't it have movement? And aren't the expressions of the two chaps on the right interesting? One just dogged, the other somewhat horrified, as one might well be if Jesus was looking so intently into one's face. 

This is St Jerome by Bartolomeo Passarotti, who lived quite a bit longer: 1529-1592. 

And this head of a man is by the Circle of Cristoforo Canozzi da Lendinara, c 1427- after 1477. So possibly not even by Cristoforo himself. It's thought that it was a design for intarsia, in which pieces of differently toned wood are inlaid - hence the sort of contour lines. 

Now, this is a sad one. Parmigianino (1503-1540) was commissioned to decorate the vault of Santa Maria della Steccata, and this is his sketch for the middle of it. It's the coronation of the Virgin. But he was jailed for a while for his lack of progress, and then he died - at 37. Oh dear. 

All these chaps were so much cleverer than I am and I'd never heard of any of them. I'm glad that their work is still around, though. So thanks, King Charles, I suppose, for letting us see them. 

 

Season of mists and all that

I've been back at Daughter 2's in London, trying to help out a bit while her husband's in Birmingham rehearsing for a Christmas musical play about Sherlock Holmes. It was Littlest Granddaughter's October week's holiday, so I looked after her for a few days. Here, a black cat and I went to a pottery painting place not far away from where they live. 

This was fun. 

For Hallowe'en, Littlest designed, and Daughter 2 cut, two fierce pumpkins. 

Here they are in the house window. 

On Saturday we went to a children's farm / play place, where we had more fun. 

There was a huge marquee filled with big building blocks, so she and her mum built a palace with a stable for a donkey (which was also there, for some reason). This took quite a long time. 

The Essex countryside is rather pretty. 

At home, Littlest built a Lego shop that sold potions. See all the bottles on the shelf? 

And this was a blindfold guess-the-taste session. 

So it was lovely to be there. But now I'm home again. 

We went to the Botanics yesterday. Here's my favourite tree, the bald cypress, with my favourite old chap standing beside it. 

Everything was looking lovely in the autumn colours. 

Pity that winter's on its way...

Look at this liquidamber - beautiful.

It's autumn in my garden too - not surprisingly. I should get out there and do some tidying up. Maybe tomorrow.