wendy house

Every summer I marvel at the beauty of the Oxfordshire poppy fields. I drive through them on my work commute. Not stopping to wonder why farmers are growing poppys. Not until today.

The Daily Mail tells how the poppies are supplying the NHS with the morphine to overcome the shortage caused by the Afghanistan war. Afghanistan was a major poppy producer. NHS Morphine grown in the UK is now used for soldiers injured in Afghanistan. Now these fields remind me of Dorothy falling asleep in the flower fields before the Emerald city, Kansas, the USA.

There are some ornamental poppy’s in the wendy house garden. I had been pondering on how to use them beyond ornamentation. Poppyseed bread perhaps? Some athlete’s who failed drug tests due to trace levels of morphine have blamed poppyseed bread for the drug’s presence.

While searching for ways to use my poppys I was suprised to find very detailed instructions with photographs describing how to harvest and refine opium.  I wont be piloting these instructions. Honest, really, no really….

Once upon a time, during an annual job performance review my manager suggested that I should be a little less efficient because it was making other staff feel bad.

I wasn’t living in the USA at the time. Quaint British ways.

I am now more adept at ensuring that I have work time allocated to allow me to be seen to be inefficient.

Lets think of it as my

• ‘unfit for purpose’ time
• extra tea-time breaks
• fermenting good ideas while going completely off-topic time
• employer funded socialisation time
• creative teamworking

A gift of croci sent from a flower provider with a message indicating they are ‘commemorating’ my birthday.   It’s jolly nice recieving some flowers with a message of hope. Though at the risk of splitting gray hairs I’d rather celebrate, than commemorate, my birthdays passed

On a Falmouth  street an elderly gentleman caught me gazing into his front garden, admiring the plants.

He came out and apologised that his wife, who maintained the garden, wasn’t available to give me a tour of the tiny garden and name specific plants.

Spotty dog and I then accompanied him on his walk down a steep hill  to the dentist.   On the walk he told us how his house was once a Quaker school and brief histories of several other houses on the street.

Cornish folk are extremely personable.

Outrageously expensive legal person wearing a suit with a tight, short, skirt and a long jacket  with shoulder pads of the size normally  worn American football players:

what a lovelly smell of flowers,   have you got some in your back-pack?

As a very professional person meets me in the security area of a flash building she leans forward and looks around me to the left,   then to the right,   then notices my little back-packand says:

it that all that you have?

I suspect that, if I wanted to impress the business world,  I should be using on of those big wheely-half-suitcase size bags to convey professional person with lots of big documents  rather than a back pack that suggests I’ve just escaped from the garden centre….

One of a host of Jasmine plants that fill the Wendy Home  with a wonderful aroma.      No chemical air-freshener arrives with throw-away packaging,  immitates floral scents and requires  refills.     Lets hope that no guests have real pollen allergies….

  During a week littered with  uncharacteristically fabulous sunshine I’ve been wrecklessly wandering out without a coat or a vest.  

Wandering nowhere in particular.   Directionless in the garden.    

Planting bulbs and border-blooming plants  for the summer, digging-up weeds, drinking gallons of well brewed  tea and generally admiring the arrival of spring blooms from bulbs and bushes  planted last Autumn.  

It’s leave from normal work.   It’s in my garden.

Its not technically gardening leave.

How silly is that?

I love you

I love you too

Are you happy?

No

What do you need to make you happy?

Not much, just to talk to you most days to hear the stories of your life, the laughter the pain, the stuff you normally share with friends. An occasional bunch of flowers, notes that tell me you love me, they can be insulting, I’ll know from the note and thought that you love me, I just need to know it through a thought or story

I can’t live my days remembering to find time to call you, to leave you a note, to be worrying about what I should do rather than living my life now, I can’t be worrying if I’ve checked-in with you enough to keep you happy, I’ll worry about whether you’re happy. It will make me unhappy

Oh, we’ll both be unhappy

I love you

I love you too

We can’t be happy together

It seems we can’t be happy

If we break-up we’ll be unhappy, but we’ll have the opportunity to be happy with someone else.

Yes, but I love you and want to be happy with you

It wont happen

No

lets part and risk happiness

[the silence of tears]

As part of my birthday treat,   I purchased the 45th copy of AFH’s poetry book ‘Of birds and bees’.   The book is  beautifully illustrated by Jo Thomas.   The first line I read was Jo’s introduction to  the Bee  illustrations:

“In spring 2007 walking,  a bee fell, in front of me, on the pavement, dead. I picked it up and drew it. Since then I have continued to collect and draw found and gifted dead bees.”

I’ve not yet seen a dead bee.   This summer some beautiful large fluffy bees tended the tea roses at the Wendy house.   This may become a treasure of the past as I learn to collect dead bees as memories.   At 1pm today the British Bee Keepers Association (BBKA) is coordinating a  demonstration In London,   Whitehall outside Westminster palace  and delivering a petition to Downing street (Prime Minister’s residence).    Guidance provided by the BBKA  to potential demonstrators includes:

You need to look your best as you may well be on TV! An umbrella probably makes sense too.

They are demonstrating to raise awareness of the impact of the the lack of government funding provided to avert an impending ecological disaster that has clear financial, agricultural implications.   According to the Guardian:

Beekeepers have warned that most of the country’s honey bees could be wiped out by disease in 10 years unless an urgent research programme is launched to find new treatments and drugs…    

 ….the Department for Farming, Environment and Rural Affairs revealed that bees contribute £165m a year to the economy through their pollination of fruit trees, field beans and other crops. In addition, the 5,000 tonnes of British honey sold in UK stores generates a further £12m

Malicious mischief is an actual  offence in Washington State and a way of being for Matrix when she smells roses.     Being  a very English domestic cat she simply loves a mouthful of roses.

Happy mumzie day

The BBC explains the origins of the day:

Most Sundays in the year churchgoers in England worship at their nearest parish or “daughter church”.

Centuries ago it was considered important for people to return to their home or “mother” church once a year. So each year in the middle of Lent, everyone would visit their “mother” church, or the main church or Cathedral of the area.

Inevitably the return to the “mother” church became an occasion for family reunions   when children who were working away returned home. (It was quite common in those days for children to leave home for work once they were ten years old.)

And most historians think that it was the return to the “Mother” church which led to the tradition of children, particularly those working as domestic servants, or as apprentices, being given the day off to visit their mother and family.

As they walked along the country lanes, children would pick wild flowers or violets to take to church or give to their mother as a small gift.

The US celebrates ‘Mothers day’ in May.   This website describes the US history as:

In 1907, Anna M. Jarvis (1864-1948), a Philadelphia schoolteacher, began a movement to set up a national Mother’s Day in honor of her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. She solicited the help of hundreds of legislators and prominent businessmen to create a special day to honor mothers. The first Mother’s Day observance was a church service honoring Anna’s mother. Anna handed out her mother’s favorite flowers, the white incarnations, on the occasion as they represent sweetness, purity, and patience. Anna’s hard work finally paid off in the year 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as a national holiday in honor of mothers.

It’s not clear to me why it a, new,  different day was required.   This website mentions several different, non-christian, celebrations of motherhood.   Wikipedia lists differnet days of celebration in different countries.  

The British pagan goddess  Brigantia,   after whom Britain is named,  is a mother figure celebrated long before christianity.   I was suprised that my search didn’t easily find information on more diverse celebrations of motherhood being appropriated into the current ‘mothers’ days.

To who?

To ME!

Thanks a whole BIG BUNCH (of blooms) Tiger.

When they float shares in Tiger on the open market I’m INVEST-TING.   That boy knows how to treat an UnBirthday gal.   Huge hugs across the sea

W sweet-smelling-home  

Post relationship clutter has invaded my dining-room table.   A space that was previously under control has subversively developed a magnetic power for things that normally live elsewhere.  

What things?  

If you’re feeling extremely bored spend a few minutes trying to spot  the following things  in the photograph.  

• birthday card & present for Swedish friend
• housewarming present for recently moved friend
• Package of summer from eastcoast friend
• open book (Marilyn Monroe quotations,    sharp lady)
• camera-case
• UK adapter power  plug
• mug of tea
• beer bottle (Samuel Smith’s Nutbrown Ale)
• pile of unopened mail from organisations
• collection of documents providing guidance on how to review papers for a conference.
• print-out of conference papers I’m reviewing.   This helps me  to make colourful doodles on them.   More satisfying than scrolling through a .pdf file.  
• vase of roses.   Hooray,   how pretty they look.   How sweet they smell.   I have to keep an eye on the kitties though.   Kitties love to eat roses.   I’ll try and catch a picture of them browsing the blooms…
• 2  closed books (Adam Nicolson,   really must start reading it again…) & Mervyn Peake’s ‘Letters from a lost uncle’.   Great bedtime story…
• 2 sketchpads sat on their carrying-case
• 2 plastic bags of legal documents (preparing a will)
• 2 Laptops (Tinkerbell on your left  & Work supplied)
• 2 bowls of ‘produce’ (green & orange – like the roses).   Produce is beginning to fascinate me….
• 3  colour pens.

Wendy making-lists-rather-than-moving-clutter