linda_joyce (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
linda_joyce) wrote2009-05-28 12:34 pm
linda_joyce) wrote2009-05-28 12:34 pm
Entry tags:
Words.
I was given the words Knitting, Flowers, Car trips and Sci FI by sallymn. My blathering is below the cut.
Knitting
This is something that started in my early childhood when money was tight and ready made knit wear was extortionate in price. When my parents married they moved in with my maternal grandparents as it was expected of my mother the youngest(only) daughter to look after them when they got to old to look after themselves so my Gran Roberts was head of the household. We were a feminist household the men were there to make the money and do any heavy lifting, their forum was the garden DIY and telling the government how they should run the country while the womenfolk actually went ahead an ran it. Because I was born nto a household with a Victorian Matriarch at it's head I was given a very Victorian upbringing. It was my Grandmother who had time to sit with me and teach me how to run a household, Mam being to busy running it by the time I was born. Gran taught me to cook and knit and to sew. As far as cooking was concerned she was still teaching me her secrets when she died when I was 17 but the knitting sewing and crochet was done when I was about 5 years old. Knitting was part of the evening ritual for Gran and Mam, with 5 bodies to keep warm in winter they would be knitting most evenins jumpers and cardigans for me were the things they made most of because I was a child and 'grew like a weed' once I had my tonsils out and of course being a child I wasn't that good at keeping them whole and unscagged. It is perhaps those quiet times with my Mam and Gran sitting quietly chatting while the radio played in the background aand Dad and Grampy talked about what ever they talked about that makes knitting such a soothing occupation for me. I still knit a lot even though the prices are reversed for 2 reasons:-
1Whatever I make for myself actually fits me. Becaus I am overweight my cloth size assumes I'm 6 foot tall so bought woolies are dress length on me and the arms are at least down to my fingertips if not a bit more. I can custom fit when I knit.
2What I knit is unique. I rarely follow a pattern exactly, I change the colour or the kneckline or the style of the welts, or as now with 2 of the 3 thiings I'm knitting, I make the pattern up as I go along.
I find knitting is almost like meditation to me,with a simple stocking stitch peice of knitting I can go into a trance and hours pass like minutes.
Flowers
I think I can blame that interest on my Grandmother too. Gran was what the vallye calls a wise woman, sensible practical and very knowledgeable about the uses of plants for both cooking and healing. She was the one that started teaching me herbs and their uses how to use wild plants in food, or drink,. Her small beer was a lethal alcoholic concotion of dandilion leaves, bramble leaves and nettles all picked in early spring. She also loved flowers for their beauty, her favourite being roses, in our Masculine garden ther was a small plot of flowers, most highly scented, roses, lily of the valley,monkey musk(until the mutation that spread just after the first world war robbed it of it's scent)honeysuckle, lavender and sage. The only nonscented flower was an old fashioned peony with huge blood red blooms. That is stil in my garden as is the lavender but ther rest have died off with time. I am growing a tiny twiglet of her favourite rose, a pink scambler called Seven Sisters after I found it still fighting through the brambles at the end of the garden. As a child I would bring her small bunches of wild flowers back to her when I had been out playing. First to come were the celeandines then the bluebells, buttercups and star of Bethlehem. I remeber the first and only time my bringing her May blossom, she hurried me out of the back door took the flowers of me and sent me back intside for a jam jar of water. When I got back with it she put it with the May on the outside living room window sill where we could smell it and carefully explained that May was a death flower only used at funerals and shouldn't be brought in to the house because it was inviting Death to enter but the flowers could stay out side where we could see them and smell them and that would be OK. This meme is turning out to be more about Gran than the words but she is so entwined with them in my mind I can't help it. I love flowers, both garden and wild, but wild has the edge as I don't have to do anything with them and I hate gardening.
Books
I love books, my family loves books all of them from Grampy who taught me to read down to the youngest of the next generation who can't get enough of them. They have to be books about Man. United ATM but that will pass. I have never collected books but my mother always said that was because I went into librarianship and the library I worked at was my collection. She was right. Now I have retired and no longer have a library I am begining to buy books. When I was young, up to about 30 years old that is, I would read anything with print with a couple of exceptions I never read cowboy novels or Mills and Boon type romances. san_valentine's wonderful sherriff Darrow books have broken my duck as far as cowboy books go but I still don't read Mills and Boon. I would also plod on and finish any book I had started reading weven if I wasn't enjoying it, I've learned better now. Life's too short to read boring books I used to read mostly SF and adventure books but now it seems to be more crime and gen that catch my eye. Perhaps because I'm more of a Rockets and Ray guns SF fan and the majority of books in the library SF collection these days are sword and sorcery I was brought up to regard books as precious objects to be nurtured and treated with care and even today, when a paperback from a supermarket can cost the same as a loaf of bread, I still treat them as precious. I never turn down corners, I won't even write on the fly pages and writing anything in the text of a book is a crime punishable by hanging drawing and quartering. I like audio books, at least those on tape because they have the same ability as books you can go back and re read a passage or page so easilly, thats not so easy with discs but I would hate to be dependant on them. There is something about having the weight of the book in your hand, the feel of the cover, the smell of the pages from the clean fresh smell of a newly published volume to the dusty sneeze making ancient tomes we held in the stack at Newport Libraries. The excitement when some gripping bit of the book ended in a cliff hanger and you only had to turn the page to find the denoument. The world would be a poorer place with out books and I hope there is a special corner of hell for those who deliberately destroyed the old libraries,or even accidently. think what the world could be like now if the library at Alexandria had not burned.
Cra Trips
I have always loved car trips, well not strictly speaking always because when I was very young we didn't have a car, bus trips were my love then, it was not just the place we were going to visit it was the actuall journey too, The change in the scenery and the scent of the air. The palces you could get to that the train did not run to. The more leasurely pace of the bus as compared to the train. I was about 11-12 when Gran decided she was too old for holidays in a caravan any more and since we could not take my dog Sooty with us to B&B we had to find some other way to spend the 'Miners fortnight' (last week in July first week in August when all industry closed down and every one was on holiday). Dad decided to hire a car for the fortnight to see how we liked going on day trips so the first day we packed the boot with a picnic lunch, a small single burner camp stove, cups, plates flasks of milk and a teapot and tea , oh and a deckchair for Gran, then we packed me and Mam in the back seat, Sooty on the back window sill( he would only travel there or on Dad's knee so we always got a car with a back window sill) and Gran in the front seat and Dad driving and out we headed. I think we went to Tintern that first trip, I remember parking in a lay by sheltered by trees with a way down to a river bank for our lunch. After lunch Dad and I went down to the river with Gran's left over crusts and fed the fish with them. It seemed that hundreds of little fish appeared from no where for each piece of bread we dropped in. We liked that holiday, if it was pouring with rain we could stay home if not we went out. Though I do remember a few times when the weather caught us out. One time when poor Dad was huddled over the camp stove with his jacket over his head trying to make tea in a downpour, and another when we were driving home across the Brecon Beacons in another monsoon and the windscreen wipers failed and Dad couldn't see through the front window so he had to drive along with his window open and his head stuck out side until he could pull of the road (single lane with passing places) until the storm passed and he could fix the wipers. I had to rely on others for my car trips for so many years, now I am a driver myself and with no one else I have to think about, ecept Losyn 3 days a week, I can get up and look at the weather and go somewhere. I'm loving it.
Scifi
I grew up in an era when Scifi was becoming scifact, Sputnik went up when I was 8 and I was 12 when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, We were going out into space just like the books said we would. I read my first SF books at age about 7 it was Standby for Mars by Carey Rockwel(if you want to know more go here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Corbett,_Space_Cadet#Books) I came across a copy of it about 10 years ago, dear god was it wrong and bad. But it got me hooked and I have never looked back I have read some great SF and some turkeys, I'm not saying which is who each one of us has a different idea I'm sure. And I still try to read SF when I see one but, I don't know it's probably me, I just can't seem to find any I enjoy reading any more. the tide will turn again I'm sure and I will find an author that I haven't read before that I can enjoy I will have to wait and see.
Knitting
This is something that started in my early childhood when money was tight and ready made knit wear was extortionate in price. When my parents married they moved in with my maternal grandparents as it was expected of my mother the youngest(only) daughter to look after them when they got to old to look after themselves so my Gran Roberts was head of the household. We were a feminist household the men were there to make the money and do any heavy lifting, their forum was the garden DIY and telling the government how they should run the country while the womenfolk actually went ahead an ran it. Because I was born nto a household with a Victorian Matriarch at it's head I was given a very Victorian upbringing. It was my Grandmother who had time to sit with me and teach me how to run a household, Mam being to busy running it by the time I was born. Gran taught me to cook and knit and to sew. As far as cooking was concerned she was still teaching me her secrets when she died when I was 17 but the knitting sewing and crochet was done when I was about 5 years old. Knitting was part of the evening ritual for Gran and Mam, with 5 bodies to keep warm in winter they would be knitting most evenins jumpers and cardigans for me were the things they made most of because I was a child and 'grew like a weed' once I had my tonsils out and of course being a child I wasn't that good at keeping them whole and unscagged. It is perhaps those quiet times with my Mam and Gran sitting quietly chatting while the radio played in the background aand Dad and Grampy talked about what ever they talked about that makes knitting such a soothing occupation for me. I still knit a lot even though the prices are reversed for 2 reasons:-
1Whatever I make for myself actually fits me. Becaus I am overweight my cloth size assumes I'm 6 foot tall so bought woolies are dress length on me and the arms are at least down to my fingertips if not a bit more. I can custom fit when I knit.
2What I knit is unique. I rarely follow a pattern exactly, I change the colour or the kneckline or the style of the welts, or as now with 2 of the 3 thiings I'm knitting, I make the pattern up as I go along.
I find knitting is almost like meditation to me,with a simple stocking stitch peice of knitting I can go into a trance and hours pass like minutes.
Flowers
I think I can blame that interest on my Grandmother too. Gran was what the vallye calls a wise woman, sensible practical and very knowledgeable about the uses of plants for both cooking and healing. She was the one that started teaching me herbs and their uses how to use wild plants in food, or drink,. Her small beer was a lethal alcoholic concotion of dandilion leaves, bramble leaves and nettles all picked in early spring. She also loved flowers for their beauty, her favourite being roses, in our Masculine garden ther was a small plot of flowers, most highly scented, roses, lily of the valley,monkey musk(until the mutation that spread just after the first world war robbed it of it's scent)honeysuckle, lavender and sage. The only nonscented flower was an old fashioned peony with huge blood red blooms. That is stil in my garden as is the lavender but ther rest have died off with time. I am growing a tiny twiglet of her favourite rose, a pink scambler called Seven Sisters after I found it still fighting through the brambles at the end of the garden. As a child I would bring her small bunches of wild flowers back to her when I had been out playing. First to come were the celeandines then the bluebells, buttercups and star of Bethlehem. I remeber the first and only time my bringing her May blossom, she hurried me out of the back door took the flowers of me and sent me back intside for a jam jar of water. When I got back with it she put it with the May on the outside living room window sill where we could smell it and carefully explained that May was a death flower only used at funerals and shouldn't be brought in to the house because it was inviting Death to enter but the flowers could stay out side where we could see them and smell them and that would be OK. This meme is turning out to be more about Gran than the words but she is so entwined with them in my mind I can't help it. I love flowers, both garden and wild, but wild has the edge as I don't have to do anything with them and I hate gardening.
Books
I love books, my family loves books all of them from Grampy who taught me to read down to the youngest of the next generation who can't get enough of them. They have to be books about Man. United ATM but that will pass. I have never collected books but my mother always said that was because I went into librarianship and the library I worked at was my collection. She was right. Now I have retired and no longer have a library I am begining to buy books. When I was young, up to about 30 years old that is, I would read anything with print with a couple of exceptions I never read cowboy novels or Mills and Boon type romances. san_valentine's wonderful sherriff Darrow books have broken my duck as far as cowboy books go but I still don't read Mills and Boon. I would also plod on and finish any book I had started reading weven if I wasn't enjoying it, I've learned better now. Life's too short to read boring books I used to read mostly SF and adventure books but now it seems to be more crime and gen that catch my eye. Perhaps because I'm more of a Rockets and Ray guns SF fan and the majority of books in the library SF collection these days are sword and sorcery I was brought up to regard books as precious objects to be nurtured and treated with care and even today, when a paperback from a supermarket can cost the same as a loaf of bread, I still treat them as precious. I never turn down corners, I won't even write on the fly pages and writing anything in the text of a book is a crime punishable by hanging drawing and quartering. I like audio books, at least those on tape because they have the same ability as books you can go back and re read a passage or page so easilly, thats not so easy with discs but I would hate to be dependant on them. There is something about having the weight of the book in your hand, the feel of the cover, the smell of the pages from the clean fresh smell of a newly published volume to the dusty sneeze making ancient tomes we held in the stack at Newport Libraries. The excitement when some gripping bit of the book ended in a cliff hanger and you only had to turn the page to find the denoument. The world would be a poorer place with out books and I hope there is a special corner of hell for those who deliberately destroyed the old libraries,or even accidently. think what the world could be like now if the library at Alexandria had not burned.
Cra Trips
I have always loved car trips, well not strictly speaking always because when I was very young we didn't have a car, bus trips were my love then, it was not just the place we were going to visit it was the actuall journey too, The change in the scenery and the scent of the air. The palces you could get to that the train did not run to. The more leasurely pace of the bus as compared to the train. I was about 11-12 when Gran decided she was too old for holidays in a caravan any more and since we could not take my dog Sooty with us to B&B we had to find some other way to spend the 'Miners fortnight' (last week in July first week in August when all industry closed down and every one was on holiday). Dad decided to hire a car for the fortnight to see how we liked going on day trips so the first day we packed the boot with a picnic lunch, a small single burner camp stove, cups, plates flasks of milk and a teapot and tea , oh and a deckchair for Gran, then we packed me and Mam in the back seat, Sooty on the back window sill( he would only travel there or on Dad's knee so we always got a car with a back window sill) and Gran in the front seat and Dad driving and out we headed. I think we went to Tintern that first trip, I remember parking in a lay by sheltered by trees with a way down to a river bank for our lunch. After lunch Dad and I went down to the river with Gran's left over crusts and fed the fish with them. It seemed that hundreds of little fish appeared from no where for each piece of bread we dropped in. We liked that holiday, if it was pouring with rain we could stay home if not we went out. Though I do remember a few times when the weather caught us out. One time when poor Dad was huddled over the camp stove with his jacket over his head trying to make tea in a downpour, and another when we were driving home across the Brecon Beacons in another monsoon and the windscreen wipers failed and Dad couldn't see through the front window so he had to drive along with his window open and his head stuck out side until he could pull of the road (single lane with passing places) until the storm passed and he could fix the wipers. I had to rely on others for my car trips for so many years, now I am a driver myself and with no one else I have to think about, ecept Losyn 3 days a week, I can get up and look at the weather and go somewhere. I'm loving it.
Scifi
I grew up in an era when Scifi was becoming scifact, Sputnik went up when I was 8 and I was 12 when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, We were going out into space just like the books said we would. I read my first SF books at age about 7 it was Standby for Mars by Carey Rockwel(if you want to know more go here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Corbett,_Space_Cadet#Books) I came across a copy of it about 10 years ago, dear god was it wrong and bad. But it got me hooked and I have never looked back I have read some great SF and some turkeys, I'm not saying which is who each one of us has a different idea I'm sure. And I still try to read SF when I see one but, I don't know it's probably me, I just can't seem to find any I enjoy reading any more. the tide will turn again I'm sure and I will find an author that I haven't read before that I can enjoy I will have to wait and see.