Alphabe-Thursday Summer Purple

It's the last week of Jenny's summer school and the colour is purple. At least I hope it is, I haven't checked, maybe it is mauve, or lilac, or amethyst. Anyway, I decided to spare you my purple prose and send you a couple of purple pictures instead. Oops, it's violet, oh well they still qualify


See what others were inspired to do HERE

Alphabe-Thursday Mood Indigo

A rather short post from me this week as it has been one of THOSE weeks. I have joined up to Spotify and thought I would have a look to see how many recordings of Mood Indigo there are and there are loads. I can't choose which one to suggest. Sinatra, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Mingus, Day, Lyttleton, I could go on. They all have their merits. So I had a look at YouTube as well and decided on This one

Or this one if you want to know the words

More indigo HERE

Alphabe-Thursday Summer Blue

Jenny's summer school is more than half way through now. It is beginning to feel like autumn here already, our summer has been too short this year and I hope it is going to give us a second chance before it gives up altogether. This week we have reached the colour blue
I love the blue of the sky in high summer, I love the blue of cobalt glass, I love the blue of cornflowers. But I don't wear blue very often, and here's the reason why

Something like this little chart hung on the wall of the Art Room when I was in the Sixth Form at school. (Sixth Form is the last two years, aged 16/17 and 17/18) When I started there the uniform rules were very strict. White shirt, navy with a thin blue diagonal stripe tie, navy gored skirt which should touch the floor when kneeling, navy blazer etc etc and the most unflattering pale blue cotton dress for summer. I can't even bring myself to talk about the hat. Anyway, the uniform changed when I was about 15 and then the rules eased off even more and we were told that, within reason, we could wear anything blue or white in our last term. This was the term when we would be doing our final school exams so we were no longer prefects at that stage. And of course, girls being girls, we all pushed the limits of what could or could not be described as blue and so the art mistress put a chart up on the wall and if there was any doubt you had to go and get her to match your clothing against the chart and got into trouble if you didn't coincide with the top line (blues that were blue) but had strayed too close to the next two lines (blues that were greeny blue or mauvey blue) The colours haven't quite come out as I intended but you get the idea. So when I left school I avoided blue because I was just too fed up with it and here I am nearly 40 years later and I still don't choose it!

Maybe I will find something to change my mind HERE

Alphabe-Thursday Summer Green

Jenny's Summer School has reached the colour green. I went out for a walk with the camera and thought and thought of all the things I could say about the colour green. But a picture is worth more than a thousand words. How lucky am I to have this less than 100 yards from my front door!








Now see what other people were inspired to say for the colour green HERE

Alphabe-Thursday Summer Yellow

I'm sorry. I've been sitting here trying to think of something nice and yellow. I've been looking around my house for something nice and yellow. I looked in my wardrobe, I looked at my ornaments, I looked in the sitting room and the bedroom and the kitchen and tried to find something nice and yellow.

I came to the conclusion that I don't like yellow. Then I had to deal with a wasp that came in the window. He was black and yellow. I went shopping and couldn't park where I wanted to because of the double yellow lines on the road that mean I can't park. I looked in my garden. The only yellow there is the grass that is dying because it has been so dry.

Gosh I am looking forward to next week

In the meantime maybe another post will convince me otherwise. Find them HERE

A-T Rainbow Orange

Back at Jenny's Rainbow summer school and the colour is orange. Or maybe amber.
Think traffic lights.
Red is Stop - it ain't gonna happen
Green is GO for it
Amber is pray about it, because there's a chance it could happen. I expect you've heard the sermon that says "God always answers your prayers. Sometimes he says No, sometimes he says Yes and sometimes he says Maybe"

Something that means a great deal to me and which has had a red light on it for a few years has just gone amber. I am not saying what because at the moment I don't want people who know me to keep asking about it, especially if it falls through.

And in case you are wondering I am way too old to be pregnant!

But in a week or six I might be able to tell all so watch this space.

Other oranges
HERE

A-T Summer Rainbow RED

Over at Alphabe-Thursday it is the school holidays but Mrs Matlock, being a hard task-mistress, has given us homework to do so we are now going through the colours of the rainbow. Yes, here in the UK we spell it "colour", I didn't make a mistake Mrs M!

So I thought about the colour red and looked round my house and garden and thought some more and then I remembered that somewhere I had some photos of my old cars.

Let me introduce you to PGT 427E.

I bought this car in 1976 and it was quite old then. It was the first car I owned after passing my driving test. Technically I had owned a Morris Minor before that because I had lent my dad the money to buy it and he drove it and gave me some lessons but it was sold before I was able to drive it on my own.

"Piglet" was a Triumph Herald Estate. It had no heater, no radio, no power assisted anything and rack and pinion steering which was famous for giving it a wheel lock like a London taxi, which meant you could turn it full circle in not much more than its own length. It was therefore a really easy car to park. It had a walnut veneered dashboard though and I loved it. It cost me £80 and I sold it for £25 two years later. Funny how I can't remember the registration of any other old cars but always remember the first

Now I have a little question for my American readers. Is it the case that you do not eat runner beans? Someone told me that you grow scarlet runners like this for the flowers but don't eat the pods and I didn't believe them. Here's one I have grown but the beans aren't setting very well this year, maybe because there don't seem to be many bees about.

HERE is where you can see what "Red" has brought to other minds

Alphabe-Thursday Black and White

Alphabe-Thursday is about to take its summer holidays and we have been given that end of term feeling with Carte Blanche to post what we will. I have chosen not to go back but to anticipate. The following seven weeks are to be a rainbow holiday and I am really looking forward to that. But I am of the age that grew up in black and white. The television was black and white. The photographs were black and white because colour photogrphy was quite expensive and my dad developed his own films. Even some of the pictures at the cinema were black and white. Life seemed a lot more black and white too, in that you knew what was right and what was wrong. And now my husband has discovered that the new trend is black and white. He used to do a lot of photography with SLR (single lens reflex) cameras that he bought as a young man and he never really go the hang of his digital camera. He has just read an article that tells him that those really in the know are eschewing the digital in favour of the old fashioned film cameras and he has found that it is suddenly possible again to get the film and batteries for his old cameras. Hurray, at last hubby has a hobby!
Goodness knows what other soup you will find HERE this week!

Alphabe-Thursday. Z is for Zebayda

First of all a big thank you to everyone who came to the birthday party last week (Y is for.....) and if you missed it there's still some leftovers in the fridge so do pop in!) Thank you to for the lovely presents.
Now let me tell you about Zebayda
It's curious how things jump into your mind sometimes. I have a very visual memory and pictures suddenly appear behind my eyes and take me back more years than I care to admit. The letter Z (and where I come from we say Zed, not Zee) suddenly took me back nearly 50 years to a place that was then called The Hutton Residential School. I can see myself in a corridor painted that institutional green that many Brits will know and loathe. The corridor was actually a hallway in a large Victorian house and the house itself felt very friendly. The HRS was a place where children from the London Borough of Poplar who came from difficult backgrounds, broken families or who were orphans, were cared for. My mum and dad had befriended a boy who lived there - why is a whole other story which I might find a slot for next time round - and so we used to go there for tea sometimes. I would be sent off to be with the other chldren while my parents had tea with the matron and I was a bit apprehensive as an only child, suddenly finding myself, albeit temporarily, as part of a very big family.
Now Zebayda was the first black person that I ever met. Where I grew up, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, black faces were not commonly seen. Her father was part of a singing group, an English version of The Inkspots, but her mother was dead and so she stayed at the School while he was on tour. She was a year or two older than me and watched out for me when I was there. I never stayed the night but I guess my mum and dad thought it would be an experience to see how they lived in that place. It always felt full of love and I hope that it was.
HERE'S what other people made of the letter Z

Alphabe-Thursday - Y is for You are invited

It's Thursday the 8th July and you are invited to my virtual birthday party. The caterers will be here soon. I have ordered an exotic fruit punch for the drivers and champagne for the drinkers. There will be smoked salmon canapes, vol-au-vents filled with cream cheese and caviar, or lobster in mayonnaise. There is the biggest cheese board you have ever seen in your life and a choice of several wines, spirits, mixers and fruit juices . Salads incude pasta and asparagus, orange and watercress and seared peppers and tomato. There's cold salt beef or ham, and a whole cold salmon which has been dressed in thin slices of cucumber to look like scales. If you fancy something hot there's a mushroom rissotto, a lamb pasanda curry and all the trimmings, or a smoked haddock chowder with crusty multi grain rolls. There are other breads too. For dessert there's a dark chocolate torte, a milk chocolate mousee, ice cream in three different flavours (vanilla, coffee and rum and raisin) and a fruit salad. I've also made a huge cobweb pudding to my Auntie Elsie's recipe, which I posted up on this blog last Friday. And there's cream.
Coffee, liquers, or herb tea. Mints.
Bryan Ferry has got Roxy Music back together just for the event but if you go right out into the extensive formal gardens, past the second fountain on the left, you will find a small chamber orchestra and some comfortable seating where you can get away from the heat and noise and repose calmly in the cool for a while.
I will be wearing my black velvet and the second best diamonds.
So all I want you to do is tell me what amazing and fantastic present you are virtually bringing me!
If you are reading this before I get up in the morning then come back later for the link to other Y's or make your way there from Jenny's blog HERE

Alphabe-Thursday X is for Xylophone

Now that Jenny's link is up I see she was ahead of me on this one. I wrote this before I saw her's - honest! I have been wasting time trying to find a picture that I could point you to, showing the sort of xylophone I had when I was little. You all know what they look like, but all the pictures I found were much brighter than mine was, I guess because the modern ones are painted in rainbow colours and are wooden, whereas mine was second hand and metal and going a bit rusty. But I loved that xylophone. It was educational, I started to learn about how musical scales worked and about the fact that things of different sizes made lower or higher tones. So then I drove my mum mad going round the house with my little xylophone hammers (red wooden balls on the ends of two slim handles) hitting everything in sight to see what sound it made. Then came the exciting moment when we filled up milk bottles with different amounts of water and tried to tune them to a scale. Hey ho, happy days!
What other things did Jenny's team come up with for X. Link will be up on Thursday morning I hope. Jenny if you read this, what time does it go up on your page and how far behind the UK are you? I'm going to stay up one night to get at the front of the list!
And HERE is the link

Alphabe-Thursday Where or When

OK, this week I am going to ask you all a couple of questions. When do you ever find the time to do all this blogging and commenting? Where do you sit when you do it?
The thing is, although I love to do my little posts I find that I am a very infrequent blogger and this discipline of Jenny's is often the only thing I do on my blogs (and I have two!) for weeks at a time. I am also a very bad commenter. Sometimes I find that after I have visited a blog and commented the whole thing crashes on me and I have to fiddle about re-starting and quite often the time is getting on and I don't continue. I am blessed with the gift of being able to sleep, and I need my 8 hours, so I don't surf in the wee small hours. My computer is upstairs so if I am cooking or eating or doing much of anything then I can't keep checking in and out - I have to sit down and look at the computer and do nothing else (except maybe listen to the TV in the background.) And of course, if I am out of the house then I can't get online either. So tell me where I am going wrong and give me your advice for being a better blogger (provided it doesn't involve spending any money please!)
And while you are here, here is a song called WHERE OR WHEN
sung by someone I may have mentioned once or twice before. It is actually a show tune from the 1937 Rodgers and Hart musical Babes In Arms so a bit unusual for him, but from an album he did called As Time Goes By, which lots of people hated, but I loved.
If you are reading this before Thursday Morning UK time then the link will be up then for the rest of those W posts

V is for Villa-Lobos

Many, many years ago, before I was married, I and my then gentleman friend used to buy and sell what was known in the trade as "smalls". Now I don't know if this is a word used for underwear in the US but let me reassure you that I did not buy and sell those sort of smalls. No, the expression referred to small items, usually china, of an antique or collectable nature. We went to fairs and auctions and eventually had a space in a couple of antique centres. Consequently I spent, or misspent, quite a lot of my youth trawling round car boot sales looking for bargains. One day I bought a record. You remember those big black circular things, don't you? The cover informed me that it was some work or other of the composer Vivaldi. I checked it for scratches and it was fine and I paid my pennies and took it home. Then I looked at it more closely and found that it was not in fact Vivaldi at all, but some works by a composer called Hector Villa-Lobos that had been put into a wrong cover. I put it on the record player and was transported, amazed, delighted. Since then, over the years, I have got to know his work and loved most of it. In fact, if I could only ever listen to the music of composers whose names began with just one letter of the alphabet, then I would choose V. Vivaldi, Villa-Lobos and a bit of Verdi would cover most of my moods. And if you would like to know what that first ever piece of Hector's work was that I heard then you can HEAR IT HERE
Curiously I am presently reading the book "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel (thoroughly recommended by the way) and Villa-Lobos means, roughly, the same thing.
Find out what other people thought of for "V" HERE

Alphabe-Thursday U is for Unusual

First of all I would like to thank you if you visited my "T" post last week. Teacher put me at the front of the class and I had lots more comments than usual - so that was unusual! I didn't manage to come and visit you all. And if you read my "S" post then HERE is the link to the post I did afterwards about the Suffolk Show.

Now, here is a rather unusual flower. I wonder if you know what it is.




It grew in the garden of my old house one year. Later it grew a lot bigger and the colours faded a bit and it looked like this



Well, let me tell you the answer. It's a foxglove, but a very unusual one, I think you will agree. Why it did what it did, I do not know, and it never did it again, although someone did tell me that it is a mutation caused by a virus!

MORE Us HERE

Alphabe-Thursday T is for Trees

I have a bit of a thing about trees. I have very strong memories attached to certain trees that I have "met" during my life. I know, I know, cue for that well known song "I talk to the trees". On the Andy Williams Show years ago he changed the second line to "that's why they took me away". But I digress.
My first tree was a big old apple tree. For some years we lived with my granddad and granny and the row of houses where they lived were Edwardian and had been built on an old orchard. Each house had been left one or two trees in the garden. I used to climb up into it and sit and read for hours, often until the light had gone and I couldn't see anymore. Dad put me up a swing in it too, so here's a photo of me sitting on the swing.

The second tree was one that I used to pass every day when I was walking to work. I had a lovely photo of it but I've lost it so I managed to screen capture what it looks like now from Google Street View. It must be ancient but it isn't as healthy looking as I remember it.

My third tree gives me an excuse to show you what a slim and gorgeous young thing I was. I am about 18 in this picture. The tree behind me was in the garden of the flat below us. It was a lilac and we got all the benefit of it because it was outside out sitting room window. In the winter lots of little sparrows would come and sit in the bare branches and my mum always said they looked liked little brown fruit

One tree I don't have a photo of is a tree in the park in one of the towns where I worked. It was a huge, and I mean really HUGE Copper beech. On stressful days I would go and look at it at lunchtime and it helped. The next tree is one that was across the road from our last house. I was rather pleased with this photo. We lived in the countryside and there were lots of lovely trees around us.


Now we have moved but we are right on the edge of the town and some of you will know that I can walk through a little wood almost outside my front door. I have posted a few pictures of these in the snow so HERE is a link if you would like to look at them. From my study window I can see the woods and two big pines, here they are in the evening sunshine

Last two. The very old oak tree that is along the lane that goes to the old farmhouse that is now a pub

and my favourite tree at Sutton Hoo

See more takes on T HERE

Alphabe-Thursday S is for Suffolk Show

Unfortunately S has come round a week too early as the Suffolk Show takes place next Wednesday and Thursday . I went for the first time last year but can't find the photos I took then so maybe I will put some up next week and direct you to them.
The Suffolk Show was, I guess, originally just an agricultural show. Most Counties in England seem to have them. There are lots of animals to see, rare breeds etc, plus cart racing and show jumping, bands, displays and you can see what I call huge tractors and what my Canadians laughingly call toy tractors. Well, our country is a lot smaller so, so are our fields.
But there is also a flower show and lots and lots of shopping and eating to be done. It's a whole day out. I am going with a friend this year so I expect to be tired but happy, well fed and a little light in the purse by the end of it.. The website is HERE if you would like to know more and you can see what other people thought of for the letter S HERE

Alphabe-Thursday R is for Ron

Ron was born the youngest of seven children in 1925. Being the baby, he was spoilt of course, but there's not a lot of spoiling that can be done by an East End family with 9 mouths to feed on a milk roundsman's money. They gave up the "comfort" of their London home for a small holding in Essex. His mother lost her indoor cold tap and the privy and replaced it with an outside tap and "bucket and chuck it"
Ron was a bright boy and gained a scholarship to the local Grammar School but left at 16 to go into the Fire Service (World War 2 having broken out by then) until he was able to get into the RAF, which he did at 17. He was a Flight Engineer and made Sgt but didn't get any further because he burnt down the camp in Iceland. But Ron being Ron even came up smelling of roses on that one. His squadron was posted to Iceland but the men were told they would have to set up Nissan huts on the hill and would not be allowed to billet in the local town.. The cook house drain soon got bunged up with grease and Ron was told to clean it. He decided that if he put some petrol down the drain and set light to it that would shift the grease but what it did was set fire to the cook house - a fire that spread. He was sort of court-martialled and fined £20, a lot of money in 1945. But his comrades in arms were so glad that they were now going to have to be billeted after all, they had a whip round and he made a profit on the deal. But he never got past Sgt.
When the war ended he went back to his home town to find that almost all of his contemporaries had moved on, married, or, sadly, died. He went back to the church youth club and there was only one person who he remembered, a girl called Dot. They spent quite a lot of time together over the following couple of years but then decided that it really was time that they made the effort to go out separately and look for a life partner. Within a week they both found they missed each other so much that they had found their life partner and not realised it.
Ron trained as a surveyor, auctioneer and estate agent but his first love was drama and he belonged to several amateur operatic and dramatic groups. He was a founder member of a well respected amateur Shakespeare company and worked with after school drama groups at a local school. He was given an audition by the world famous D'Oyly Carte Company and, perhaps not kindly, they told him that they would have accepted him had he not been a husband and father by then, but that the life of touring and late nights was really only for those without family ties. He never really got over it. But, aged 38, he sent his wife (willingly) out to work and got a grant to train as a drama teacher.
He was a very good teacher, there being something of the little boy that understood the ways of little boys, and which appealed to the children. Then aged 49 in the space of four months he developed and died of cancer.
Ron was my dad

See what other R's have been written HERE

Alphabe-Thursday Q is for Q

I am reading a book called "Questioning Q" at the moment. Yes, really I am!
For many years the accepted theological teaching was that the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke had both drawn on a common source, called Q, which was believed to have been a collection of sayings of Jesus, but for which direct evidence did not appear to be extant.
It was called Q for the German word Quelle, which means "source"
When I was studying for my theology degree (which by the way, I never finished) this was taught as being accepted and definite. We looked at the similarities and differences between the two gospels and where they were alike we were told that this probably meant that the two had drawn from a third source, (or one had copied from the other) OK, yes, I have simplified this somewhat but you didn't come here for a lecture now, did you!
The reason I am writing this now, though, is because this theory has come into question in more recent years and so what I was taught as - pardon the pun - "gospel" is now open to more and more scrutiny and the resulting discussions are, to me anyway, fascinating.
You have to bear in mind that theology is "talking about God" and does not in itself require any faith or belief. If you have read me before you know that I am a practising Christian but if theology has taught me anything it has taught me that it is healthy to Question, to re-think, to keep one's beliefs, principals, core values, alive and active and dynamic and to accept that sometimes you may change your mind about things.
Sorry, just had to get that of my chest!

Of course, we all know that Q grew up to build wonderful gadgets for James Bond and to make Jean-Luc Picard's life difficult.

And HERE'S some qawwali music, which I love

And please forgive me if I don't manage to respopnd to your comments or leave a comment on yours but blogger is giving me so much grief again today and keeps crashing

You'll find a long queue of Q's HERE

Alphabe-Thursday P is for Paris

I am an armchair traveller. For all sorts of reasons I am no longer able to jet about (or cruise) willy nilly. In fact, not at all. And yes, I do get a little bit jealous sometimes of the people who can and do. But that is a negative thing and we don't do negative here on Just Jotting Along!
I have some very pleasant memories of Paris. I first went when I was 17. A school friend had a sister who married the gorgeous Jean-Paul and lived in a flat in Paris so I and 2 others went with her for a week's stay, sleeping, at first, on the floor of the living room. Then a friend of theirs said two of us could have his room in his college digs, which was fine until we realised that the only place to have a pee was at an open urinal at the end of the corridor. I drew the long straw and stayed with my friend and her sister, but the other two had to nip down the Metro last thing at night and then first thing in the morning. They were not meant to be there and the next night another friend of the family offered her digs in a slightly less difficult situation. And it was in that place that I first listened to Leonard Cohen, looking across the roofs of Paris from the 6th floor. I also bought my first 2 Jacques Brel LPs on that trip. I already knew of him but only from the radio. And it was the first time I had filter coffee. Those plastic cone things, and the papers, were just not available in the UK then, so we brought back supplies. And Petit Suisse cheese. We went to the Louvre and said "Ou est.... " and were pointed to the Mona Lisa before we could say any more . She's a lot smaller than I had imagined. One rainy afternoon we went to the cinema and saw Midnight Cowboy. I only half understood what was going on because my brain insisted on reading the subtitles
The second time was when I was 30; with another friend who had a cousin who lived there, but this time I had a real bed because they let their cats roam the place and I didn't like cats in the room when I was sleeping so I got the bedroom and the others slept on the floor in the next room. It was a very hot time of year and there were cicadas at night which was rather exotic. This flat was right near the Gare du Nord so I could watch trains coming in and out and going round on a turntable, and there were more roofs and windows through which you could see a little sometimes. We went to the newly opened science museum right at the end of a metro line somewhere in the wilds, and played with a computer for a while - a big deal then. We saw the weird glass pyramid that had now appeared by the Louvre. and The Geode
On both occasions, because I was staying with people in a rather off hand sort of way, we got to do ordinary shopping. You know, I think you should always go and look round a supermarket when you are on holiday, even if you don't need to. It's fascinating.
So I feel very nostalgic for Paris.
I started collecting books about the city, some are really old. and I love reading them as though I know the place, when, of course, I don't really.
Notre Dame seemed too touristy to me but Sacre Coeur was just wonderful.
Climbing those steps in Montmartre.
The self service restaurant at Motte-Piquet
The wonderful names of the stations on the Metro
Shops open in the evening
Asking for "un carnet " on the Metro, like you are a local.
DEEP SIGH

More Ps HERE

Alphabe-Thursday - O is for Oasis and Optimism

This blog was never intended for anything but a bit of fun. My banner says it was meant to provide an oasis and that was what I wanted to do - promise anyone who followed that there would always be something positive to read here, or something funny or entertaining. Not for me the angst, the baring of the soul, the ranting and raving. Most of those things are, at least in my life, short lived and I have no wish to record them for posterity! So I have been a little quiet recently. Last week's Note From My Mum was not a joke. I have, in the last few weeks, had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a full time carer, my husband and my mother both need a lot of care and between them they take a lot of my energy and time.
I have worked since I left school at 18. I was a lawyer though I tend to keep that to myself these days. I was also a book keeper as a sideline. I was single until I was 36. When I gave up my job just before Christmas it was to give myself six months to catch up with a lot of things before I looked for something else, but I now realise that planning to get another job has been creating its own stress. My own health has been a bit suspect and I don't have the stamina to keep going all the time. Now that I have decided that I am not going to do that I find myself truly feeling a lot more optimistic about the future because I can give my energies to the two people who I love most in the world, and who need me the most and be very glad and feel, frankly, very blessed, that I harbour not one iota of resentment about the situation..
I am extremely fortunate that we can manage without my earning. Hubby being in a wheelchair means that we don't spend on things like holidays, or going very far afield for trips, neither of us smoke, he doesn't drink and I only do in moderation, I have time to cook real meals which are much cheaper than ready made and I have a wardrobe full of clothes that I used to keep for work, or best, which I can now wear to do the gardening in should I so desire. The social life I have is with the people I genuinely want to spend time with, not because they are the people I need to cultivate or people to whom I "owe" an invitation.
I may actually find that I will have the time and space to start preaching again - oh yes, have I told you I am a Methodist Preacher? I haven't been active for a few years because of all the other stuff that has been going on but I am hoping that might change in time. In God's time and mine.
So, for all you fraught and frazzled bloggers, this little oasis will remain open for business for the foreseeable future. I will welcome your company on this new journey and will stay optimistic I hope
More "o" s ( which makes an "oooooo" ) HERE