Wooden carvings

Yorkshire Pudding's recent blogpost about wood carvings he had seen in a church gave me an idea for this post.  My daughter Kay and her husband bought a house near me two years ago. It was in a pretty bad condition as it had been lived in by a little old lady for many many decades and was still in a sort of 1960s time-warp. She had a thing about water and had several ponds (including one in the tiny front garden) and many ugly water containers up the side of the house all linked together to collect rainwater. The house - a small modest end of terrace Victorian house - needs a lot doing to it and is a work in progress. London prices are extortionately steep and it cost well over half a million pounds (more than 4 to 5 times its value elsewhere in the country), so there is not a lot of money to spare to renovate it. I'm helping them where I can. Rewiring, re-plumbing, new windows (there are mushrooms growing in the current ones!), new kitchen and new bathroom are just some of the projects to be done, not to mention re-landscaping the garden as the ponds take up the entire space where maybe lawn should be. Kay and her husband regard this as a ten-year project as their busy jobs also take up any time to do it themselves quickly.

The little old lady was a bit of an artist and we have found hidden under the undergrowth in the garden many metal animals, which she must have crafted, now sadly rusted and only fit for the rubbish dump. However, one thing they are keen to keep are the carvings on the bannisters on their staircase. They are quite unusual and, we think,  probably carved by the old lady, but Kay has fallen in love with them.

an owl

a squirrel

Not sure if this last one is a rabbit or a nun!

Spring is on its way

The weather here in London has been very wet for weeks and weeks on end and, with the windchill factor,  very cold, although temperatures have been mostly above freezing. The greyness has been the worst I have known for a long time and the sun is rarely to be seen. However, one little bright sight in my garden is the appearance of snowdrops. Against all the odds, they struggle through the hard soil and are a joy to behold. Hopefully spring is just around the corner with brighter, warmer days ahead.

Wicked

The choir I go to does some very challenging pieces which is why I like it. Very often when we start the term's rehearsals of the new songs, I don't necessarily like what we are singing,  as the songs are sometimes discordant or just plain difficult to learn.  But over the weeks, as we rehearse and fine-tune them, they grow on me until I find myself humming them or, worse, going over them in my head at 3am in the morning when I am trying to sleep!

Last year, we did the entire repertoire of Wicked, the musical. At a concert with 3 other choirs, our choir was voted the best, which pleased us all no end. A few weeks ago, some of our choir members invited me to go with them in a group to see the film version of the musical which recently came out. I have not been in a cinema for decades. I have hearing problems which means I would normally sit through a film only hearing a fraction of it. Hearing aids are all very good, but only make people, who mumble, mumble more loudly. It's the clarity to make out words from a string of meaningless vowels and consonants that is a problem. I much prefer to watch DVDs with subtitles to catch up on modern films. As this was mainly a musical and I knew the vague story from the research I had done, I agreed  to go along to the cinema with the group.

Oh my goodness. Not having been to the cinema in so long really was a culture shock. Our local cinema had 8 different screenings of which Wicked was just one. The foyer was like an airport lounge with different food stations in a circle - popcorn, sweets, drinks, ice cream, coffee etc. The cinema itself was full of about 150 leather armchairs (ten rows of 15 seats) which could recline so it was almost like you were lying in bed with a small table to swing over you to place your drinks and food. At least, if I don't hear anything, I can nod off in comfort for a couple of hours, I thought. I know this is not something new for most of you, who do regularly go the cinema, but I was like a kid in wonderland!

Fortunately, the volume was so loud, I think I would have heard it a few miles away and the film so engaging that the 2 hours 40 minutes flew by. My group was so tempted to sing along with the songs, but we bit our lips and sang along to them in our heads. 

The sets were mind-blowingly amazing and must have cost billions unless they are computer-generated. I came out buzzing. I don't think I'd manage with a non-musical film as the dialogue was still a little hard to hear at times, but it was quite an experience just for the cinema alone.

This is an extract from some of the Wicked repertoire our choir sang in 2023.....

I shall never ever forget

I am publishing an old post this week, as today's date means a lot to me. You'll see why.....

I suspect, should I ever die and they need to perform a post-mortem on me, they'll find the First of February 2001 etched in my brain like a stick of Brighton rock.  It is a date I shall never ever forget.

In mid December 2000, I had been told I needed an urgent hysterectomy operation. I had developed a large mass in my womb. If I lay face-down on a hard floor playing a board game or doing a jigsaw with Kay, I could feel it digging in to me. The consultant gynaecologist I went to see was fairly hopeful it was a benign fibroid but because of its large size, could not rule out it was something malignant. He needed to open me up and see for sure, but did not want to leave it too long. However, with the Christmas and New Year period in the way and therefore an obstacle both from my and the NHS point of view, my operation, although urgent,  was fixed for the 2 February 2001, some six weeks away.

However over Christmas, it became apparant my father was very ill. I have written before here about how special he was to me, how close we were and how upset I was when he died, untimely ripped from our lives by leukaemia and (cruelly) to have two kinds of the disease at the same time: one which he could have lived with for many many years and, apart from the occasional blood transfusions, would have caused no problem, but the second type was more aggressive and by mid-January 2001 revealed the diagnosis that he had but a few months if not weeks to live and he was too weak for chemotherapy. Not certain when exactly he would die, I was nervous to go ahead with my operation, but my father begged me to carry on, as it was much needed and he would not be happy if I postponed it.  He argued that I still had my life in front of me and would be recuperating by the time he grew worse, so we stuck to the schedule.

A few days before my operation, Greg, a nine-year-old Kay and I drove the sixty-odd miles to stay with my parents for the weekend. We visited my father who was by now very weak and in hospital. The consultant haematologist told us that Dad was rapidly fading and that his blood was showing more of the killer leukaemia cells day by day. Again I protested that I ought to cancel my operation, but again my father insisted I should go ahead and be all the more stronger to deal with what would happen to him later. At our parting, I hugged and kissed him and could not bear to let go or turn the corner out of view from his bed in the ward, all the time trying to keep a brave front for Kay who did not really understand or suspect what was going on.

A few days later, it was Thursday 1 February 2001: the day before my operation. I had been told to report to the ward at about mid-afternoon. I was to have a bath at home beforehand and to have brought a case full of stuff to last me a week in hospital. The hysterectomy and removal of the "mass" would take place on the Friday morning. I was at home busy preparing myself and making sure that Greg and Kay would have enough to be fed and watered during my 7-day absence. I was also packing a case and getting ready to have a bath after lunch.

At about 12:50pm the telephone rang. It was my mother in floods of tears. My father had suddenly passed away ten minutes before. I froze. Now what to do?   I was all for rushing to be with my mother but Greg wanted me to have that op so badly  as he was nervous it could be bad news and to postpone it was madness. However I could not leave my mother to cope with Dad's funeral on her own and in any case I did not want to be incapacitated for it either. I decided to cancel the operation. I rang the hospital and left a message with the consultant's secretary. I rang around my circle of friends and relatives telling them the grave news.

I was in a daze. I could not think straight. There were a million and one things to think about, not least of which was how we were going to break the news to Kay. The phone kept ringing.  Then in the late afternoon my consultant rang me back. He said he sympathised with my position, but he would seriously urge me to reconsider the operation for the next morning. "Your father can no longer be saved, but YOU can", he said. He also said he could not guarantee that putting it off for a few weeks would have a good outcome if the mass was malignant. He begged me to think about it and ring him back with my decision. Meanwhile people were ringing me saying much the same thing, that my father would want me to go ahead with the operation. My mother even rang to say she had been taken by close friends to collect the death certificate and the funeral could be arranged for three weeks hence by which time I would have recuperated. There was nothing else for me to help her with, so even she said I should go ahead with the op.

Thus it came to pass that on the evening of 1 February 2001, Greg delivered me to the hospital and then rushed off to collect Kay who had gone back to a friend's house since leaving school that afternoon. I found myself sitting up in a bed in a large old Victorian  gynaecological ward of twenty beds or more, ten down one side and ten down the the opposite side. I sat listening to people laughing with and chatting to their visitors, while the tears rolled down my cheeks. My beloved father had just died;  I sat all alone surrounded by people; and I faced major surgery the next morning. A day I would never ever forget.

Twenty-four years on, I still miss him.