A trip to Matisse..

Hello Tom, Joe, Silvia and Dick,

Sue and I went to the Tate Modern on Friday to see the Matisse cut-outs exhibition.  Here are some photos of us and views of a windy day by the river!

We took a train, two tubes and a bus to get there - surprisingly smoothly and quickly.  Here is Sue/Mum being excited about non-dairy milkshakes!

When we got there we headed straight for the cafe.  Expensive but good food (best hamburger I have ever had) with a great view of St Paul's across the river:

We strolled out to the riverside - here is the Bankside ex-power station:

Then to the Millennium bridge.  The views along the river encompass the Post Office tower of north London and Tower Bridge to the east.

Persuaded Sue to take one of me for Facebook purposes..

The View from the Bridge, with Shard:

Finally - me squinting at the phone trying to keep my fingers off the lens!

That's it!  The cut-outs were good too.  A lovely day out.
Best wishes, Jane

One thing leads to another - more paper gone!

Well, my sister came round, and we spent a happy afternoon going through my old art coursework.  I created a huge pile of stuff to throw out - things I had done as course projects that were not visually pleasing!  And a lot of bits of mount board.  (Now these last are in the bin, I wonder if I could have passed them on - better luck next time!)  As well as feeling cleaner and clearer about my room, I enjoyed seeing all the work I had put into the course.

This is what's left, which may not look tidy to anyone else, however it is a vast improvement on the previous state:

And this is Sue pointing to all the junk I got rid of!  She is a declutter expert.

NB you may recognise this area - the art box is behind this, and the pile of unfinished self-help books featured in previous posts!  I am aware I have some way to go to a decluttered house.

As a result of all this activity I feel much better about myself and have a lot more energy - it's amazing what a difference decluttering makes.  Onwards and upwards!

Seabiscuit

I have just finished 'Seabiscuit' by Laura Hillenbrand. It is a fantastic true story, well told, and I was very involved with it (OK I cried at times). Then I read Laura H's article about her illness (CFS) which is another moving true story, of determination against the odds and terrible setbacks to produce a best-selling, award-winning book. She is still ill. I do hope she finds ways of recovering like I did.

I am getting better after a long CFS-like recurring virus since April. I am relieved I can use the Lightning Process to get rid of it, even after I'd left it awhile to try and clear up on its own. I am plugging away at my walks and short drives, and seeing people in the village, and I'm seeing positive results again - phew!

I've just had a successful visit to my sister's, and a great time at her 60th birthday party. Now I'm back into producing more cards of my paintings and promoting my cookery book (Eat to Beat Fatigue), as it's been entered for the People's Book Prize (for August) - vote here if you'd like to see it win, during August and September - www.peoplesbookprize.com.

Laura Hillenbrand's story and her book have moved me. Not the drama and the struggle but the characters' creativity and enjoyment of life, even when they are in pain. Keep on trucking!

New leafcutter nest!

The leafcutter bee has found a bigger space for its nest - another pot of verbascum. The seedling was wilting and had been broken off - I dug and found this. I don't want to uproot it for the sake of a clearer photo, but it is a capsule made of leaves put sideways on, some way down in the soil. There may be more - I'm leaving them be this time.

Insects galore in my garden

I live in a cottage in a garden that used to belong to a bee-keeper, which means there are plenty of plants around which flower in succession for a variety of insect life, especially bees. This year, however, I feel more than ever that I am just incidental to the other life here – it has taken over!

First the bees swarmed round a chimney, and strayed into the sitting-room. I looked up the Beekeeper’s Association on the internet and found that there was a beekeeper who dealt with swarms of bees allocated to each postcode in my county. Lucky me! Mine had to travel some distance, and was very friendly and reassuring. He strode into the sitting-room, opened the window, and said, “Off you go, ladies!” I had to tape newspaper to the outside of the non-opening windows then they all flew straight out of the open one. He couldn’t remove the bees, as they’d already gone down the chimney, but he taped up the underside of my stove’s chimney, as bees can get through quarter-inch gaps, and told me how to get rid of the bees if I needed to. I haven’t needed to so far – they are nesting in an old flue, blocked up, and haven’t paid me a visit since then, though they can be seen flying round the chimney during the day. Because of varroa eroding a bee’s resistance, they will apparently be dead within 18 months, so I hope they live well till then.

I spoke to the beekeeper about my other problem – the wasps nesting under the back porch. Theoretically this shouldn’t be happening, as they have nested there before and been poisoned there too, but these have come back and built new cones onto the nest – a real wasp ‘des res’ with extensions! He said I could get rid of them, but that it might not be worth it, as by September they’d be dead anyway. And I’d watched a ‘Springwatch’ programme which enthused about wasps being natural pest preventers and much maligned.. so they’ve stayed as well, and haven’t been a problem so far. I do avoid eating jammy scones outside the porch though…

Then as if all this insect action wasn’t enough, I took a seedling out of its pot in the greenhouse and all these green leaf capsules fell out. I was a bit horrified at first, thought ‘mullein moth’ and put them in the bin. But that evening, another thought, ‘leafcutter bee’, (see right) came to me and I looked that up on the internet and found to my horror that a bee had carefully constructed those capsules and laid an egg in a sac of nectar inside each one. The capsules were each lidded with beautifully-cut round leaf lids.

Next morning I took the capsules out of the bin and planted them ‘in a south-facing frost-free place’ as advised, near a large ornamental grass, which I hope will protect it. I tried to bury them in twos, one on top of the other, as per the diagram I looked up on http://crawford.tardigrade.net/bugs/BugofMonth23.html
That I thought was that – until I saw the leafcutter bee herself, come back to a ‘south-facing, frost-free’ environment – my greenhouse! She spent a lot of time burrowing in the seed modules underneath various precious seedlings (She's in the module on the right in the righthand photo). Then she left – last seen frantically gathering nectar and pollen on a scabious. I look for her every day. Her energy and industry inspires me. If she comes back I will sacrifice the seedlings she's burrowed under!

Art explosion!

After I came home, I got going with promoting my prints and cards which I had just had printed. They look great - I need to paint more. I went to a local art exhibition in Litchborough and sold cards from the vestry of the old stone church - very peaceful atmosphere and friendly, though not that lucrative - I spent the profits on lunch!

Let me know if you would like any prints or cards via Comments. This is 'My Village from the Stile', copyright AJH 2009.

A Happy Easter in the Chilterns

I stayed with at my sister's over Easter. She and her husband live in the middle of the Chiltern Hills, where they run a luxurious but inexpensive B&B in a little barn, surrounded by fields, beechwoods and swooping red kites, who nest opposite. It's very peaceful, as it's on top of a hill down a 'no through road'.

We walked to a view out over the escarpment that ends the Chilterns - an Iron age fort called 'Pulpit Hill', to see out over the Vale of Aylesbury (no town, just patchwork fields and sky). Cowslips and violets were growing everywhere in the chalk, and the cherries were just out. It was great to be able to go out on a walk with Susan (and more practice at outings for me!).