Much of a muchness

Jenny, who writes an hilarious blog over at I’m having a Thought Here-The Latest Whatever, tagged me a while ago to tell you 5 weird things about me. I have already done this meme a couple of times now (you can check out the two previous occasions here and here) so I hesitated to burden you with even more of my oddities. However, on reflection I came up with yet another five quite easily so here they are:

1 I am a bit of a pedant about grammar and spelling. I realise of course, that I am now laying myself open to being corrected every time I write my blog but so be it….

2 My 25th wedding anniversary was on September 11th 2001. A very bad day to be celebrating anything. My (ex) husband had bought me a ring to celebrate the occasion. It was two long thin baguette diamonds - which looked too much like the fateful twin towers for comfort. I have hardly ever worn it.

3 My first pregnancy lasted 11 months. I was originally told my son was going to be born on 25th January but when I had a scan at the beginning of December, they said he was too small and my pregnancy wasn’t as advanced as they had originally thought. They then said he was due on March 9th. He was actually born on March 19th. He still finds it very hard to get out of bed…. :-)

4 I was once on the television local news. I had been shopping in Waitrose and as I steered my wobbly trolley around a corner I was confronted by a cameraman and a woman holding a bowl of muesli. Apparently Dorset Cereals muesli (delicious-highly recommended) is selling like mad out in the Caribbean because they consider it to be an aphrodisiac. She wanted me to try a spoonful and comment. I appeared on the local news looking particularly startled and gormless, mumbling through a mouthful of muesli. Marvellous.

5 When I did my degree, I was the only girl in the class of 20 boys. At the time, Metallurgy was not a subject that appealed to girls. I only chose it because I did Maths, Physics and Chemistry ‘A’ levels and as I was spectacularly indecisive, I decided to study Metallurgy as I had been told it used all three subjects and I didn’t have to make a decision. Bad idea. And as I was spectacularly shy too, I barely spoke to anyone for most of the time I was there. What a waste!

(This image is of Metal Corrosion and was taken with the PAXcam digital microscope camera on an Olympus metallograph at Battelle Advanced Materials. So there.)

I’m not tagging anyone in particular but I would like lots of you to have a go at this (if only to let me know I’m not as weird as all that!) Just leave a link in the comments so I can see how weird you are what you have to say.

I am very thrilled that Number 2 so has just arrived home from university after completing his final year. (Where did that time go? It doesn’t seem like 5 minutes since I was dropping him off on his first day - three years ago!) He gets his results on Thursday so we are on tenterhooks until then…. It seems so odd to think that soon he will be off in the big wide world. I could get all wistful about how time flies and start reminiscing about when they were both babies but thereby lies depression and gloom, so I am just going to show what HE was like as a nipper and move swiftly on….

You may have noticed that I have gone quiet on the bookbinding front…. The large album had a major disaster a few days ago. I was sticking the cover paper onto the board cover and thought I was being very clever. (Ha! I should have known better!) Instead of putting the glue onto the paper and having to manhandle a large gluey piece of paper, I thought, ‘I know, I will put the glue on the board and then I can manhandle a DRY piece of paper into place’. Genius. Except that the paper wrinkled terribly when it came into contact with the gluey board (I’m thinking that maybe this was because the act of spreading the glue onto the paper, stretches the paper first but doing it this way, the paper stretches after it is on the board and so, wrinkles up).

I tried to smooth out the paper but I managed to tear it and as I didn’t have any more of this particular paper, it was a disaster of epic proportions! And it was a Brazilian marbled paper I ordered from Paper Mojo in the US. However, I have to say, Shelly at Paper Mojo was a star and has Fedexed me a couple of sheets which have just arrived. (I ordered a spare sheet too!) Luckily, as Number 2 son is now at home, I have the extra pair of hands I needed to finish covering the book, so hopefully, the next stage will go a bit more smoothly…. fingers crossed.

I am listening to Coldplay’s new album Viva La Vida and I like it very much. Have I ever mentioned what a HUGE Coldplay fan I am? I have seen them twice in concert in London and then I saw them at Glastonbury three years ago. They are fantastic live. This is the new Apple iTunes ad featuring them singing the title track from the album. I suppose it is just a coincidence that Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow called their first baby Apple?

The only other thing I need to rave about is the match I watched yesterday between Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic in the final of the Stella Artois Championships at Queen’s Club in London. Sublime tennis - so exciting and as close a match as you could imagine. Nadal won eventually but Djokovic played wonderfully and it was a very close run thing.

What a shame my knee is still tweaking and I can’t play tennis otherwise I would have played like a demon today after watching such an inspirational match.

Yeah, right…..

A couple of years ago, I had a really strange experience. I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep. I thought I was still awake and I opened my eyes and was sure that there was someone in the room with me. I closed my eyes tight, absolutely terrified and felt someone sit on the bed and then I felt as if someone was sitting on me as I couldn’t breathe and I was completely unable to move or struggle. After what seemed like a couple of minutes, I eventually woke up and found that it had all been a rather hideous nightmare, and it took me a long while to recover.

This same dream has happened to me maybe half a dozen times since. Always the same feeling that someone is in the room, a feeling of terror and the same suffocating sensation and the worst is not being able to struggle. It happened again last night with one refinement, this time, I knew what was happening was a nightmare and I although I still tried to fight the person off, it was more a case of trying to wake myself up as this time, I knew subconsciously, what was happening to me.

I was listening to the radio a while ago, and they were talking about why people think they have been abducted by aliens. One of the doctor/scientists on the programme said that one explanation was ‘Sleep Paralysis’ and went on to describe exactly what I have described to you above. I have since read a lot about about it and it is a very well documented phenomenon - try googling it, there are lots of references to it. Not everyone experiences the hallucinations which accompany the paralysis but it is felt that it may be a possible explanation for people thinking they have been visited by witches, ghosts and aliens and such like.

One of the many web sites that explains this experience is run by the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and it has links to lots of other ones. The painting at the top of the page is by the Swiss artist, Henry Fuseli and is called ‘The NIghtmare’. It has been suggested that he may be depicting a sleep paralysis episode. In mythology, the Hag is a well known figure of a wizened old crone who is supposed to visit during sleep, sit on your chest and send you nightmares. So if I look a little ‘hagridden’ today, you will excuse me I’m sure! And it is Friday the 13th today…

Anyway, back to business. A couple of weeks ago, I got chatting to an old lady at the market stall when I was buying those plasticized fabrics. She asked me if I would have a go at restoring her favourite poetry book which she loved and used a lot, but which had fallen to bits after her dog had a go at chewing it (obviously not a poetry fan then).

As you can see it was in a bit of a state, I was going to make a new case for it but she said she liked the original cover (teeth marks and all) so as I’m not really a book restorer I did the best I could with what I had, I hope she likes it. She won’t know of course that the first time I did it, I opened the book up and realized I had stuck the text block in UPSIDE DOWN. One of the advantages of making blank books is that this doesn’t normally matter. In this case, it mattered a lot, so I had to rip it apart and start again…

This has all been a bit serious hasn’t it? I’d better leave you with a bit of silliness to lighten the mood or you might not come back :-)

And to keep you up to date on the progress of my diet….

I am not one of life’s natural green fingered, gardening types. Don’t get me wrong, I like having a nice garden, I just don’t particularly enjoy the process of getting it nice. I have a chap who is supposed to be my gardener but he is so busy at this time of year, the most he manages is keeping the lawn under control. Last year, I planted some Irises and some Arum Lilies on my river bank and the gardener strimmed them to death before I had time to mention I had planted them. Recently, I ventured out and planted some lily of the valley plants under my lime tree. Unfortunately, they went the same way as the lilies and irises….

The gardener also doesn’t plant out the pots and planters in the garden so once a year, I deck myself in old clothes and gardening gloves and spend a day planting marguerites, geraniums and lavender and getting very grubby. Have I mentioned I hate having dirty finger nails…

When I had finally finished, I had a shower and noticed that my knee was a bit itchy. This morning, I awoke and my knee was VERY itchy. Look away at this point if you are of a nervous disposition….

I have a huge blistery bite thingy on my knee which has been driving me insane with itchiness all day. I knew I wasn’t cut out for gardening…. A friend said it was probably a spider which had laid eggs under the skin and as we speak, hundreds of little spiderettes are hatching and growing….I think he knows I am a hypochondriac and was just teasing - wasn’t he?

I watched the Stella Artois tennis championships on TV this afternoon. ( to try and take my mind off the itching). Rafael Nadal was playing and he beat Jonas Bjorkman 6-2, 6-2 . He seems to have recovered after beating Roger Federer in the final of the French Open, and to have adapted to playing on grass (after the clay at Roland Garros), with no difficulty at all.

During a break in play they showed this little clip of Rafael Nadal exercising on court before the match. Watch it and weep…

This guy has muscles in places I don’t even have places!

You will have noticed that yet again, I have done no bookbinding. Well, the sun was shining, the tennis was on, I had a poorly knee….oh dear, and it can only get worse as the summer progresses…

This word is turning into a bit of a buzz word over here, isn’t it? Still, two posts in two days can’t be bad….

I was driving into Dorchester yesterday to the hairdressers (no major disasters there, hair same but shorter, hairdresser fully mobile again!) when I passed through an area called Poundbury. This is a ‘model village’ (read ‘housing estate’) which is being built on the outskirts of Dorchester by Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.

It is a very contentious development as opinions are divided about the architectural merit (or otherwise) of the houses being built there, the density of the development and its eventual size. This quote is from a local web site and reflects some of the ‘anti’ feeling about Poundbury (the full letter can be read here, it’s hilarious!)

“In my understanding, be it correct or otherwise, the Poundbury development was intended to reflect the architecture and community of a traditional West Dorset country village. This, I assume, is the brief that the designers, architects and developers are working by. It is possible that I am not the only person who is struggling with that concept, considering that the Poundbury development is quite possibly the diametric opposite of that brief, in every perceivable way.

I am no designer, nor an architect or a developer, but it doesn’t take an expert in this field to reach the conclusion that the surreal, and quite frankly “fake” Poundbury development appears to be taking heavy inspiration from the following:

- Kensington & Chelsea
- Walt Disney
- Regents Park Residencies
- 18th Century Normandy
- Southern European/Spanish
- Rural Germany/Austria
- Peckham
- Far-Reaching corners of the Milky Way.”

Personally, I think it’s dreadful and I could fill a whole post with my objections (hmm, now that’s an idea for a dull day) but one good thing that comes from all the digging and excavations that are going on are the poppies which spring up along the roadside. I was driving past and screeched to a halt to take some photographs of them. You can see some of Poundbury in the background.

I don’t mention Dorchester much but I went into town the other day and walked through the Borough Gardens and spotted the clock and the bandstand which have just been freshly painted and look really good.

All the bandstand needs is the Wessex Military Band which plays in Bucky Doo Square in Bridport on Saturday market days. They look amazing in their scarlet uniforms. I managed to get a shot of them last Saturday.

It makes a change to be showing you shots of the towns instead of the coast - I thought you might be getting a bit bored with those. I had a lovely surprise yesterday. My book swap book arrived. It was sent to me by Crazy Daisy Girl (alias Diana Waite) all the way from Utah. It’s a gorgeous little book and to tell me something about the town she lives in, she made the cover from a flour sack from a local flour mill, the pages are red to represent the red rocks which are from the area. Here are some photographs of it.

My album is coming along. I have finished sewing the pages together and have started to make the cover. It has been a nightmare! I am using thicker than usual board as the it needed to be sturdier due to the size of the album, so I had to take it to the gallery I used to work at where they have a huge guillotine which made short work of cutting the board to size. Of course I always have problems with glue and manoeuvering large sheets of gluey paper is just so difficult. I originally intended to have leather corners on the album but to be quite honest it would have made it even more difficult to position the marbled paper so I chickened out… Anyway, progress so far…

So far, so good, so stressful….now I need a lie down :-)

Instead, I am going to go and play with my Wii fit. I am trying to lose weight as you know and this is such a fun way of exercising. I love the step class and the hula hoop and the jogging and the downhill skiing slalom and the yoga….brilliant fun. For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, check this out.

I have to close the blinds in case the neighbours think I have gone insane….next thing I’ll be moving to Poundbury :-)

I went for a walk on my favourite beach last night. I was delighted to find lots of the coastal plants in full bloom along the edge of the beach and on the cliff tops. I think the purple flowers are called ‘thrift’ but will have to check up on the others. 

I had lots of company on my walk - not of the human kind though.

The cliff tops are honeycombed with rabbit warrens and I saw dozens of them during my walk. It’s slightly disconcerting actually. The cliff edges are unstable enough without bunnies mining them! It was a lovely walk though, even though it was grey, the sun kept trying to break through and the sunbeams shining on the sea were gorgeous.

I went for a walk as I needed to get out - I had spent the entire day sewing this giant album I am making. I started by cutting 50 sheets of ivory Colorplan 270gsm paper (which is the same as Falkiners use in their photograph albums). Each sheet had to be measured and cut individually and then scored so I could fold over a 2cm section on one side. This helps to space the pages so that the album lies flat once photographs are placed into it. 

The next step was to sew the pages together which so far has taken me over a day and I am only about half of the way through. I normally just hold the text block in my hands to sew but as these pages are 40cm x 50cm, that’s just not possible. The sewing would be easier I think if I was using a sewing frame but as I don’t have one, I am just lying each new page on top of the previous one and holding them in place. It seems to be working so far….

I found this great web site the other day that invites people to post an image of themselves when they were a child and then to photograph themselves re-creating the childhood photograph. It’s called ‘Young Me, Now Me’ and some of the photographs are hilarious. I ‘borrowed’ these to show you what I mean. You must visit and see the rest of the photographs - or even post your own!

As you might have guessed, I couldn’t resist digging out a Young Me, Now Me combination. It’s not a direct recreation but with a bit of cropping and converting to B&W, it’s close enough…

It’s interesting to note I had bags under my eyes even when I was 8. Must have been all that reading after lights out under the bed covers with a torch! And my hairstyle hasn’t changed that much - just got longer. Which reminds me, I’m off to my hairdresser again on Wednesday. Last time I went, he was in a  wheelchair as he had broken his leg very badly and he did struggle to cut my hair - I’m amazed he even tried. It necessitated me lowering my chair until it was inches off the floor so that he could reach me - I felt like a little girl again, sitting on those miniature chairs we had in primary school.

Shall I be more adventurous this time….? Nah!