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Showing posts from December, 2014

Singing

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How I would love to have a really beautiful singing voice.  Unfortunately that is just not going to happen.  I have however decided to settle for good enough and I have joined a choir. At school I loved singing but I was never good enough for our really quite serious school choir.  I could hold a tune just about but couldn't get all the high notes with the sopranos and couldn't manage all the lower ones when I was sent to sit with the altos instead.  I could read music just about but I couldn't play any instrument (still can't) and struggled with sight reading.  So at around about seventeen years old I gently slipped out of the choir, following my teenage theory of "if you can't do it really well, don't do it at all". What a totally stupid philosophy of life.  Yes it meant I held onto the things I could already do well and got better and better at them (writing about English Literature, cooking, baking, walking, writing poetry) but all sorts of

November: going, going, gone

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Has someone speeded up time?  What have I been up to since I saw you last?  Loads and loads, here is a whistle stop tour. Drove to Devon (car just does the three hundred mile journey by itself these says while I snooze on the back seat, I wish). Spent a week volunteering with the National Trust  helping to decorate Killerton House for Christmas. Good things: great company, good food, fabulous instruction from the fabulous Sarah Pepper  so that I now know how to make wreaths and swag mantelpieces.  I am not an experienced or talented flower arranger.  Every day after a few minutes of working away on my own I looked at what I was doing compared to everyone else and felt such a rush of shame and embarrassment that I contemplated just sneaking out and not coming back.  Yet every day when I persevered, following the guidance I had been given, not giving up, remembering that with Christmas decoration "more is more",  whatever I was working on turned a corner and suddenly