White Haired Woman

I have lots of favourite places – it depends on where I am (was) when it is (was) my most favourite.

In Zanesville, where I was born and spent my first seven years, it would be my great-grandmother’s house followed by my grandmother’s house.

The Great Weller’s house was like something out of an old movie. I think there were about twenty rooms though it could have been a hundred, for all I know. We weren’t encouraged to explore when we were there, so never went above the first floor* but there was a staircase to go to the second floor, I believe. (Without a mind’s eye it is difficult to picture things and I have no memory of a stairway up to another floor – I just know there was one.)

The downstairs rooms were huge. We always went in through the side door, which led, on your left, to the dining room. Ahead of you were the stairs to the first floor*, and, at the end of the hallway there was a wooden, floor-standing cabinet which, when you cranked the handle, made music. To the right was a study with a huge partners’ desk which I remember quite vividly as you could pull the drawers open from either side! If you went through the study, you would arrive at the front door, I think, and a foyer which I don’t remember at all. Off to your right from the foyer would have been a quite grand sitting room, known as the ‘gold’ room because all the wood of the furniture was painted gold. Further round was the music room which had a grand piano and through there was the dining room. Off to the right, half way down the dining room were the pantry and kitchen, which was enormous!

The first floor had quite a few bedrooms and, I imagine several bathrooms. At the top of the stairs and down the hall, the room on the right was the Great Weller’s sitting room. She was always sitting in a chair next to the window when we visited. She was in her late 80s by then and suffered from various ailments. She always had a blanket on her lap which draped to the floor. Each of us in turn would sit on her lap and chat to her. It was there that she told me she was going to leave me her beautiful aquamarine ring when she died. I actually had the nerve (at 4 or 5) to ask her when she expected to die! I don’t remember what her answer was. (She did leave me that ring which I have passed to Veronica so that she doesn’t get impatient like I did!)

Opposite her sitting room was her bedroom. There is a legend in the family that the Great Weller broke her hip when she was 89 and was more or less told that she wouldn’t walk again. About 6 weeks after she broke her hip, they say, she was up and moving the heavy furniture in her bedroom around. I can’t vouch for the truth of this – if she was anything like me, and I’m only 81, she was impatient with her inability to do things she had easily done before and would have tried.

Down the hall, near the stairs, was a room I remember quite well. I don’t know what it was usually used for, but I remember it because, one year, we spent the night at the Great Weller’s house and the Christmas tree and all the presents were in that room. Beyond that room, on the other side of a door, was the room we slept in that night and, I think, other nights as well. Judy and I, being very excited about Christmas and Santa Claus etc, got out of bed and – lying on our tummies – we peeked under the door to find out what was happening. If I remember correctly, our mother and father were there with other grown-ups, trying out a little train on a track. If it truly was my father, I couldn’t have been much more than three and a half and Judy would have been two. It could, of course, have been our step father in which case I was, perhaps, seven or eight.

The room we were sleeping in had windows looking out over the garden. One night, not at Christmas, Judy was lying awake and I was asleep. Suddenly, she later told me, she saw a ‘nun’ on her knees, come through the wall and go out through the closed window. This was the beginning of our belief that the house used to house nuns. (It didn’t). The house was built for the previous owner and sold to my great grandfather, Samuel Weller (His parents must have read Dickens!).

Carrying on through that room, the next in the circle was Herminnie’s room. Herminnie was, I believe, a cousin of my grandmother Ethel. She had been married but, presumably, her husband had died and she was ‘taken in’ by the Great Weller as a paid companion.

Herminnie was a big part of my younger years. She was, possibly, in her forties when she was widowed but to us she was quite old. She was of average height and had very big bosoms! You might wonder how we knew this…..well, one day, Herminnie had to take a bath and she was looking after us so we all went into the bathroom and Herminnie got into the bath as we watched. Then she washed herself but gave us the job of washing under her big, droopy bosoms, first one then the other!

Later, after the Great Weller died when I was eleven and she was ninety two, the house was torn down and a motel was built on the land.

Notes * The Great Weller was what my daughter called my great grandmother Weller when she was young, and it stuck. The Great Weller was born Herminnie Pickens in 1862. She married Sam in the 1880’s and had two daughters.

Note * The first floor in England is what Americans would call the second floor.

My most unfavourite part of my daily routine is actually getting up in the morning!

Unlike all the older people I know, I am not an early riser, nor have I ever been, aside for a two month period in the year 2000 when I was up every morning at 6 for a walk around the local country park – a time when I really wanted to lose those extra pounds.

When I was going to college, when I was working, when I had a daughter who had to be taken to school or got up and dressed, I was up and ready – but, at the weekends or during school holidays and when I didn’t have a temporary job, I would stay in bed until I had to get up. When we had the shop, which opened at 9am, I would get up at 8 and be ready for opening but, on Sundays, I probably wasn’t up before 9:30 or 10.

I can get up very early if necessary, though. When we needed to be at Ashford International to get the Eurostar at 8, I got up with plenty of time. On the day that I needed to be at the hospital at 7 am, to have my knee replaced, I was up and ready.

But, on days when there is no real reason to be up and smiling and raring to go, I’m not. I always get up in the night for a pee and then I wake up naturally around 9 to 9:30 and, seeing the time, tell myself, “I’d better get up,” but I have been known to fall asleep again and wake up about 10:30.

I know that this isn’t a ‘good’ thing to do, if for no other reason than breakfast is late and lunch is even later. Also, my morning routine of reading the news (online) followed by attempting the puzzle page of the New York Times, is completely messed up!

Julian gets up around 7:30 most mornings; my friend Myrna gets up around 6, makes herself some tea then goes back to bed to watch the news; my mother-in-law used to get up around 6 every morning, summer and winter; my mother used to get up around 6 until she decided she would just not bother and stayed in bed with the lights off all day and all night. I don’t want to turn into my mother so I will make myself get up every day but I seriously doubt that I will ever get up before 9 am and feel happy about it!

At 81 it’s always possible that I haven’t a clue about podcasts! Some 81 year olds can’t even turn on a computer and never will. Luckily, as soon as I knew there was such a thing as email, I had to learn how to do it and I’ve been working on home computers, laptops, MacBooks and iPads for over 25 years!

I started off on computers with writing essays when I was studying with the Open University, back in the 90’s and then, as soon as I could, I got an email address and wrote to friends (who had email addresses) and, when I had little to say, I played spider solitaire. A few years on, when we had broadband and didn’t have to take over the telephone line, I started my online games and jigsaws shop and kept a look-out on eBay for things I thought my customers might be interested in – at that time I still had my antique and collectables shop, so I was buying and selling little items I liked, while assuming that if I liked them, someone else would too.

When we sold our shop in 2005, we moved to the seaside but I kept my online shop open and concentrated on late nineteenth and early twentieth century wooden jigsaws, though I carried on buying and offering games and a few toys for sale.

From 2005 until 2014, I bought and sold quite happily. No one bothers to tell you (in case you’re thinking of dealing in second-hand items), when you buy a ‘lot’, sometimes it’s a lot of stuff, and some of it you will never sell! One time I bought a lovely ‘lot’ of calling card cases at a famous London auction house. I sold four or five of them and still have four or five! Usually, though, you can make most of the costs back on the one or two really good pieces and sell the others for less but still making a profit.

In my understairs cupboard, if you could get past the clothes hanging in front of its door, you would find around six crates of china – mainly 19th century plates and a nice late 18th century earthenware teaset. In the 90’s, before minimalism, people used to buy single plates, presumably as decorations for a wall. I used to buy the plates from a ‘runner’ (I think that’s what he was) called Des who would turn up every week or so. He would have spent the previous week going from shop to shop searching for things to buy which he could make a profit on but so could the person buying it from him. He was a mine of information and could tell me who made it, what it was made of and how much to ask from my customers. I sold a lot of what I bought from him but, sadly minimalism came and the customers for the plates I still had didn’t! But, someday the trends will change – maybe when my grand daughter is in her 60’s and opens a shop!

My online shop was called nostalgiagames.net. I was the only person selling old wooden jigsaws for a good few years. I had customers from all over the jigsawing world but mainly the US and UK. I bought most of the jigsaws that I sold, from auctions online.

The end came when other sellers realised how much money they could get for the best jigsaws. I just couldn’t afford to offer such high prices because I also had to pay for the goods to be sent to me and, of course, there are commissions and VAT to be paid on top of all the rest.

I closed my site down and was left with quite a few things in my store-room. But, in 2015, I heard about an Emporium opening with very reasonable rented spaces and went ahead and opened a stall. I thought people might be wanting to buy plates again but – no – I sold one plate in the first week or so – not enough to pay the rent! But I also sold some old games; in fact for the next two years I sold mostly old games but I ran out of stock and tried to find more online. Some things people wanted, others no one wanted. So I closed in 2017, selling much of my stall fittings to someone else starting up.

Since then I have fully retired, so now I have time to listen to podcasts! At the moment I have no idea what is available. I did listen to several of Rachel Maddow’s podcast series about how fascists tried to take over in America in the 30’s and 40’s. In a few years, if I live that long, I may find that they have finally succeeded. I hope they don’t, but I don’t live there anymore and I won’t be affected by the terrible and ridiculous things the coming government seems to want to do. I do feel very sad for those who live in America who fought so hard to stop them, especially my relatives. Maybe it won’t be so bad….fingers crossed.

I am sitting here a year later and have realised, after reading the above post, that I didn’t answer the question posed. At this moment I am not listening to any podcast and haven’t for several months but I have listened to a few during the last couple of years.

The first podcast I listened to was an interesting one about an artist whose name – and the name of the podcast – has completely slipped my mind. The next was a series by Rachel Maddow describing the way the far right almost took over the country in the 1930s. It was called Ultra and it was fascinating!

I also listened to Bagman, another political series by Rachel Maddow. I spent very little time thinking about American politics until around 2015, so had no knowledge of the things that Nixon and Agnew did.

I must admit that I don’t spend much time on ‘listening’ when I can either ‘watch’ or ‘write’ or ‘read‘. For me, listening to a podcast means sitting still and doing nothing other than – listening! It is silly, I know, but I find it very difficult to just sit and listen. Sitting and reading or sitting and watching are things I do much of the day, now that I’m older and I can do either quite happily but, sitting and listening? Nope! It’s wasting time! Why? I can’t explain it.

(I am partly deaf and this may be part of the reason. If I could be doing a household chore or painting, perhaps I would listen to broadcasts more but whenever I try this I start thinking of what I’m doing rather than listening then I find I’ve missed important details.)

1. The McCarthy hearings which were on tv after school every day – annoying to a girl of ten or so!
2. The Coronation of Elizabeth II (I saw the movie at the Esquire, Ludlow Avenue, must have been 1953, I think)
3. Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
4. The polio epidemic which seemed to happen every summer in the early and mid 50s.
5. President Kennedy being the winner of the election in 1960.
6. The Bay of Pigs, and the Cuba Crisis when everyone thought we were going to die in a nuclear explosion.
7. President Kennedy’s assassination.
8. Marilyn Monroe’s death.
9. Martin Luther King’s assassination and Bobby Kennedy’s assassination.
10. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, etc etc – great British music scene.
11. I forgot to put the Day the Music Died (plane crash which killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens).
12. The first Man on the Moon.

I’ve reached the seventies now. I’m sure there were loads of important things but I can’t recall at this particular time so late at night, so I’ll leave it there.

Good night everyone. Sleep well.

In England, a million dollars is worth only about £765,500. Of course, that would buy me a lot of old jigsaw puzzles, or chocolate biscuits or dry white wine but, in the scheme of things it’s not really worth all that much!

OK, so we don’t have a mortgage now and are pretty well off. Though old(ish – 81 isn’t that old), we don’t have to worry about medical bills – the NHS is still working well-enough for our ills. We don’t need lots of new clothes, shoes, handbags, or gimmicky electronic goods, just maybe some replacement tubes of paint and some canvases from time to time – although we’ve both made so many paintings that are never going to sell that we can always paint over them! Our needs are few and the pension seems to cover those.

But kids and grandkids could use a bit of help, living as they do in two of the most expensive areas of England for housing. ‘Veronica’ could use a cash injection of £500k to finish improvements on her new house but that would leave only £265,000 for her daughter – that’s no good! She lives in the most expensive area and would need a lot more if she wants to pay off her mortgage and still have enough to buy somewhere a little less expensive.

And then, there’s tax. Say I win £766,000 on the lottery, I wouldn’t have to pay tax on that but if I give away part of it, the person I give it to would have to pay tax on it. So what I’d given them wouldn’t be so much. Still, I’m sure they would appreciate it.

I think I’ll just have to win a bigger lottery prize! If I should win tomorrow night’s European Lottery, I would be something like £24,000,000 richer! Now, that’s more like it!

Daughter and grand daughter would be given enough to pay tax and still have loads for properties, cars, clothes, travel. I’d be left with quite a bit myself and then I could sit down and work out which charities I would give some to.

The Dogs Trust would get some – I’ve gone to them for my two wonderful canine companions over the years; Julian is keen to donate to the Great Ormand Street Hospital for Children charity because he spent a month or two with them when he was a child and, coincidentally, ‘Veronica’ spent a couple of weeks there as a toddler, so I am also keen – they do such great work! Then there’s the Woodland Trust, the lifeboats, the air ambulances, the hospices, the blind, the deaf, medical research, Samaritans, women’s refuges, the food banks, the hostels for homeless people and so on and on and on!

I think I’d better win one of the even bigger prizes! I’ll probably need to pay a secretary to write the cheques for all these charities and to research others!

Or, maybe I should forget about lotteries and huge winnings and leave it up to my daughter and her daughter to work out their finances to the best of their abilities and donate monthly small amounts to just the few charities that I already support.

My title refers to Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, who were painting in the early to middle part of the 20th century and were Canadian. (Go and have a look at some of their paintings!) I love their colours, in particular and, indeed, colour is what I look at in every painting. The Scottish Colourists are a group of painters known, especially for their colour choices. (Google images has loads of their paintings to see!)

In fact, I could probably name painters from almost any period when looking only at their colours, but, I’m not going to name names here simply because a long list of names wouldn’t really tell you what I really like when I look at paintings. Because it’s the colours I look at, there are a lot of abstract painters whose work appeals to me.

I suppose this is one of the reasons that I prefer to paint abstract paintings.

A group of my earlier abstracts, completed in oil on canvas from about 2017 to 2020.

And here’s one which I am pleased with. I found a painting by a ‘real’ artist that I liked and copied it.

And one more that isn’t abstract and isn’t realistic:

So, these are a few of my paintings and I think you can see that I like colour. I am not my favourite painter but if I like what I’ve painted, I like it!

I suppose my first priority for tomorrow is to wake up and get up. Despite my advanced age I’m not much like many older people of my acquaintance who get up at the crack of dawn. No, my alarm is set for 9am and, if I don’t feel like getting up, I turn it off and go back to sleep! I’ve always been more of a night owl, though I don’t stay up as late as I used to, normally being under the covers and comfy by around midnight.

Julian is away in Dorset for a painting week so Lola and I are in charge of everything. I had a carpal tunnel operation last week on my right hand. I put the op off for years because I’m right-handed and there are certain important things I need my right hand for. But, the bother from the effects of squished nerves in my wrist became too bad to let it go any longer.

I had to wait for a free space in the hand surgeon’s busy calendar and it just so happened that he was ready for me last week. It would have been better if it were next week or even the week after, from the point of view of an easy life. With Julian away, there’s no one to cut an avocado in half but me. Mind you, I didn’t know how much it would hurt to do it myself, wearing a huge bandage as I am, but it was pretty painful! If I hadn’t started to cut it, I would just have left it till Julian came back and had egg on toast instead of avocado on toast, but I had to finish what I started and, after the pain, it was delicious!

The operation, itself, was really good. The local anaesthetic was the most painful part of it and that was very quick. I waited a quarter of an hour or so then the doctor came in, asked me if I wanted to watch – NO THANKS – then started a conversation with me which took my mind off what he was doing. Somehow, we started talking about my *Aphantasia. The nurse knew nothing about the subject and found it difficult to comprehend that such a thing is possible but the doctor knew what it was and asked me some questions, though he doesn’t have it either so some of his questions made me laugh!

The operation was over in a flash, some little micropore plasters were put on the wound and my hand bandaged with gauze, cotton wool and a crepe bandage. I phoned Julian who had driven to a scenic view to draw while he waited and a few minutes after that he arrived to take me home

Back to the subject of tomorrow’s priorities – after getting up, washing with one hand, which is not at all easy, dressing with one hand which is a dawdle, eating my breakfast and reading the newspapers, my next priority will be to be ready for my grocery order to be delivered. I gave up driving a few years ago when my eyesight was getting poorer so I signed up for deliveries. I wasn’t sure I would like doing my shopping online but I do! Julian and I between us meet the driver at the door, empty his boxes into ours, slide our boxes to the kitchen and empty them into fridge, freezer and cupboards. Tomorrow’s delivery will be quite small as Julian won’t be eating lunches or evening meals at home this week so the job will be quite easy and quick.

A further priority will be to take Lola for her daily walk and also to have a running game from living room to kitchen and back – she runs, I throw from a standing position, a selection of squeaky toys which have flashing lights in them. My aim hasn’t got any better, sadly, but she doesn’t seem to mind if the toy I throw goes all the way to the other end of the kitchen or bounces off the door frame of the living room.

Other priorities follow in the same vein until it’s bedtime, once again when, I suppose I will prioritise waking up the next day and so it goes.

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*Aphantasia – a lack of pictures in the head. See my earlier posts for a more detailed explanation or go to good old Google!