Hedging

I've got a small length of privet hedge here and ever since my brother stopped hedge cutting a few years ago it has been a pain to get it cut. It grows fast and needs several trims per summer.   There is a professional tree surgeon who lives in my road, a friendly chap, but busy with big jobs although he advertises that he will do small hedges and gardens.  I have engaged him to do it in previous years, paid the going rate, and been happy with that.  However, he never shows up unless I keep ringing him and leaving him messages to pester him to come.  It gets tiresome.  I spoke to his wife one day and explained I was giving another "gentle reminder" that my hedge needed trimming.  She said she quite understood and would tell him, adding that he never writes things down and is very forgetful.  Now that came as a shock because, having been involved in business all my life, how can you run a business if you never write things down?  My neighbour John came over this week and said he had ordered firewood but the delivery had not arrived. Funny that, John.   I had seen John walking up and down the road several times and it turned out he  was looking for the same man to "remind him" about his firewood.  John stays in when the  wood is to be delivered in order to assist with stacking it.  So I said to John I have given up with this man and knowing that he is unreliable I order my wood from a merchant up the road who delivers on the day he says, at the time he says, and puts it in my shed for me, for which I generously tip.   I rely on my woodburner for heat and I cannot be worrying about a wood delivery in winter.  John tells me he is now 90 and in fact offered to cut my grass for me when he found my brother had given up.  Now how's that for neighbourlyness!  At the time, a few weeks ago, I actually thought John was 86, as if that makes much difference but I thought I cannot have an 86 year old doing my grass for me, I would be ashamed to be  sitting indoors while he did the work.   Now I find he is in fact 90.   He told me that when his daughter reached 60 a few weeks ago he felt he must be getting old.  

So yesterday I decided that another step onward with me looking after my own back yard - garden - from now on, I ordered a hedge trimmer.  Like the lawn trimmer - strimmer - it is battery powered.  It is not a Karcher this time but a Flymo.  It had good reviews, is quite light, and will do an hours hedging on one battery charge.  That will be more than enough.  It should arrive tomorrow.   I am sorry that I am not buying these things from local suppliers but ordering through Amazon but I regret to say that these local people are not helpful enough in sales to get my custom.  It is a sad state of affairs but the staff just are not there to be  seen and the gardening equipment is just left to sell itself I suppose.  You can look around for someone to reach something off a shelf, make a recommendation, ask if you need assistance, and they just are not there.  So a quick browse on the internet and then on to Amazon and it is all done.  Videos, reviews and good offers and delivered to my door. 

I went outside yesterday in the cold, we had hail showers through the day, and did a bit of hedge trimming with some loppers to get the higher bits and will do a bit more today.  I will just have to see how I get on with it all when the new hedge trimmer arrives but I think I may still be lopping a few high bits with the loppers. 

Of course I still have the front beech hedge which I will need help with but that only requires one cut per year in August.  I will have to cross that bridge when it comes. 

And Now The Ads

 I used to enjoy the cinema advertisements, the ones you see before the film and before the trailers.  They are now but a shadow of what they used to be having changed significantly even in the six or seven years that I have been back going to the cinema.  They are now dominated by public service adverts for the British Army and the Royal Navy, the National Lottery and things like getting jobs in child care, breast cancer awareness which much as it is an important message it goes on way too long, the King's Trust (Trust always spoken with a northern accent vowel) and being told that 900,000 young people are out of work, the equivalent of the third largest city in Britain.  (This always begs the question for me as to why do we have vacancies and why are we told that it is vital that immigrants keep coming to fill the vacancies when so many of us are out of work?)  That is a rhetorical question so don't bother to answer it.  The other advert is for funerals and at that point I cover my eyes with my hat as the ad shows the lifespan from birth to death of an elderly woman going through all smiley things in life and skipping through the decades until  one day flowers and death. Does this really make people sign up for funeral plans?

 I used to like the Virgin flights adverts.  They don't come up anymore.  I suppose so many people are streaming at home that the advertisers are deserting the cinemas.   (It is a sad time for cinemas and with Warner Bros taken over by Paramount having pipped Netflix at the post.  Either one of them winning is not good for the cinema industry.) 

 Back to the ads.  Apart from those there are a few EV car ads which with cars at £35,000 to £50,000 plus and all looking the same (SUVs)  do not hold any interest for me and not at all like the old days of ads for Minis and Cortinas and the odd Jaguar and Lotus which I think we all took a bit of interest in and wondered which one might be the latest Bond car and did the Lotus have a Norfolk registration of interest to us yokels. 

There remains one advert that comes up every time I go and that is an annoying holiday ad for TUI holidays where a very slim girl with a big smile dives into a perfect swimming pool with no screaming kids and no sunbeds filled with towels/and or bodies and nothing the slightest bit imperfect or vile having earlier got on to a plane loaded with smiling people not all scrambling to place their wheely suitcases in the overhead locker and not all hot and sweaty and squashed in but all sitting peacefully and smiling at the camera in perfect clothes of course. 

I was just reading that a lady, described as elderly, aged 71, (elderly?)  went missing in South Africa on a TUI holiday so all was not so hunky dory with the lovely swimming pool and the lovely blue sky.  (TUI used to be Thomson Holidays in case you are interested and they got swallowed up by a German company who were engineers or manufacturers I think and reinvented themselves as a holiday company). She has never been found, no remains, nothing, and it is thought she was murdered for her body parts which sell well on some South African bush markets for witch craft.  She walked alone when I would probably have already gone to bed if on holiday even if it was broad daylight and not too sure of the area, but that is by the by.  She disappeared.  The holiday tour went on without her and that was the end of the poor 'elderly'  British woman.  TUI still run the holiday but have declined to tell guests about the incident because they do not want to scare them.  I always have that funny feeling about TUI when I see that advert described above of the girl diving into the swimming pool.  I now feel like 'told you so'.   Nothing is ever as hunky dory as that on holidays.

The King and I

 Am I pleased that King Charles is going to the US to see Trump?  Yes.  Now is the time we need a bit of normality and if anybody can bring it then Charles can.  He may be a bit of a silly ol' chump sometimes but visits like this are just up Charles's street.  A bit of diplomacy and normalcy.  I am sure Queen Camilla will be in her element too. This is a time when politicians can step aside and leave it to the King.  We are allies of the US and will remain so, we do not want politicians squabbling and back-chatting and acting all hurt.    Attacks on foreign policy and the navy here hurt as the truth usually does.  We should take it on the chin and deal with it.    Roosevelt and later Truman did not always say good things about Britain but Churchill got over it mainly by ignoring it.   Go forth and repair our relations Charles.   King Charles we need you.    Friends forever, US and Britain.  

Spirituality

 I've written about spirituality before and I thought I would write about it again.  It means different things to different people and I imagine to some people it means nothing whatsover.  As Kathy said last time I wrote about it, it is for her a feeling we are all beings with an inter-connection.    For me it is simply man cannot live by bread alone.  This probably comes from 12 years of convent life in a Catholic school.  Some of it rubs off and buries itself within you.   I left it behind me for decades and have only picked it up again during the years that I have been alone.  It is also probably a crutch for me but if it helps me then it is a good crutch.   

The spirit for me is that the body lives with both physical and non-physical feelings.  That is how I feel at this moment.  I am human and I can change and the older I get the more changes I see in myself;  the more I alter my  views on maybe how I have behaved in the past, how I have reacted to events that took place, how I might react now.   It can be frightening like going into an unknown of a person I haven't seen in myself before.  I can only speak for me personally, one can never switch to knowing what others think.  Yesterday I spent a long time going over and over events of long ago and how if they happened now I would react differently.  Changes that I never thought would happen to the way I think have happened.   

Spirtuality is as it is for me,  and I speak only for me.  It may not exist for you.    How it is and for those who do not feel that, then that is fine.  There is no right or wrong about it, no success or failure implied.  No have to or have not to.  No judgment. I have not passed judgment.    No difference in your life implied or intended.  No better or worse.   It is just a personal way of dealing with the everyday for me at this time.

Good Friday

 

My usual images for Good Friday.

A Poem and a bit about poetry

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins is my beloved poet.  I won't say favourite because it is going too far to narrow ones likes to one.  I have many favourite poets.  Hopkins collected words as he went about his day.  He kept a notebook.  I do the same and I call my notebooks Words  after Hopkins  and I number them.  I am now up to book 3 since I finished my Masters.  That is six months.  They are school exercise books.  I also write lots of things in my Word books, not just lists of words.   

Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound in a line or lines. I used alliteration and assonance  in my poetry in my dissertation.  Hopkins was the master of words.   Here is an example of Hopkins alliteration from Pied Beauty where he is praising God for nature

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle; dim;

and in God's Grandeur: 

and all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 

Assonance is the repetition of the vowel sound as in soil, toil, smeared, bleared. 

You will find alliteration and assonance in all of Hopkins poems. 

Hopkins was the master of this and I greatly love his work and he was always with me when I was studying for my Masters.  This morning he is with me again.

Here is a poem from my dissertation.  It is unlikely to ever be read or published by anyone.  I wrote it after Hopkins poem Hurrahing in the Harvest.  

Hurrahing in a Time Machine with Gerard Manley Hopkins  

the sun shone well before
breakfast from dawn until midday
i made the most of it in meadows
and picked buttercups, soldiers buttons and
squeezed the milk of 
dandelions on to my hands
and spread it slowly across
my palms and watched it
ooze overboard
i heard a sound behind me and
i saw gerard manley hopkins.
i waited until i
fell in step with him.
i asked what he saw when first he walked here.
he stared ahead of him:
he saw not Drax
nor druids, dams nor drones, he said.
and at roads he rushed to run across.
what is that sound that spoke of wheel?
he beckoned me to save him
as if his soul across the skies
could mix with mine
and knot, not i i thought.
i cursed the car
and grabbed his hand his saviour
and looking west to where
the sun would set blank went
he stopped in front of stooks and me.
O God he called and
Holy Spirit come, a pause, ah,
pleaded pity now the people
O God the politicians
the patience long departed
pledged in piety lost in lies
despair disparity dwindled
the poor perhaps St Peter
comes for past purpose pitched
i listened, lizards passed 
i laughed, he looked long divided
laggards to his left he lurched
in vertigo less noble knight.
i rubbed the dandelion milk on to my face
and kicked the kissing gate and
the loose libertine
last night lost leeward. i
heard him plead O God
again and groping greenery
he waited and took the rosary rued
regret and in a rash run
he dropped his pocket book, paused and
peed upon the poppies, peewits
perfect peace on earth obey.
he'd left the lure of lloyds,
the lancet to bridges
seven siblings longing lonely
he took the lord the longitude
ignatius loyola
and disappeared to liverpool

That is my poem for today.  Today is Maundy Thursday in Holy Week.  the day of The Last Supper.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was the oldest of 8 children and he was to join his father's business in insurance, particularly of sea vessels and trade. (He would have been greatly troubled and stretched in his work in shipping insurance at this time now during the turmoil in the Straits of Hormuz and spare a thought for those in ship broking and insurance right now).  However, Hopkins broke his family's heart when he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest.  They severed links with him.   His friend was Robert Bridges who became a doctor, and later the poet laureate. Bridges helped Hopkins with his poems, edited and eventually published them after Hopkins died.    This is a little explanation of the last six lines of the poem. Hopkins was profoundly influenced by Ignatius of Loyola and finding God in all things. 

Daily Life

Yesterday didn't turn out so well because my massage was cancelled due to back problems of the masseuse.  She is having a constant battle with health and this is not good for running a business where she is the lone worker.  I was just getting ready to go for the train when I noticed she had whats app'd me an hour before telling me about the cancellation.   I understood, you can't give a massage if you are not 100% physically fit, but I was disappointed.   I have messaged her this morning and she is still closed to customers.  I am looking for another place to go.  There is one but I am cold and not in the right mood for changing providers but when I perk up in the sunshine which I hope comes soon I will investigate a new place to go.  I will stay with my Thai lady until my money on account with her is used up, my payments being in advance for better deal.  In spite of everything it is a commercial arrangement and I am looking at it this way.  She has become a friend over the three years I have been going but I am getting fed up with the constant interruptions to service causing the cancellations and re-arrangements.   

I have written two poems whilst here this morning.  A bit of angst always brings out a poem.  The cold weather is causing me to be a bit down at the moment.  I want to be cheerful but it is hard.  

 I have done my exercises.  In this order:

Walking heel to toe small steps across the room for balance.  Repeat many times during the day. 

Heel lifts to exercise calf muscles to aid the second "heart" hiding in the calves.  Slow and controlled exercise.  It is not a race to get through it. 

Toe lifts to aid ankle mobility. 

More balance exercises holding/steadying myself with chair back to hand if I need it. 

Wall squats.  Hold for 30 seconds.  Repeat as many times as I am able. 

Sit to stand.  Sit on chair, stand slowly, sit back down slowly.   I managed this 20 times. 

I will do more exercises later. 

If I am in an airport and I need to stand for a while then my legs must be in good shape.   I am working on this now for six months, just entering the seventh month.   I am improving.   This exercise plan was started when I booked my holiday.   I still cannot sit on my heels and have been doing that particular exercise for three months.  It can take much longer.  However, I can sit cross-legged on the floor like I did as a child and that is very satisfying.  And, of course, I can get up off the floor.  

The holiday is still on although I know there are some FCDO no-go areas in Azerbaijan.  I assume the itinerary will be adjusted accordingly if necessary.  I am not bothering the company to find out as I am sure they will tell me anything I need to know.  Quite frankly after reading my insurance small print it is not going to help me so I might as well just go.   It is only if the  travel company cancel altogether that I would get my money back, as I have said before.  Travel insurance is just like all insurance, the detail is in the small print.   I don't seem to have done very well with my travel insurance "peace of mind and feel good factor" as I feel anything but good.  I get lots of questionnaires from them regarding how do I feel about their service and I am telling them I am not particularly happy but everything from them is addressed to me as a highly valued customer when I feel anything but highly valued.  When I was trying to be honest with them about medical things I got shouted at by an extremely aggressive young lady who called me back about the conversation I had had with the Indian call centre when I had been trying to explain to an Indian boy a conversation I had had with my GP about statins.  It would make a good comedy sketch.  That cost me £100 whacked on to my premium.   

Well that's enough of that.   

I got my petrol on Monday at my normally quiet garage which was swamped with customers and queues.   I take it the normally busy supermarket garage up the road must have run dry.