Nothing much to report...

 - eheu fugaces - thwarted by injury, still no knitting and no immediate sign of any happening either...

I was trying to work out why not knitting is bothering me so much - I've done without for decades in the past but I'm beginning to conclude that I'm now so raddled by female martyrdom that I need to come up with elaborate pretexts to even think.  So yesterday I took this photo of daffodils and decided to see what it evoked without the meditative qualities of knitting as support...

So my first entirely knit free séance is recalling the daffodil strewn lawn in front of my grandmother’s house,  and its purpose is to see if I can't breathe even some transient life back into a time and place long gone, and so far hairnets are what I'm receiving .... yes, hairnets holding my grandmother's  weekly shampoo-and-set in place as she washed up delft (which is what it was most certainly called) and I dried and put back on a blue painted wooden dresser after Sunday lunch - while all the men snoozed in armchairs, by the way.  My grandma, myself and some combination of my female relatives, worked in this way under the baleful amber stare of Darby, the black cat, glowering in through the window, fluffed up on the small sill above the sink, with an attitude that nobody could ever mistake as belonging to a pet. 

But no matter how much I focus and hone in, the colour of my grandmother's lipstick is stubbornly failing to show.....  the shape of her mouth, yes; her lips, yes,, but no way did she not wear lipstick.  I see strong pink on cigarette stubs, but I'm not sure - I know her cigarette brand though: she encouraged me to take a puff from time to time as practice for when I was older. No detail either on her drop earrings, although I coveted them in intense detail for their dangle qualities (being only permitted sleepers or studs myself).  No, nothing up through the ether there, however a very clear view of the elongated, crooked piercings in which they were worn, and which were homemade, with needle and cork, by her sister in their girlhood kitchen.  Likewise, her array of colourful brooches, stylish shoes and hats aren't standing up and being counted as individual items in my recall, despite my hours spent viewing, testing and proffering opinions on all of them as grandma prepared to emerge, toilette complete.  Her bedroom was where we'd both try her outfits and pirouette critically in the oval mirror on her wardrobe door.   It was bright with two big windows, each overlooking different aspects of the daffodil lawn, then fencing and hedges and fields of friesian cattle grazing around scatterings of trees and one ancient and venerably beautiful beech. 

Grandma (left) prettying up my mother on a Sunday stroll

My grandmother was a bit vain - this is undeniable - she really cared about her appearance and encouraged me to pose and strut too in a way people generally didn't then -  fun.... in fact, she was fun.  She wore hats like mushrooms, hats with netting, hats like turbans, and had a very off-putting fur collar with tails and claws for Sunday Mass which both fascinated and repelled me.  She was also gleeful at holding an enviably trim figure intact right into her seventies and eighties ..." better than any of my daughters or daughters-in-law", she loved to whisper in my ear with a conspiratorial snigger... 

For what turned out to be the last time, I appeared in ripped jeans to visit her in hospital.  She wasn't saying much, poor lady, by then, but she passed her last remark in relation to me, "Someone should put her into a grooming course", she said.  

I already knew by then that she was perceived as controversial in a way that went beyond disinhibited aging, however what's coming back now, sparklingly bright, is her girlish spirit, the fact that she always had time to chat and cavort even as she worked hard...and she really did work.  And another thing...her total resolution that nothing can ever trump love - she acted that philosophy out and spoke about it on a daily basis as naturally as she walked and talked, brushed, swept, whisked, plumped, rolled, folded, scraped and polished with her wide-as-a mile approach to life, that was also remarkably atypical of that era and place.    

more from the contact sheets - grandma tending her hens

She wasn't a woman of huge means in her later years especially, but we children never went away without her pressing coins or notes into our hands to buy or do with whatever we wanted - which was an enormous treat and in fact my only source of revenue. I really do wish I could remember her hands better - I've lost them -  all I have is a flash of rings and a memory of hanging on to one while feeding the hens that used to mob us when we eventually emerged from the wash up with a pail of lunch scraps…   

My trouble is that I keep interrupting myself and losing my thread, as it were.. if I were knitting, I'm sure it would be clearer.