I was getting fed up with a sticky shelf where the golden syrup tins sit,
the dried fruit shelf needed a bit of a sort-out,
spring was in the air outside,
and it just kind of happened!
You get to see the pretty side of it...
... but there was plenty of the usual grime and elbow grease and embarassingly out of date spice packets, too.
And now we need Post-its to tell us where the cereal and the wooden spoons have gone!
Although I post about the jolly things our boys do with clay they've excavated themselves, long dog walks etc, a part of modern life is the way that electronic games can take over. Our boys are usually fairly phlegmatic that we limit their time on the computer and DS (and the TV, too), especially on school days. Their friends have (allegedly) unlimited time on games, and not much supervision either. It seems to me that our boys, or at least Son 2, are all the more obsessed, simply because they know they aren't allowed to play all day. The beginning of the holidays was a case in point - he was tired and grumpy, playing far too much, and angry at me every time I told him to turn off.
But, blessedly, a normal pattern of things is beginning to restore itself as the limits become accepted, and other things grab his interest - this Lego Minotaurus game, for example, which allows you to adapt the maze and make up your own rules, and has given us a few fiendish games and a lot of independent architectural work over the last week.
A sort-out of books led to the rediscovery of some comical gems - Spike Milligan's Milliganimals, and a couple of Far Side cartoon books. The recovery on the sofa was much-aided by readings of these cartoons, and Son 2 is also hooked.
The new digital piano, bought at some expense yet still a very good deal to replace the crumbling 'real' piano, is another huge draw and if you look closely you'll see a 'tick list' on the piano, which the boys mark every time they run through their piano pieces. Look at those double/treble/quadruple-ticked days! And the joy of having the headphones when the boys want to experiment with machine-gun noises, or when Ben wants to play at 11pm...
... of course the whole desirability of the thing sometimes leads to scuffles!
And finally, of course, the other antidote to too much video gaming is getting out and about. Son 2 can cycle to his friends or come on dog walks, but Son 1 is still limping (or lurching, really) and our season tickets for the nearby safari park have been a God-send for giving a semi-mobile boy something to do in the sunshine. On our last visit (Wednesday I think) he actually lurched round the walk-round zoo with me too!
This week she came back from a visit to her hometown and gave Ben a little package from the Boulangerie Molière - six petits pâtés de Pézenas. They are the bobbin-shaped, sweet-sour tarts for which this Mediterranean town is known.
We warmed them up and ate them with a raw veg salad (thinking of Serenata!)...
They were great! The mutton is really strong, which is an unusual taste for a modern Brit, but the overwhelming flavour of sucrée-salée is just like that of a mince pie. I knew there had to be some English connection - perhaps from the Middle Ages, when Crusaders came back with the original dried fruit/sweet and sour recipes? It turns out that the connection is much more recent, and is Anglo-Indian, rather than Middle Eastern. Lord Clive, the Governor of India, spent some time in Pézenas, and used to give soirées where the main delicacy was these little meat tarts. On leaving the town he gave them the gift of his recipe! This all dates to 1768 - what a lovely French/British/Indian connection we have unwittingly linked in to...
If you'd like to know more about this delightful cardinal bird, and, more specifically about how we're going to be thinking our way through the Cardinal Virtues in Lent, please check out the post below.
Oh, I was so happy, and so surprised!
Due to budgetary restraints, I've been avoiding the troc shops, but this was theraputic...
Son 1 talked me into buying that rather impressive serpent which is now holding our oranges. We've always admired them, and buying trendy things about three years too late is par for the course for me.
But the real Floss buys really old things, not just three-years-out-of-date fruit holders! I spotted this tin straight away, which has a quite remarkable image combining a 1920s/30s style couple in horse trap along with an ancient Greek horse. Really - see for yourself: http://www.etsy.com/listing/87402521/ancient-greece-bronze-horse-in-gallop
The base of the tin is pretty well-made too.
"Do you really need this?" asked Son 1, in some desparation...
But I have to have a Scotsman in London! And the soldiers in their bearskins...
I have to say, they do complete my vintage tin display rather wonderfully (for now, at least). See the bright red Chinoiserie one? That came too...
It's fun with the Egyptian style one below it, which came from the same Troc Shop several years ago.
The ancient horse has found good company with another round tin too, I think.
And they all snuggle under the 'combles' near my collection of vintage fabric boxes. I am really rather pleased with all this!
Thanks very much for the comments you've been leaving on last Wednesday's post (click on the link in the sidebar to see it). It's clear that a loose theme with a positive, 'looking forward' nature is going to be useful for us. I'm looking through all your suggestions, in comments and emails, and will come up with something for you by Ash Wednesday, which seems appropriate! The most important thing is that this 'Pause' is designed to help bloggers in their own spiritual path. Therefore I try to keep the rules to a minimum, because how on earth would I know what's right for you? If you want to dip in and out, and not post every week, please do. If you want to tie your posts in with something else you're doing, like a Lent group, readings, giving up or taking on things... please do! See you in Lent!
Another one of these 'amazing' connections popped up towards the end of last year, and I'm partly writing this post to tell you about it, and partly in an attempt to re-connect with the person - I'm ashamed to say that when I changed email addresses I lost all the relevant emails and even her address!
So, this lady is Australian, and has a fantastic son called Tobias who is pictured above - along with the cute dog he has a cute little family and they are heading from Australia to Mozambique this year, to work as missionaries.
What made the connection is that Tobias draws the most incredible mazes - it's been a hobby since childhood and he's used it to explore spiritual ideas, as well as to pay homage to the very first maze - the Labyrinth of the Minotaur:
So when Tobias' mum was browsing my blog, she noticed a link to my old friend Rob's blog, and was unsurprisingly drawn to this post, where Rob writes about a worship labyrinth he created on Tynemouth beach.
Realising from my comment that I actually knew Rob in real life, she contacted me to see if I could put her in touch with him. She explained the maze connection and asked for our adresses, as she wanted to send us each a copy of Tobias' book!
How incredibly generous! And how I would like to get back in touch with her to tell her all about how Son 2 worked his way through the 'Simply Amazed' section for children and then tackled the 'Hardly Amazed' set of really, really tricky mazes, and even paid a teeny bit of attention to the spiritual content, and was genuinely interested in Tobias' call to work as a missionary...
You'll see the inspiration picture - a vintage railway poster advertising Edinburgh as a destination - to your left in my sidebar. Last time I just used the colours and shapes in the Dunfermline poster to inspire a collection of nicely-toned bits and bobs (geegaws, as Ben would put it...).
This time, influenced by the destination and by the January posts of other bloggers taking part, I've collected things which actually do have an Edinburgh connection. It's probably the only time I'll do that, but Edinburgh is my Scottish base and always has been, I suppose, so it's no surprise.
Just below the tin is a little vintage enameled sewing case - just room for a thimble, pins, needle and thread. I think I found that in my Christmas stocking one year in the 1980s...
After that triumph, I don't think any of my other finds seem quite so impressive! The books have some Edinburgh connections - my mum talked me into buying the three enormous leather-bound Bible commentaries in the Bethany Shop, Stockbridge, Edinburgh. I bought the Poems and Songs of Burns from my dad's church book stall more recently - isn't it a wonderful binding? The cannon balls could recall Edinburgh's military history and even the Cannonmills area of the city, if you like, but actually they came from an English battlefield and are really there to hold the books up!
This is my other recent Edinburgh find - and I got it at the English Christmas Market in Toulouse! The title was vaguely familiar and it turns out that this is a reprint of books by an author which my grandma collected in the 1940s. The Silent Traveller is the pen name of a Chinese artist and writer who arrived in the west in the 1930s, and wrote charming and insightful books about what he found, illustrated with his own Chinese-style drawings. If you can find one of his books about a city or area you know, I think you would be really charmed by it!
Here's the whole set-up - I always put them in a dark area, which is bad for photography but just right for seeing when you enter the house! You win some, you loose some...
Lent is a very different matter, because we don't go crazy in the run-up to Easter. Well done us, I say! So the take-up for the Pause in Lent is smaller, and usually mainly Christian - Lent has some really obvious Christian notions and it's easier to get a handle on it if you are practising it as part of your faith. But anyone is welcome to join in - as always, what am really curious to know is: what is YOUR take on Lent? I don't care if it's not the same to other people's (in fact, dare I say it, I prefer learning about something that's different to other people!)
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