... this year's charity shop blanket - a volunteer knits a few every year, and I pick up another one for the collection each autumn!..
... the bag I customised this weekend. CK? What CK?..
... and a certain birthday-man who turned 44 on Wednesday.
The boys made him a cake each!
When I bought it this afternoon, though (1€50 special offer on fleeces at Veti Relais, the charity shop)...
it was a girl's fleece. Eew!
Double eew!
Thanks to a tiny T-shirt that Son 2 outgrew years ago, but which he'd begged me to keep because one day I might do something with it, he now has a fleece with his favourite glow-in-the-dark Puerto Rican frog on it again!
But who are this fine couple, embroidered onto linen about seventy years ago?
Here they are in all their finery - poor King George V, who by that time seems to have been in pretty bad health, but still managed to have plenty of Silver Jubilee celebrations. There are great photos of King George and Queen Mary here, with some great social history from one family to go with it.
Linen is all about social history for me, as I've implied. Look at the back of the embroidery - the grey detail shows how a loyal housewife stitched the raised features of the faces and crowns.
And how about a bit of political history? The detail in the opposite corner shows the English rose, the Scottish thistle, the Welsh daffodil and the Irish shamrock - George V was king throughout the one of the most dramatic phases of Irish history: war, Home Rule, the Anglo-Irish Treaty etc. The south of Ireland finally became a Republic two years after this embroidery was completed. All that history in the work of an accomplished housewife!
Like some other bloggers, I was privileged to be given two tea towels from All Tea Towels this summer. Ireland has a part to play in this half of the story too, as it's another centre for linen production in Europe. All Tea Towels is based in Northern Ireland and posts free to all parts of the UK. I'm just going to talk about the linen tea towel I chose here - linen is such an absorbent fabric that it has made the best drying cloths and towels for millennia!
You can see that the design on this tea towel is an absolute winner for me - blue, linen and gold, in a vintage advert for gardening. What really impressed me along with the teatowel was the Linen Care Guide provided. I've had plenty of vintage linen in my time, and have worked out how to care for it through a combination of trial and error and good reading (such as a fantastic article in BBC Homes and Antiques that I can't currently find!).
So now, here's how to care for new 100% linen tea towels, thanks to Al of All Tea Towels:
We're starting off in church. (We're starting off in chu-urch.)
The boys are eating with Youth Club. (The boys are eating with Youth Club.)
To the car! (To the car!)
Buy a box. (Buy a box.)
Buy some platters. (Buy some platters.)
Time to pick them up! (Time to pick them up!)
Back to church, alleluia! (Back to church, alleluia!)
There's the Youth Club, scream, scream. (There's the Youth Club, scream, scream.)
So Ben and I went to the meeting with the Directrice of the school, his form teacher, the school nurse and the school doctor. The outcome of this meeting is that everyone now recognises that he has a genuine and long-term difficulty, and that allowances will be made wherever possible to give him a longer time to write, allow him to make photocopies of other pupils' notes if he didn't finish his own, or to email teachers to ask for details that he missed in class. The actual appearance of his computer in class is still in doubt. We will have to have further meetings and take this to the Disability Agency. It appears that his science, maths and technology teachers think it's a great idea - all problems solved in one simple action. We're with them there! But his language and humanities teachers (and possibly the bureaucrats) hold with fervent devotion to the beauty and value of the hand-written word, and suffer for him, thinking of how he will be deprived if we don't allow him to develop his handwriting skills further. See - they're not cruel or crazy, they're just thinking differently. We'll see if the Brits and the technocrats can come out on top in this one, though... Thank you for your comments and prayers.
This post is also related to my resolution to enjoy life to the full. One of the things I first found myself really enjoying this year, for maybe the first time, was taking the boys to the swimming pool. I decided not to get stressed, not to get worried, not to get bored, and just enjoy it. Guess what - it was really enjoyable!
And after all that I feel qualified for a little blogging...
although with schoolwork still firmly in mind.
I've told you lots about my Rentrée, but I haven't said much about the boys!
In some ways, that's because things are going smoothly, and in other ways, it's because blogging publically about little things that get on your nerves about a foreign system or about any particular school is surely a very, very bad idea? Anyone and everyone can read my blog and I want to keep my relationships with local schools and French friends positive - c'est logique!
But here is a little of our news. Son 2 is the (not-so?) proud owner of the books and files above. Having had a very good year last year (held back a year at our request, making lots of friends and working well) he's now gone up into cinquieme (5°). The work seems fine, his attitude is good and the nuisance of being in a class which he seems to think is full of (rédoublant) louts is balanced by having some of his best friends from last year back with him. He's a bit stunned that Ben and I have banned computer and video games on school days but is coming to terms with this tragic loss...
Son 1 is loving, loving, loving his final year in collège so far. He's taken up Greek which he has adored from afar for years (thanks to internet language sites and Percy Jackson books) and is working really hard to complete all his homework on time - a bit (a lot) of a transformation from the boy who stropped about his homework and then rushed it off in record time. I guess we've seen that transformation slowly coming but of huge help this year have been a) advice from a friend in the year above, b) maturity and c) this:
Warts and all photo of Son 1's desk and his new computer. French schooling is basically all handwritten, but Son 1's dyspraxia means that an expert has recommended typing as the way forward for him. His teachers are happy for him to type his homework - they have been for years. But coming up on Monday is the meeting which will decide if he is allowed to take that teeny, tiny litle white laptop into school to type up his lessons in class (it's all about copying from the board here in France). Opinion is divided amongst the staff, with the opinion of the directrice (principal) and the school doctor probably being the most important, and, of course, the hardest to acertain in advance. We'd be grateful for your prayers, if you're the praying kind...
This is my grandma!
I think my grandma may have been the one who bought this Frances E Willard commemorative scarf, because they had something in common:
The poem above says it all - they were both involved in the Women's Temperance Movement.
Frances E Willard was the ' most famous member and second president' of the Women's Christian Temperance Movement. Read about her on their website here - they are still at work!
As you can see from the beautifully-drawn map and illustrations on the scarf, Frances E Willard was involved in all sorts of social projects to improve the life of ordinary Americans in the late 1800s, and was commemorated in hospitals, children's homes, libraties etc all over the States.
I enjoy a glass of wine (hey, I live in France!). But when you realise that society was falling apart in the UK and the USA due to alcohol, abused to drown the misery of poverty (thus making poverty even worse, of course!), I think that the Temperance Movement was a powerful force for change, which encouraged women to work together for the good of society. My Grandma Signed the Pledge when she was young, in Wales, and never drank. My mum didn't drink either... so that's kind of died out in our generation, but it doesn't stop me from recognising the work of women social campaigners like Frances E Willard.
I thought I'd give you a bit of a run-down on my resolutions so far - I like the fact that posting resolutions here means that I am accountable! Otherwise, I really do forget...
I have three books in French - on Bastide towns (these are medieval planned checker-board towns and we live in one), on the pastel (or woad) trade in the area and one on birds of the region. There's also a rather lightweight book in English with pretty pictures of Toulouse and its heritage, but sometimes I just want the luxury of reading in English...
The news is becoming more accessible now that we have free digital TV. There are several French 24/7 news channels and Ben and I are both determined to watch a cycle of news per day. It makes a real difference instead of having to sit down too early (8pm) or too late (up to 11pm) for the terrestrial news channels. And I think it's really good to watch the French news, instead of just reading the BBC news website as I've done up until now. I feel more connected to France and the French when I follow the news from the national perspective. Possibly, if I listen to enough 'standard' French, I might even get rid of a bit of my local accent? Or possibly not...
Here is just a peek at my two scrapbooks. I cannot tell you how much pleasure I am getting out of putting them together. They're just cuttings albums, the kind I used to keep when I was a child... and I think that might be part of the fun. A full post to follow...
And yes, you were right, it was the enamel coffee jug that was perjoratively labelled 'old'! It's true I wouldn't put coffee in it, but think of filling it with woodland treasures, as Betty the Wood Fairy suggested... It certainly has a future, as well as a past.
... anyway, on to the winner! I'm just off to close down the giveaway and will come back with news of the winning comment...
"It's old..."
What got me thinking was how these words mean different things to different sellers.
Far too often, I hear them being used to excuse a silly inflated price:
I'm charging you lots because... "It's old!"
There was a time a chap about my age tried this on me with a charming mirror with the date 1964 on the back.
I sincerely wanted to point out that anything that was only a few years older than him or me was hardly worth a price-hike.
But I didn't.
And I did buy that mirror, after a bit of bargaining.
But on this occasion, the phrase: "It's old..."
Clearly meant: "So that's why I'm charging so little for it. Why on earth would you want it?"
Hurray!
No prizes, but if you want prizes, don't forget to enter my giveaway (button in the sidebar) which closes tomorrow!
