Painting Wells

It never crossed my mind that there was a reason why Wells is called Wells. I now know. It is because there are a lot of wells there, too many to paint. I say that, because I have just returned from a week's water colour painting in Wells. It was an organised holiday based at The Swan Hotel overlooking the amazing Wells Cathedral.

I was looking forward to a restful week, dabbing paintbrush into pallet and contemplating beautiful views. Wrong! It was a full-on, 9.30 to 5 pm, packed programme. It was enjoyable, inspirational, instructional but relaxing? No way!

I am no expert at art and so I won't be sharing any of my 'masterpieces' with you but I will share a photo from the hotel of Wells Cathedral and some info about the holiday in case you fancy having a go too...

The holiday was organised by Alpha Painting Holidays. We were very well taken care of by Jill from Alpha, who brought us teas, coffees, packed lunches and anything else that we might need.

The tutor was the very talented Rob Dudley.  He was equally attentive to our painting needs - in other words he was extremely patient with the likes of me, a virtual non-painter, and was encouraging and positive in spite of my many abortive efforts.

The only disappointment was the catering arrangements at the hotel. They couldn't serve us supper until 8 pm and, after a full day of fresh air and concentration, I was ready for bed even before they got around to serving up the soup course.

OK, OK, I'll include one of my efforts... but NOT my water colour attempts. Here is a bit of a pencil sketch of a gatehouse by the Cathedral gardens. 

Well I did warn you! Best to stick with my writing, methinks!

I queued all night to see the Beatles!

Midnight 1963 Leicester city centre. I was thirteen years old. Mum thought I was staying at my friend’s house. Her mum thought she was staying at mine. We were queuing for tickets to see the Beatles. I had their faces plastered all over my bedroom walls. I knew every word of every song they had ever recorded. I knew their favourite food, hobbies, star signs… but to actually see them! Groovy!

2 am and the pavement was packed. We were all singing, working our way through all the tracks of all their albums. We were amongst other expert Beatles lovers here. We couldn’t risk a single wrong word.

4 am and strangers had become friends, exchanging cubes of chocolate for sips of tepid thermos flask tea. For a while spontaneous chanting turned us into four distinct camps.

“Paul! Paul! Paul!” I yelled.

“George! George! George!” yelled my friend.

It was Ringo who won… easily… ear-splittingly.

Now it was dawn. 5 am and the crowd was getting restless. Police were struggling to keep us from sprawling across the road. My friend and I stood close to the wall, holding tightly to each other, determined to keep our hard-earned places. Not far in front of us, a large shop front window was bending like cellophane with each wave of pushing, but still we didn’t budge.

6 am and more police arrived, some on horses. The cellophane window collapsed with a thunderous roar. There was a stunned silence followed by cheers but now the pushing subsided. We became compliant. The road had been closed and we were moved off the pavement by the police, away from the shattered window, channelled into three queues, each queue separated from the next by two sets of crash barriers.

At exactly 8 am the booking office doors opened. The closer my feet shuffled to the door, the more my stomach churned with excitement. It was only after I emerged from the booking office, a ticket safely in my bag, that I realised how cold and tired I was, but it had been worth it. Front row of the balcony. Unbelievable!

As for the performance… I didn’t hear a single note sung or word spoken but I saw them. I saw the Beatles in real life. Paul looked at me. I know he did. He swished his mop of long Beatle hair as he mouthed, ‘She loves you, yeah yeah yeah’. He was singing it to me. I was in love.

I lost my voice that night, something to do with the screaming I suspect. I couldn’t talk for days but I wouldn’t have missed it, not for all the ‘yeah yeahs’ in the world.

Lost life stories

Every life has a story to tell. We can’t all talk of major achievements, life-saving inventions or headline-making discoveries, but we all have our own unique story. Several years ago, when I set out to research the ‘lives behind the stones’ in the local Jewish cemetery, I was not looking for the big names. I wanted to know about the lives of the ordinary people, people like myself.

Regular visitors to this blog will remember me talking about this Heritage Lottery funded project that I coordinated in 2014/15. We created a website with information about Leicester's Jewish cemetery and a complete database of the graves providing a genealogical search facility. The website is testament to my team’s commitment and hard work and I am proud of what we created.
(Apologies if you’ve had trouble recently accessing the Jewish Gilroes project website. It has been undergoing routine maintenance but I have been reassured that it's fully functioning once more.)

I do regret that we only had time to research nineteen stories. We were not even able to recount entire life stories, but mere snapshots of those nineteen lives. So much has not been told and there are about a thousand graves in the cemetery, so there are more than 900 lives yet, if ever, to reveal their stories. Maybe some were refugees from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s or descendants of refugees. Others may have come later in the 20^th century from Germany. They would possibly have been evacuated to Leicester during the Blitz. They must have experienced so much that I will never know about because now their lives have been lost behind the brief descriptions on their headstones.

On the left is the headstone for the very first burial in the cemetery. It marks the grave of a young girl called Nina Rosina Berger who died aged 13. We could find very little about her short life but there was information to be uncovered regarding her family. A small group of us put together our findings and this is the story that I was able to write up for the website. Nina Rosina Berger.

Looking to the more distant past, apart from a few exceptions, only the lives of Kings and Queens, their Chancellors and Priests were recorded. I want to know what the ordinary people did. I want to know about their daily lives, worries, joys, habits. If only they had been literate, with their own blogs and Twitter accounts, think how much more we would know about life in days gone by… or would we be bogged down with their daily recounting of what they had for breakfast and what the weather was like?

From football to matzo balls

STOP PRESS: 

Tuesday 3rd May - Leicester have won the League! We are the Champions. I may not be an avid football fan but I'm feeling pretty proud of Leicester this morning.

Football
What I know about football could be written on the side of a matzo ball (matzo balls are small dumplings for soup) but I have noticed that there's a lot of excitement around Leicester's King Power Stadium over the last few weeks. It would seem that at the beginning of this season Leicester were no hopers, and now they are almost winners of the League. I don't exactly know which League this refers to but I do know that a lot of people are very excited about it.

This Friday Leicester will be turning blue as a show of support. There will be blue banners, blue balloons, blue cakes in shops and blue jerseys everywhere. There will even be a blue strip tease posted up by Walkers Crisps. They will be removing packets of crisps from an apparently naked Gary Lineker in their Countdown to Kit Off.

As I understand it, this Sunday's game could be the clincher. Televisions will be tuned in to Sky Sport. The streets of Leicester will be silent. I may take advantage of the situation and go shopping.

Matzo
We are in the middle of the eight days of the Jewish Passover. I've blogged about the story that must be retold each year, the story of slaves escaping Egypt, of freedom and the ending of oppression here. Those first two nights, when we have the Seder meal and retell that story, are special. Not only do we get to share a meal with family and friends, we also share our well-rehearsed traditions and songs. It's the kind of communal activity that I love.

But what of the rest of the week? Eating matzo in place of bread is tough. Every year I'm reminded of how much wheat-based food I usually consume. As well as bread, there's pasta, pizza, scones, fruit loaf, the list appears to be endless. Just as too much matzo has its unpleasant effects on the body, so too must all that wheat. Maybe this year, after the Passover, I'll stick to my promise to myself and cut down on the wheat. It can only do me good.

Happy Passover. Happy football viewing and good luck to Leicester City.

A Magnificent Magnolia

A magnificent magnolia flower

A lovely gift from a lovely friend

Fresh white petals brightening up a dark corner

A sign that summer is not far away

A doggy dilemma and how first impressions can be misleading…

…especially if you’re a Staffordshire Bull Terrier.

Sunny was found tied to a fence in a car park, (How could anyone do that to any living thing?) and is now at an RSPCA Animal Centre waiting for a new home, one where he will be loved. There’s only one problem. When visitors walk by looking for their dream dog, Sunny enthusiastically tells them:

“I’d love to go for a walk and play on the grass.”

“Please, take me home with you.”

“My suitcase is packed and ready.”

Unfortunately the visitors don’t understand Dog-lish and to them his conversation sounds like a series of angry barks.

If only those visitors could take him for a walk and play with him on the grass, they would soon see that far from being an angry barking dog, he really is a little softie…

So you see how first impressions can be misleading.

(The above photograph was taken by Daughter who volunteers at the RSPCA.)

It’s not only dogs who have trouble with first impressions. We often make judgements on other people based on a brief introduction, even though we all know that being shy or nervous can affect the way a person is perceived. How do we overcome this problem? It is especially important when going for a job interview where it can affect someone’s future career. I don’t know the answer but I know that I have often assumed that someone is unfriendly until I get to know them and then I invariably realise how very wrong my first impressions were.

I am now wondering how I come across to people on a first introduction. (They possibly can’t see beyond the fact that I talk too much!)

Have you ever made a glaring mistake based on first impressions and how do you think you might be perceived on a first meeting?

If you’re interested in giving Sunny a loving home then here is another adorable photograph of him together with his contact details.
Sunny at the RSPCA's Southridge Animal Centre.

Treasured Items

I have paused in my research about my Grandma and her journey from Latvia to England in the early 1900s to consider some of the practical issues that, fortunately, have never, to date, affected my life. One issue that I have spent some time ruminating over is, how did my Grandma and her brothers and sisters decide what to leave behind them and, more importantly, what treasured items to take with them when they set out on this foreboding trip?

The only item that I remember the family referring to as 'Russian' was a huge feather quilt. This was when I was small girl, in the days before duvets, when people in England slept under sheets and blankets. Every winter that feather quilt was placed onto my bed, over the blankets but under the counterpane. I loved it. It was snuggly warm and made me feel secure under its weight. 

Though they were never referred to as 'from Latvia', there was always a pair of candle sticks and a small silver wine goblet (or bekher as it is referred to in Yiddish) on Grandma's sideboard. These were items used on a Friday evening to welcome in the Sabbath and I can only assume that they were part of the treasured belongings. The bekher has been so well polished over the years that the engravings can hardly be seen but they are of typical buildings from the shtetls (small Jewish Eastern European villages).

Grandma did not know what kind of journey she would have to endure and so would need to keep packing to a minimum but how does anyone decide what to take, what to leave behind? I appreciate that the family were very poor and so would have had few belongings, but there must have been small treasured items, something that Grandma maybe slipped into her pocket when no one else was looking, that made the journey with her.

So what would I take with me if, sadly, I had to make such a journey? Of course, life has changed dramatically in the last hundred or so years. I would grab my phone and Ipad even though I'd not expect there to be Internet access out at sea but what else would I pack? What would be that little item that I slipped into my pocket? A photograph of my family? A small teddy bear for comfort? A prayer book maybe, or a book of uplifting thoughts? What would you pack under such circumstances? And what would be that treasured item that you slipped into your pocket when no one else was looking?