Been a member for a while, but only just started using SS

Hi Brenda,

My apologies - I have just seen your response, more than a week after you sent it! Are we supposed to get a notification when someone replies - I’ve no idea!

But thank you for replying, so nice of you.

I’ve ‘eard of that there ‘Eywood up in Lancashur, don’t think I’ve been there but have been to Preston and Blackpool a few times! The land of ‘want a brew?’ and bacon barms!

I enjoyed reading your message, the writing and the books written - well done you, that’s brilliant. My daughter is trying to get me to write my autobiography, but wouldn’t know where to start really, and who would want to read that? She keeps insisting and even bought me a book on ‘how to write your first book!’ Telling me now it’s part of her history too so I should do it (ever feel like you’re under pressure via guilt?)

The gardening - well! Have since decided to re-do the garden and Darryn the fella we used to chop down the jungle last year is coming back to re-turf it and give me some strips down the side for pots of plants etc. I can’t really plant them as I have a disability and can’t bend down to tend them. My daughter decided to grow tomatoes and chillies! She deseeded one of each and we now have tomato plants growing! Something she learnt from her Nanny when she was around 6 years old! They’ve sprouted and she’s very pleased.

This has now turned into a flurry of seed hunting and planting. So I’m sure we’ll have everything sorted by the time the garden is finished! I’m watching her closely and picking up tips, Nanny must have taught her well because she looks like she knows what she’s doing (either that or she’s secretly googling or asking Alexa!)

Nice to meet a fellow female foot fan! Being an East End girl I LOVE West Ham. The Claret & Blue draws me in and I’m hooked! The sounds, the sights, the feel of Matchday... that hope of winning, seeing my team score and celebrate as almost 60,000 fans sing, shout and yell with absolute pride... ooh I love being a season ticket holder, but missing g it all so much. It’ll be a long time before we can get back to the stadium that’s for sure.

Nice to hear you’re a Citeh girl when you’re supporting Manchester. I love their ground - it’s fantastic for me. Can’t walk far so to be able to get parking and literally step from my car and walk a few steps to the stand is amazing. Plus I quite like Citeh. There’s not too much friction between our fans and the banter on match day is great. Plus, we were lucky to get Pablo Zabaleta a couple of seasons ago. He’s such a nice guy. Sad he’s going to retire at the end of this season, but I’m sure he’ll go back to Citeh to work with the team. He’s adored in both teams and gets a fantastic reception when we play Man City.

Great to read about your train hobby. I don’t think it’s sad at all! Sounds like you really enjoy it too so be proud of it. And look at all the skill and patience you must have to work on the bits and pieces! And your knowledge of the subject sounds very broad. That’s something you could teach to others who are interested in the hobby.

Isn’t it annoying when people do that ‘talking to the male’ when discussing something a woman ‘shouldn’t be doing!’ Drives me mad. I get it a lot... that I shouldn’t be running my football groups on social media! Only thing I can say to those people is ... *raspberry!’ Shouldn’t make any difference!

Sorry to hear you lost your hubby, hard times eh? But I’m sure he’s peeping over your shoulder reminding you you’re only as old as you feel (28 I think you said haha) and the time warp continues to go on!

We held a socially distancing tea party for our now 81 year old neighbour yesterday. Only 6 of us (sticking to the rules!) but was a nice afternoon, and she loved it.

We have a giggle with her and often tease her that her hospital bed in her living room only has metal bars on it so she can handcuff people to it in bed! So we gave her a set of handcuffs and a feather boa to help her out! She roared with laughter! We do tease her and she whinges that we wind her up but secretly she loves the attention. We also got her a Kindle Fire Tablet and need to teach her how to ‘video call’ us. She gets very lonely and we’ve noticed on the days we can’t get to see her she always has a bad day the next day.

We’re hoping even if we can’t get over there we can see her every day via video, and it gives us the chance to see how she physically is too. A good investment I think. She was over the moon when we said it had Alexa - I can only imagine the conversations they’ll have!

We also rounded off the party by giving her some space dust which pops in your mouth. Was expecting her to go mad but she went into a kind of trance, staring into space and just listening to the pops and feeling them explode in her mouth! She looked up and said ‘Oh isn’t it lovely! It’s all fizzy in my mouth‘ She had some in her hand which had got sticky, my daughter passed her a wet wipe to clean it but she said ‘Oh no! I don’t want that!’ and popped the rest in her mouth and drifted off to space again. We was laughing so much as she innocently looked round, saying ‘I’ve never had this before. It’s lovely. They didn’t have it when I was young..’

Was a lovely afternoon and we rounded it off with fish and chips for her tea. Strange how little things can please someone so much. If I’d known a 10p packet of space dust would do it I could have saved £75 on the tablet and case

Hope you’re a safe and well Brenda, and keeping busy in these strange times. What have you been up to to keep the boredom away in lockdown? I actually took myself off to the kitchen to make bread pudding one day. Was told it ‘didn’t taste like Nan’s but it’s ok I suppose!’ I’ll take that! I hate cooking

Take care

Bee

Hiya Bee

Oh look, I'm sorry to have been so long in putting computer to paper, I work full time and have decided to start driving in to work and back home - well you've got to make use of those quiet roads before the traffic queues start up again 🙂 I got the notification on my email and kept thinking "Right, I'll sit down and write ..." All good intentions that go the way of the Dodo.

Anyway, how are you and how you keeping. I hope you're ok and been experimenting in the kitchen a bit more. My mum used to make a great bread and butter pudding. I tried it a couple of times and it just tasted like bread pobs with custard on it. Nothing like how mum made it or you get in cafes. e and bread and butter puddings are just not meant to be!

Yeah, you should write a book. I've been thinking of telling others because when you think of the things we got up to in our childhoods, all those adventures that needed sorting out, all those tennis balls playing two-ball and three-ball against the house wall, kick-out-ball games long into the summer nights - I was only reminiscing with my Line Manager along the same lines today - and concluded that we were really almost dragged in by our mums and dads. And you compare our stories to the stories of kids today, and there is such difference and richness. Not saying kid's childhoods these days aren't rich, they are but in a different way. But when you think of the swashbuckling, re-creating film scenes out on some piece of rough land. When we reminisce in front of our kids, who are now all post 30, and the looks of incredulous but awe on their faces - it's worth it! So, recently, I've been thinking it would be really good to get some memories of what we got up to.

On top of that, another good thing about jotting stuff down, is it keeps the memory banks intact. Just recently, my brother, sister and I have really been going down memory lane with our childhoods, it's been lovely and comical to share. I've included my 32 year old son and 30 year old nephew in on the emails and visualise their faces as they read what their parents got up to!

So yeah, go for it. Books can be as short or as long as you want them. So yeah, do it. I'll badger you along with your daughter 🙂

Oh nice one with the garden. Don't they taste good! Have you managed to put in some raised beds - I went on a waiting list for some local allotments years ago and got the grand tour. And what was nice, was to see about half a dozen raised bed areas for those who struggle with floor level beds. And I thought what a great idea - crikey, given how soon my back can ache, I could do with raised beds. But even in plant tubs, these can help enjoy a bit of pottering about without getting aches or if a person feels prevented from gardening and facing the inevitable having to bend down to ground level. But doesn't home grown stuff taste good - and don't you get a great feeling of harvesting your own stuff. I had an allotment at an old house, and the first batch of vegetables - oh my goodness. I soon came to appreciate the Harvest Festivals we did at school and church. Again, in a recent reminisce with someone at work, I was telling them about my mum and her growing tomatoes in the "front room" (the parlour for the want of a posh word). She was working part time and one of her bosses decided he was going to grow tomatoes - he bought the proper plant food, tended them etc etc. Mum just got some seeds out of a tomato, plonked them probably in some bit of compost, or dirt, shoved them in an old tin toffee tin kept from Christmas. Well, both lots got growing, and growing, and growing. Mums took over the entire window area, and grew the full height of the window so you can imagine the fight for sunlight between human and plant in the room. And it came to harvesting the fruits. Her boss was going on how good his was, how tasty etc. She took a couple of hers in, and they tasted mums. He turned round to her and asked how she'd managed to get sweet tasting tomatoes and what food had she used. She said none. She just watered them, kept them in the window, encouraged them to become triffids. And the difference was put down to the tin - as she put water in it, the metal in the tin rusted, and the contents of the rust with iron, lent to the taste. Come the following year, she grew them again, but they didn't have the same taste - but you find this don't you. Something that turns out good one time is compared against with subsequent attempts, and you never quite get the result again. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not.

But wow, the difference in taste is always there to be noticed between home grown and those grown for supermarkets.

Talking about gardens, I've got a cherry tree out on the back garden. For the last couple of years, its given a handful of cherries - oh my goodness, you should see it this year, branches and branches of them! What's happened is that some Leylandii have been lopped a couple of years ago, and the back garden isn't too far from gone mental. I call it the Amazon! I took down the last of a shed that David built (I helped) over the weekend. There's still quite a bit of stuff there which was housed in it which I'm moving, and then the idea is to just sit out in the area. The original idea, a few years ago that David and I had, was to take it down and relocate the fruit trees to the back of the garden, but how it is now, I think where the shed was would make a nice little grotto and it keeps the fruit trees where they are, and I get to enjoy a Mock Orange and the Magnolia at the back.

Taking the last of the shed down has been on my to-do list for about a year and a half but it was protecting the stuff that was in the shed but I had been toying with the idea of taking it down sometime this year, and hoped to consider it during the pandemic but never got round to it. Then my neighbour, who has a little girl, had a tree guy round middle of last week. I don't know what happened, but one minute the wall was flush upright, then on Thursday I noticed there was a slight lean on it toward her garden. It wasn't looking dangerous, but what I was really mithered about was her daughter. The little girl normally plays round the back door steps. The tree guy had left the felled stuff in the garden, and among it was quite a bit of blackberry vines - well you know how prickly those are. The chances that the little girl would go over are next to nil -but you never know. So that was it, over the weekend, I took the shed wall down. And what I started to think was to shift things round in the garden and make a little seated area up in that part of the garden.

So, now I have something to show for something I did during pandemic. I confined myself to home because a work colleague went home on Thursday afternoon showing symptoms - and work had a deep clean on Friday. Obviously, I didn't want to go out anywhere just in case, and thought what shall I do - answer, make safe a shed wall. On top of that, I'm part way through an embroidery project I'm doing for another workmate where embroidery has become something of a regular funny joke between us and he reckoned that the Bayou Tapestry was probably done quicker - so I'm making him a cup mat based on the Tapestry which I've told him about - it's a Piglet Tapestry (try and google it - it's really cute). Then I've decided to make a sampler for a baby who is due in about 3 weeks, but I want to make a cuckoo clock with it. So that's another embroidery project. All this will keep me quiet for the rest of the year 🙂 Then I'll get back to a project I was doing before all this recent stuff. I did another Covid 19 project just as all this was kicking off which has a cute little fieldmouse peeping out of a lily flower, with the words something like "Stay safe, stay inside". Awwwwwwwwww.

So, are we ready for Wednesday? I was rather hoping they'd write the season off on one hand, but then wanted it to resume on the other and make Liverpool deserve their win. But a big part of me was hoping it would be written off with no winners! Can't think why! What about you guys.

And of course, cricket is back yyayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

But really think on about jotting a book together. It's a bit daunting and you might wonder how on earth you start it off, but once you start, you'll find your fingers and pen won't know how to stop 🙂

Hey, just had an idea or two. I went to a workshop run by a local poet ages ago, and she gave us a blank sheet of paper and the subject of the class that night was wondering how and what to write. And with the blank piece of paper, she was going to conduct an exercise in getting the pen going. She told us, not asked us, to entitle our pieces "I want". And from there, we were to write the things we wanted, but with starting each sentence with "I want". We had a right laugh. And it got the pens moving like mad.

And if you want any help - there's a pair of hands here.

Okay, I'm going to love you and leave you, and hope that you have a nice day tomorrow and nice week.

Take care, Brenda