It’s easy to feel like the only person out in the landscape. But you’ll have come with a friend or two, if only to haul you upright when, inevitably you fall deep into a drift of snow.
Back in France, in the Ariège, the very best way of getting out into virgin snow and becoming at one with a pure, glittering white winter landscape was take yourself off to the nearest mountain, strap on your snowshoes and walk through the fresh crisp air as if you were the only person in that particular bit of world. It was hard work though, and after the first hour, I’d had enough.
Three years on, and the memory of the pain, sweat and general exhaustion of the entire procedure has faded. I remember instead the vivid sunlit skies and startlingly white and unspoilt snow. And sometimes there were shadows: clear silhouettes mirroring, yet enhancing the world above the glistering mantle.
This week’s WordPress Photo challenge is ‘shadow’. The challenge is now issued on a Wednesday rather than a Friday. I think I’ll now usually respond on Saturday, not Sunday.
I was out for a convalescent constitutional this afternoon: William had passed A Bug onto me last week, and I’ve been a little delicate. I hadn’t taken my camera with me, only my phone, so these images aren’t the finest. But I don’t care. They’re evidence that spring is on the way. I wish you could hear, as I could, the birds singing as they do only when they too know that short winter days have passed. Yes, spring is springing.
Ten thirty on a damp Wednesday morning. The Horniman Museum was just opening its doors as William and I arrived, and we stomped downstairs to the aquarium.
We were the first arrivals. Here’s William, wholly absorbed in fish, frog and butterfly hunting. This peaceful moment didn’t last long. Within minutes one, two, then three parties of Reception age school children stormed noisily in. The fish continued their solitary swishing round their watery home.
View of the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge and Tate Britain.
I was in London this week, and on Monday had a day all to myself. After a morning at the wonderful Paul Nash exhibition at the Tate Gallery, I mooched around the area where I grew up.
Here, just at the back of Tate Britain, is the Millbank Estate. There was a penitentiary here till 1890, and when it was cleared away, 17 blocks of flats were built as social housing between 1897 and 1902, housing 562 families. They must have seemed palaces to the former slum-dwellers who moved here. Each flat had its own kitchen and scullery, its own toilet. The streets were tree-lined, and there was a communal garden besides. Even now these barracks-like buildings have an air of quality, of being built to last. Sadly, many of these flats are now in the hands of private landlords, who charge their tenants up to four times more than those who are still in the social housing system have to pay.
Millbank Estate.
About five minutes walk away are the flats where I lived between about the ages of seven and fifteen, St. Augustine’s Mansions. Those of us who lived there were ordinary types. There was the little old Irish lady in the flat below; the man who worked at Manbre and Garton, the sugar refiners, who once a year would take us and his wife to the wharf-side where he worked to watch the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.
St. Augustine’s Mansions.
There was the Liberal Party activist, who was disappointed when my mother wouldn’t let me take the afternoon off school one day in 1958. Our activist friend hoped I would lay a wreath at the recently relocated monument to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. My mother, an early beneficiary of education for girls, didn’t approve of suffragettes. But later, we’d often go to our friend’s flat on Saturday evenings to watch That Was The Week That Was. I was by then the only child in my class not to have a TV at home.
Entrance to St. Augustine’s Mansions. No handsome trees there then.
Briefly, before he made the comparative Big Time, a singer lived on the ground floor. Was it Billy Fury? I can’t remember.
These ordinary flats are now a gated community. Look on Zoopla, and you’ll find that the larger ones change hands at £1,500,000.
I wandered on to Tachbrook Street. Now, as then, there is a market. Then it sold everything you’d need in a weekly shop. Now it’s street food from every continent, sold to the large local working community at lunch time. I can recommend the sumac chicken from Lebanon.
Local shops sell fine cheeses, fine antiques, and the charity shops have goods with £200 price tags.
And here is a residential street. There won’t be any local working folk living in these handsome terraces any more. Zoopla again. £1,750,000.
A typical local street near Tachbrook Street.
It’s rather lucky that I neither want nor need to move back into the area.
This week’s WordPress photo challenge is ‘Repurpose’. We’re to submit an image of something of our own that we’ve put to a new use. I couldn’t come up with anything worth a snapshot, even though I’m rather keen on ‘repurposing’.
Instead, I want you to come with me to Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. I was there almost ten years ago as part of my Indian Adventure. I loved this town. It’s not quite on the tourist trail, as its glorious and extravagantly carved temples remain unpainted. They are not vibrantly painted like those in nearby Madurai, so Madurai gets the foreign visitors.
I stayed* with a young American academic, Gwen, who for seven years had made Thanjavur her home. She whisked me about on her motor bike, introduced me to her Indian friends and neighbours, asked me to run errands for her in the market where nobody spoke English or saw tourists much, and took me to tiny back street shops to buy freshly prepared and sizzling-hot evening meals.
I was by myself though, when early one morning I came upon these goats. They’d found a new use for the adverts pasted on the walls of a house. Look.
And here’s the cow that was tethered outside Gwen’s window. It’s found an unfortunate use for the pile of rubbish tumbled into a pile on the corner.
View from Gwen’s window
Finally, here’s a different use for a pavement. It’s become a canvas for traditional drawings in fine sand. These designs frame the lights which lit our path homewards every evening during Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light.
And here are three picture postcards – temple views.
Thanjavur: Breehadeeswara Temple.
Temple elephant, Thanjavur
Thanjavur: Periya Kovil Temple
* via ‘Couchsurfing’, a scheme which matches travellers with locals, who offer beds, local knowledge and friendship.
We’ll all remember 20th January 2017, the day Donald Trump took his oath as President of the United States. No comment.
The 20th January was special within our family too. It was the day my son Thomas celebrated his 40th birthday. Really? How did that happen? Is it forty years since my son kicked and chortled in his pram, his simple world revolving round milk, sleep, fluffy nappies (no disposables then) and besotted parents? Now he’s a besotted parent in his turn. And nobody much remembers that it’s forty years since Jimmy Carter became President of the United States.
Thomas is no longer newborn here. All those colour photos got so faded. But here he is, nearly a whole year old in his splendid woolly bear coat that I crocheted for him- all by myself.
Unexpectedly, 20th January turned out to be even more special for our family. It was the day that my daughter Elinor, having seen off her husband to cancer nine months ago; having been diagnosed as a cancer sufferer only four months after that; having had one operation that failed to dig it all out; and having had a mastectomy only the week before last was declared cancer free. She’s got preventative chemotherapy and radiotherapy to face still, and breast reconstruction. But she’ll be fine. And that was more than we dared to hope only a few weeks ago.
Thomas and Elinor explore Glastonbury Tor, getting on for forty years ago
This makes 20th January a Red Letter Day for this family. Even Donald Trump can’t take that away from us.
Donald Trump was inaugurated in Washington DC. Thomas was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Elinor lives in Bolton, Greater Manchester.
I have another blog apart from this one. My other site records some of my family’s history, in a rather anecdotal fashion. Its readers are mainly not the same people as those who read this one. So just for once, I’m going to share a post from ‘Notes on a family’. I love my Great Aunt Blanche’s autograph album from 1903. I think you might too.
Among my family treasures is an autograph book, dating from about 1903. It has no signatures from the famous, or even local notables. Instead, it’s a record of young people enjoying themselves at the turn of the 20th century.
The book belonged to my grandmother’s sister, Blanche. In 1903 her father Arthur was a clothier’s salesman, and she was a tailoress, a machinist. Most of their friends worked in the textile industry in some capacity. They were ordinary working people, and not educated to a high level – though she and her sister were still at school at the ages of 12 and 14, according to the 1891 census.
Blanche and her friends had autograph books. They sometimes amused themselves in their spare time by filling the pages of each others’ volumes. Here’s hers. I’ve left out all the pages that simply had improving quotations from…
I felt stuck. In my head, I rummaged through my photo collection. I discarded foggy moody atmospheric mornings like this one. I rejected bright summer meadows and crisp snowy winter walks as not quite projecting the ambience I want to think about on this dismal January day.
Here’s what I’ve chosen. It’s an image that’s more than six years old now, but it sums up much of what we loved best about our years in France.
Our walking group had played its part in organising a walk for ramblers from all over the region. We’d arranged signage, helped sponsors set up their stall, marshalled the event, walked ourselves, and handed out certificates at the end before the visiting walkers departed. Now we could relax.
Here we are in the mediaeval town square in Mirepoix, unwinding over a good and copious meal with plenty of wine. The sun is shining. The afternoon stretches lazily ahead of us. We’re among friends. This is an ambiance chaleureuse at its finest.
I only made one New Year’s Resolution this year, which is one more than I usually make. This year, I would not buy any more second-hand books from charity shops – my main sources for all kinds of serendipitous purchases – till I’ve read almost every unread book on our own shelves.
Well, that worked. It’s January 13th and I’ve just spend £3.75 on this little lot, culled from the charity shops of Ramsbottom, just up the road from where Ellie lives.
Ramsbotton is a post-industrial once-upon-a-mill town, a nice little market town with a whiff of artsiness about it. It has a cute little heritage railway: you can catch an East Lancashire steam train on high days and holidays. There are lots of independent shops, great coffee shops and restaurants. As a side-line, it does a fine line in charity shops with book departments that are a cut above the average, and I spent a happy hour or two browsing this afternoon before the boys came home from school.
Ramsbottom seen from snowy fields.
I’m in Bolton this week because on Monday Ellie had her second operation, her mastectomy. It went well, thanks, and she’s recovering at home. Her dad and I took turns to manage-a-patient and manage-a-dog and manage-the-twins . The worst job is definitely getting the boys up in the morning. They’re just like their mum used to be when she was 11.
Blanche Pickard in about 1903. 
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