Have just had twenty four hours of violent tummy pains, and ghastly symptoms of food poisoning. I suspect that the soup at the Lent Lunch at a local church is to blame. I long to know if others are similarly affected but can`t ask. Anyway I have stayed in bed all day and feel very peculiar now I have just come downstairs to move chairs about for Meeting tomorrow. I am a firm believer in`working it off` so I am sure I will be better soon.
Trouble is, I am trying to do my homework for the Writing Group which is on Tuesday and I find it difficult to be creative when I am not feeling well. Think of all those poor poets with galloping consumption like Keats, and the Brontes. However did they manage.

grasping the nettle

I have been Warden here at the Meeting House for fifteen years next month and the years have gone in a flash. It is an ideal job for me as I love cooking and providing meals, making beds and folding things up, tidying rooms and in truth I even enjoy cleaning and there is plenty of scope for all that here. Also I like having a houseful of people both the ones living here and all the groups coming and going. So it is quite a challenge for me to think about giving it up and but I have decided to set a date and work towards it. So I have said that I will retire on May 1st 2010, unless of course I fall down the stairs or collapse with some dire complaint before then. So it is a relief to have made a decision and I can now get myself geared up to it.

It is my day off and I am not in Brighton this week so I am going out in the garden in lovely Spring sunshine to plant a blackberry, a loganberry and a raspberry up against the wall at the end. So future wardens can make some fruit crumbles for the Quakes Sunday lunches. I am also going to buy a new lawnmower as I can no longer cope with the vagaries of our ancient petrol mower which is hell to get started. I think the lawn is starting to grow.

Terry Waite is coming to stay in our B and B room when he comes to open the Emmaus hostel in Winchester next week. He wrote recently about his five years of captivity in Beirut, (four in solitary confinement) saying that it had given him a taste for silence, and he has recently applied for membership of the Quakers though he is an Anglican priest. He says he finds church services a bit too busy, all that standing up and sitting down. I agree with him.
My dear friend J came yesterday who is younger than I am, but we talked a lot about ageing, and ways of getting to grips with it. She said she had read that Joan Bakewell who is now Minister for Elderly People or some such title ,recommends that everyone in Homes or geriatric hospitals should have their CV on the end of their bed plus a picture of them in their prime so that everyone would know what they once were.

weight on my mind

I went to the doctor for a check up and to my annoyance, my blood pressure was up and I was severely admonished for my large weight increase, not surprising as I have not kept to my New Year resolutions at all. So I have had a hungry couple of days with the prospect of more to come. No more slices of D`s fruit cake and his delicious home made bread made with the flour from the water mill where he works. The cat who is sixteen, is getting thinner I notice, and she eats constantly and lies about all day on top of the Aga, while I am whizzing around working, and up and down two flights of stairs, from morn till night. So unfair.
The weather is really Springlike, and as always, I had the feeling yesterday that I ought to be doing something special ,like walking or cycling in the countryside, or visiting a beauty spot, but in fact I pottered around in the garden, doing a bit of digging, raking, and straightening edges, with the washing blowing in the wind in the sunshine, and was perfectly content.

not a clever blogger today

I had an email for my dear friend J entitled "you clever blogger", she had just read this humble blog for the first time. So now I feel a sense of responsibility to be (a )funny and (b) clever. Not easy.
Its been the usual run of the mill here -fourteen kids and helpers round the table for lunch for a half term fun day for the family group that meet twice a week here. Sausages, baked beans and jacket potatoes, heavenly food. Then when we had washed all that lot up, E and I went to visit an old Quaker in a Care Home. Both E and I felt we wouldn`t mind moving in there straight away. No smell of wee, loads of activities: painting, glue, pom- pom making, and several bits of knitting left around that you could just pick up, I did about ten rows of bright red purl and plain with great enjoyment.
This evening, the homeopath lady did not finish her session on time in the Library and all the Gamblers Anonymous lot were milling about waiting to go in there and the AA people were also waiting to go into the Meeting Room only the GAs were in there so they came into the kitchen where six of us were simultaneously trying to cook and eat our suppers and bumping into each other. Then M turned up and said she was about to take twenty five chairs out to the garage to be picked up in the morning by a bloke who is going to re cover them. What a palaver. We don`t seem to have any chairs to sit on for our breakfast I notice.

I have a lot to do at the moment as I am trying to get the Quaker Mag, the Colebrook Courier that I edit with T, ready to take round to the printers, and Quakers keep sending more copy written in spidery writing that is very difficult to type up. If I change a word or leave something out, they are on to me like tigers, so I have to be careful.
I went to my reading group last night. The book was Engleby by Sebastian Faulks which is about a psychotic but clever man who was horribly bullied at school. I was shocked by how many of the group had also suffered from bullying at school. At my North London grammar school in wartime, I was never bullied, but just bored, and would daydream or draw pictures all over my exercise books. I would watch the teachers opening and shutting their mouths like fish and had no idea most of the time what they were on about, but bullying, no. How lucky I was.
I am just waiting for a couple of B and B`s to arrive, the house is still full of Buddhists, Narcotics
Anonymouses, Asylum Seekers Visitors, and odd Quakers and it is time I went to Bed.

I am eagerly awaiting a second onslaught of snow, it was all over too quickly last time. I am just back from Brighton and glad that the roads were completely clear. Also that my eldest son arrived safely from USA . Though he is in his mid fifties and a serious professor of mathematics, his interest in life is dance especially Latin-American, so we all had a bit of a dance in J`s front room, and he showed us the Rumba then W gave us all a lesson in Flamenco, so there we all were on a Saturday afternoon, stamping our feet and twirling around. My knees caused certain limitations but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I also gave my son in law a lesson in marmalade making so it was a very instructive sort of weekend.

It`s snow fun for the fainthearted

In the middle of our farewell party for Tamara, we opened the window as we were all so hot in our circus/clowns outfits and saw to our amazement that the the garden was covered in thick snow which was still falling fast. So some finished the evening with a snow ball fight, and tonight most of the residents are outside making a giant snowman (or snow woman) W for some reason has decided to do this wearing shorts.

We had a really good evening and Gavin, Dee Dee and Will excelled themselves with their amazing clown make up and other disguises. I had to discard my blonde wig as I got so hot whilst carving up the roast lamb, but we had two magnificent Uzbekistan national costumes, and J in spangles and everyone sported at least a red nose.

I have had a wonderfully peaceful day today as all the groups have cancelled, so apart from doing the usual Monday jobs and sorting out Tamara`s room, I had a good bit of time to do my homework for the writing group tomorrow (now cancelled of course) which is a modern version of a children`s story and I chose red riding hood only she is a hoodie on a rundown housing estate visiting her nan in a tower block, there is a bit of knife crime thrown in, and some desperate characters, but it ends happily -ish.

More snow is forecast for tomorrow. All the schools have closed, K rang to say there are no buses running in London, we don`t seem to manage snow very well in England.