Good Friday always used to be the most difficult day of the year for me. When I was little it was the beginning of the most boring long weekend of the year. Friday was a bank holiday – there was absolutely nowhere to go, nothing to do, all the shops were shut, it was usually […]Read Post ›
I have had this scarf for sixty years. It is one of my oldest and most treasured possessions. But it was not until today that I thought to investigate the writing on it. Thank goodness for the Internet. I discovered that in 1962 there were international skiing championships in Poland. This is what Wikipedia has […]Read Post ›
Maja is my one of my oldest and best friends. I have known her since September 1965 when she started going to my school. I knew her father before then, as he worked with my mum, and her brother, Tom, and I knew of her- but had never met her until she started at my […]Read Post ›
for CE What an amazing book! A very moving book. Complicated in structure at first – I had to start it over again a few times before I finally got the hang of it – that’s what happens when you have a book in every room and pick them up at random. Anyway last week […]Read Post ›
Packing away my grandmother’s spectacles I came across this piece of embroidery. My father had obviously packed away her things when she died and gave them to me many years later. But I never really looked closely until now. I remember this cushion and I always knew she had embroidered it. There were some others […]Read Post ›
For the Mhinisteir’s wife Today is the sixth of December. For me the real beginning of the Christmas season. This was the day when good children were given a little present and naughty children a birch rod. One year my mother gave me a rod. It was very small and gilded. Very pretty. But a […]Read Post ›
George Sand has always been a very romantic figure in my imagination. Ever since I was at my boarding school in Ealing, when Mother Mary Dominic swore me to secrecy not to let the other nuns know that I knew, she divulged that Chopin’s lover, that very wicked woman, had actually been a pupil at […]Read Post ›
Yesterday we had to go to South Kensington because my husband needed to have his eyes tested. It was his first train trip (my second) since lockdown started, so a very exciting if somewhat nervous undertaking. As it happened, everything went very smoothly – very few people anywhere, and most of those wearing masks. Uncomfortable, […]Read Post ›
Some thoughts. For HH Exactly a week ago as I write we were making our way from Cookham via Bagshot to Camberley Theatre to see a school production of the musical “War Torn” about the ‘futility of war and the difficulties faced by refugees when caught up in a war scenario.’ We had been invited […]Read Post ›
Life Through Basia's Eyes 