Happy New Year

2011 is almost over and I can't say I'm sorry. I don't know whether it was the Year of the Pig or not, but it certainly was a pig of a year for me. Too many deaths too close for comfort. Too many changes forced upon me by circumstances outside my control. A house that won't sell and no house on the horizon to buy. Bring on 2012. I really cringe when I say that because the years seem to be flying by and I'd be a fool to wish for time to speed up.

Time waits for no man  has never sounded truer. And so my New Year's resolution is  to  deliberately     s  l  o  w       d  o   w  n.  To make significant moments last longer by taking the time to linger over them rather than rushing on to the next thing. And to linger with people too. I know we live in a fast-paced world, but I want to set aside time for chatting with friends. Yes, chatting. A telephone call rather than a text. A note-card in the post now and then. A conversation on a park bench.

I'm also participating in the January 2012 A River of Stones challenge. I did the 2011 one and surprised myself. This event asks you to observe something closely, every day of January, and to write a few words about it in a blog post. The idea is that the written pieces should be short and cut through to the essence of the thing. Small, like river pebbles. I found it quite amazing how this daily task, which initially seemed daunting, became a very positive and soothing thing in my life. Click on the River of Stones badge at the side of this page in order to find out more.





Kristal enjoyed her first Christmas and managed NOT to demolish the Christmas tree. Like the good Guide Dog pup that she is, the extra food on view and within reach didn't tempt her. Guide Dog pups don't get to sample human food, so don't look for it.  She had her own gifts, mostly edible, and enjoyed tearing the paper  off them.









A brisk Boxing Day walk was the best part of it all for Kristal. She was fascinated to see so many children
with new scooters,  balloons, bits of tinsel in their  hair. Our local coffee shop was a-buzz with extended family gatherings and excited children clamouring for the attention of...  anyone who would listen. My quiet, calm pup did me proud. She looked a bit shell-shocked. Why doesn't someone get these kids under control?  I reckon the staff were thinking along the same lines.


As the New Year approaches, I wish  you all health and happiness and a lot of creative energy!

Daisy Graduates

So pleased to hear today that Daisy has qualified as a Guide Dog and is now working in Maidstone, Kent, with a lady who has a child, a Corgi and a cat. So she's part of a family and is much appreciated and loved. That's just great. I'm sure she'll help her owner come to terms with her deteriorating eyesight with greater confidence, and she'll be a lot of fun to live with. Well done Daisy and lots of love to you.

Kristal, on the other hand, is going through the equivalent of her teens. Questioning commands...'do you really expect me to do that?' ... and throwing her weight around a bit.

This is her Winston Churchill impersonation. Actually, she's holding the rolled up instructions to a new household gadget. You can see by the look in her eye that she's not going to give them up easily. This is her 'what's in it for me?' expression.

However, she's maturing into a very good looking dog, now eight months old, and showing that she really 'has what it takes'.

Despite her strong will, when she's out on a training exercise she knows what's expected of her. She has a high energy level and will appreciate being kept on the go, therefore benefiting someone with a busy lifestyle. Her time-keeping is amazingly accurate. You can set your watch by her. She knows what happens when and lets you know about it. She also has a really good memory for routes she's walked previously and can sniff out Cafe Nero even when we're in an unfamiliar town.

In restaurants and cafes she's very well behaved and settles beneath the table for a snooze. She's quiet and unobtrusive, which is often more than can be said for some of the children we encounter. (However, this morning, she was so quiet and unobtrusive, snoozing beneath the table in a coffee shop, that I didn't notice she'd chewed right through her lead. There was I, standing up to leave, holding a lead with no dog on the end of it.)

In John Lewis she likes to preen in front of the big mirrors in the fashion department. In the Ladies Toilets, she's suitably coy and just sits quietly in a corner of the cubicle trying to avert her eyes while I struggle with multiple layers of winter clothing, a scarf that threatens to either choke me or dangle where it shouldn't, a shoulder bag looped around my neck, gloves that keep falling out of my pockets, a wonky hat that heads southward when I bend over, and several carrier bags of shopping. When I emerge, red faced and puffed, she is the one who is calm and collected.

I have high hopes for her.

Alien Invasion

Dear Everyone, 

What have I been doing today? Well, I've been trying to persuade a host of unwanted visitors that they should find alternative lodgings for the winter. In this, I'm referring to the hundreds of Ladybirds (ladybugs) that have taken up residence in the window frame and around the blind thingy in an upstairs bedroom. 

A TV programme some time ago forewarned of this alien invasion. Evidently these critters are Spanish in origin and almost twice the size of our native British Ladybird. Just as the infiltration of Spanish Bluebells are overpowering our more delicate native variety, so these Spanish bugs are eating our native ones out of house and home. 

'Ladybird, Ladybird fly away home...' goes the nursery song we grew up with, but when she gets there, her Spanish cousins have eaten every greenfly in sight.... the cupboard is bare. So what should I do to these creatures? They're difficult to dislodge and persistant in their efforts to return to the snuggled warmth of their bedfellows in the cosy crevices they've found at both ends of a window blind and around the window frame. It's a dilemma, to be sure. For these tiny spotted creatures are part of our childhood folklore and often our first introduction the up-close-and-personal scrutiny of bug life. We're not afraid of them. We love them. We've spent happy days counting their spots. We've sung songs to them and shared with them our concerns for their offspring: '...fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are alone...'

I know they're one of the 'goodies' in the garden. They eat their way through tons of greenfly (still not enough in my opinion) but that does not entitle them to house-room for the winter. We just DON'T WANT THEM IN OUR BEDROOMS. Oh they're very well behaved. They don't run around or anything. Apart from poo-ing and discarding bits of legs here and there, you wouldn't know they were in residence. But I'm afraid, somehow, they've just got to go. I can't bring myself to spray them. This might be a job for the vacuum cleaner... oh dear. (cough, splutter!!)

   
Not decided what to do yet. Watch this space. 

I prefer brown

best-sellers often let me down
like eating white
instead of brown

To keep, or not to keep? Thoughts on de-cluttering.

Don't you just hate it when you see a bargain and circumstances prevent you from taking advantage of it? Various airlines are offering some good flight deals for long haul departures after Christmas. Normally, I would already have booked by now for our escape-the-winter trip, but we're in the midst of a protracted house buying/selling saga that is dragging on and on, preventing any form of forward planning. We don't do summer hols... we do winter escapes.  But it's not working out this year. In fact, I'm looking to experience my first full winter for eight years.  HELP!  Where did I store all those hand-knitted gloves and scarves my mother made?

Meanwhile I'm in de-cluttering mode. Husband is not taking this seriously yet. Everything I put into the charity shop pile he picks up and says, 'You're not giving this away are you? I like this.' Oh yeah? He likes it so much that he's not seen it for years because it's been up in the loft or buried in the bottom of a drawer.

Not normally given to nostalgia, it's amazing how much de-cluttering time is spent reminiscing - re-living the time that this dress or suit (yes, once upon a time I was a 'suit' person) was a favourite. Unwrapping lovingly wrapped odds and ends from years ago only to wonder what it was you ever saw in it. Finding bundles of old letters and cards that just have to be read from start to finish... largely because they're in grown up hand-writing, fashioned with real pen and ink, and so the personality of the writer... just a little bit of that long lost person... remains in the lift and swoop of the letter formations.

As a child of the fifties UK to Australasia government assisted migration programme I've always been a compulsive letter writer. Writing to the folks back home was part of colonial life. Letters just for the fun of keeping in touch, but, because of their hand crafted nature and extended length,  saying so much more than an email or text.  I also had pen-friends in several exotic countries and loved the look and feel of an envelope arriving in my letterbox that had been passed from hand to hand; transported, I imagined, by donkey, ship, aeroplane and bicycle, and bearing that tiny piece of art work in the top right hand corner that had actually been licked by my friend. Mmmm. I could almost smell the dust of India or the spices of Hong Kong when I held the envelopes up to my nose.

When I came to live in England in the swinging sixties I corresponded regularly with my mother back in New Zealand and collected, over many many years, a huge number of stamps off her letters. I still keep them in clear glass ornamental jars.

New Zealand has always produced exciting pictorial stamps. But what's special about the stamps I collect is that they're taken from the corners of the blue aerogrammes that kept families in touch with each other before the days of emails and skype. And so, on the back of each tiny square or rectangle, there's a snippet of my mother's handwriting.


Hope this finds you     sunny day today...           Dad went to...    sorry to hear...                                         
          You'll never believe...

And this brings me to what turned out to be a disastrous spate of de-cluttering over 20 years ago. My sister-in-law had been visiting and pointed out to me that I really ought to de-clutter the end of my kitchen work surface where I keep mail and such like. Pens, telephone, note pads, rubber bands, appointment cards and lots and lots of the blue aerogrammes that arrived, sometimes two or three times a week from my mother.  So, with another spate of visitors due, I threw myself into de-cluttering mode,  tidied up and threw out lots of letters, perhaps the previous few weeksworth, that had been cluttering up my kitchen.  I didn't know that within a few months my mother would no longer be with us. After her death, when I searched the house, I couldn't find any of her letters... such was the extent of my tidying up. So now I only have snippets of her handwriting on the backs of the used stamps.

Sometimes I spread them out on the carpet and read them one by one. This brings back vivid images of my mother. I hear her voice and and sense her gestures -  the twinkle in her eye or the
worried frown. Now and then an expression of despair, but mostly an assurance that everything was fine, when often I knew it wasn't.

'When in doubt, chuck it out,' we're urged. But hang on a minute... what about giving a thought to that old Yorkshire saying, 'When in doubt, do now't'.  With that in mind I think I'll give the de-cluttering a rest for a while. 

Seeing Eye - Guiding Light

Today I started my day by sitting on the station platform with my Guide Dog puppy, Kristal, watching trains go by and people embarking and disembarking. I'm a puppy walker for Guide Dogs and today is the start of Guide Dogs Week. A celebration of 80 years of providing guide dogs for people in Britain who are blind or partially sighted.

The idea that dogs could be used, on a large scale, to guide blind people sprang from the experiences of German soldiers trying to locate their blinded comrades in the trench warfare of the First World War, where, like British soldiers, many were blinded by mustard gas. However, there are several much earlier indications and documented evidence of individuals having trained pet dogs as guides going back to the first century AD... in fact there is a depiction of a blind man being guided by a dog in a fresco in Roman Herculaneum. Dogs were being trained to guide blind people at Les Quinze-Vingts hospital for blind people in Paris in 1780. In 1788 Josef Riesinger, a blind seive maker from Vienna, trained his pet dog to guide him so successfully that people doubted he was blind. In 1847, a Swiss man, Jakob Birrer, wrote about his experience of being guided, over a five year period, by a dog he'd trained himself. However, it's from experiences that sprang from mustard gas and the blinding of soldiers in the trenches during World War I that the modern Guide Dog story begins. A German doctor, Gerhard Stalling, treating blinded soldiers at a re-habilitation hospital, observed his own pet dog, untrained and working purely on instinct, clearly guiding a blinded patient. From this, in 1916, sprang the first formal training programme. Soon, there were nine major training centres in Germany providing 600 trained dogs a year for clients in many countries.

In 1927, a wealthy American lady, Mrs Dorothy Harrison Eustis, living in Switzerland, heard of the German successes and went to observe their methods, following this up with an article for the Saturday Evening Post magazine (November 1927). Considering that this might be an answer to his prayers, a blind American man, Morris Frank, wrote to Dorothy encouraging her to think of introducing guide dogs to America. Dorothy Eustis saw this as an opening and trained a dog for Mr Frank who journeyed to Switzerland to work with the dog. Training completed, he returned to America with his guide dog, Buddy. The pair were followed by reporters and photographers convinced that an accident was bound to happen... but no, the partnership was a huge success. Frank was reported as saying that the 5 cents he'd spent on purchasing that magazine was worth a million dollars to him. The Seeing Eye organization was launched in America and encouraged two British women, Muriel Crooke and Rosamund Bond to embark upon their own training programme. This was the origin of guide dog training in Britain. In 1931, the first four British dogs completed their training.

Now, 80 years later, the Guide Dogs Association produces about 1,300 puppies a year. They have just over 5000 working guide dogs. Many more are required. There are over a million people in Great Britain registered blind or partially sighted and of these, over 250,000 would benefit from a guide dog partnership. However, Guide Dogs is a charity and receives no government funding so can only produce the number of working dogs it can support. (Support being in the form of breeding, training, veterinary costs, feeding, equipment etc.) Under the guidance of the 900 or so staff, Guide Dogs is supported by over 11,000 volunteers who take on a wide range of roles such as fundraising, puppy walking, assisting kennel staff, speaking at functions, driving dogs from one end of the country to the other and many more.   

Although training dogs is Guide Dogs main role, many people will be unaware that the organization also contributes a large amount of its funds towards research into eye disease and it is second only to the RNIB as providers of mobility and independence training for blind and partially sighted people with or without a dog.

You never know when you might need the services of an organization like Guide Dogs. We're told we can expect to live longer these days. The problem is that our bits and pieces are wearing out at different rates...  

That said... I think it's walkies time!

   For further information: www.guidedogs.org.uk  
   

A Good Day to Die

Hearing that someone you love is about to die is never easy. It's even more difficult when you're 12,000 miles away and can't get there to say goodbye. There's an overwhelming desire to just see that person one more time.  You cast your mind back to when you last saw them. What did you talk about? Was there laughter? Laughter's good. Did you leave on good terms? Did you wave? A wave is treasured.

Nellie is my aunt. A very close aunt, despite the fact that we live 12,000 miles apart for much of the year. She has no children of her own but lots of nephews and nieces whom she always spoilt rotten when we were little. She's just coming up to her 90th birthday, but I don't think she's going to make it. Last night I received a phone call from my cousin to say that the doctors thought Nellie might only have 24 hours left. They were just going to make her comfortable. Nellie is frightened of dying. I know she is. And especially of dying alone. She's not very good with pain either. I need to tell them this. I need them to know that she won't like it if they close the curtains. That she'll like the television on, even if the sound is off. And she likes her hair brushed... get someone to do that for her. Hold her hand. And let her keep her teeth in, because she hates to be seen without them. She'll want to look presentable. She was always very clothes conscious. And remember, hold her hand.

All my cousins will be with her. She won't be alone, I'm sure. But I should be there. Instead I'm here, 12,000 miles from where I'm needed. I should be the one holding her hand. I'm the oldest niece. I was four when I went to her wedding. She was the aunt who was always laughing. And nothing made her happier than to be surrounded by nieces and nephews. She loved us all.

So now I'm just waiting for another phone call. I can't do anything else from this distance. I'm hoping she'll just drift away... isn't that what we all want? I hope the sun will shine; that she'll gaze out of the window at the clouds floating by and think to herself, yes... this is a good day to die. But I know from experience that it doesn't always work out that way. So now I'm just sitting. Looking at old photographs, remembering happy times. And waiting for the phone call...