Vaccinated Diamond Birthday

Six Months Later

So, six months after I was born in Wakefield, Sally Anne Allard was born on St Patrick’s Day in Bradford. March 2021 marked Sally’s Diamond Birthday. It wasn’t “normal” in that there was no meal out and no trip to the cinema or theatre…. But it was normal in keeping up the tradition of getting together with our daughters (even if we were walking two by two) and eating and drinking (a picnic in the open air, socially distanced.) Last March we began locking down before the government asked us to and this year we look forward to restrictions being lifted. So in the weeks and months to come I hope we’ll have a series of further birthday-style events….

St Patrick’s Day over the previous five years

• 2016 – Anomaleesa at The Everyman Cinema in Leeds
• 2017 – Gardening course and the live action Beauty and the Beast at The Everyman
• 2018 – Icy walk, wintry views and meal at home with (Sally’s choice of) Minority Report on the TV
• 2019 – The RSC touring production of Matilda at Bradford Alhambra and Green Book at Showcase
• 2020 – Almost UK-wide Lockdown, hikes (on different days) to the Druid’s Altar and Top Withins

No cinema, no theatre, but plenty still to enjoy

In the bullet-points above, I’ve mentioned cultural events that made 2016-19 distinctive, but all years have still included cards, a cake and presents revolving around themes of gardening, glamour, reading, flowers, food and drink. This year a parade of visitors passed by the garden gate to wish Many Happy Returns and delivery folk turned up at a steady pace…. Unusual gifts this year included a phone call from Australia, a home-knitted cardigan and a kit from Dishoom to make Naan-Bacon-Rolls. (After nearly 35 years of marriage we are learning to be cooperative in the kitchen!)

Birthday Talents

It’s easy to celebrate birthdays with Sally (or spend Christmas, or go on holiday, or do Bonfire Night, or do anything really….) All that’s needed are messages of love from family and friends and some time together making human connections. All the Lockdowns in the world can’t squash Sally’s talents for being generous and open-hearted to whatever can be achieved with whatever resources are at hand….

Spring in the air

The birds are nest-building, the daffodils are out, the buds are budding, the daylight hours are longer – these are all signifiers of Sally’s birthday every year – the Spring of the year. And in 2021, the Covid vaccine rollout continues apace…. A Spring-like birthday present from the scientific and medical community. What will St Patrick’s Day in March 2022 bring? We’ll be a year older. Will we still be socially distancing? Wearing masks? Time will tell.

A Birthday

by Christina Rossetti

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me. 

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Sighing after swallows flown

La Rue, Saltaire, posh takeaway

Lockdown 2.0

Another week, another jigsaw. This time, a birthday jigsaw featuring “The Harry Potter Film Club” named because we started the club to watch the Harry Potter films one after the other and have since graduated to Oscar-winners, foreign language films, strange comedies, cheesy romances, macabre crime movies and everything in between. The week has also seen the successful ordering and whole-stomached consuming of a posh takeaway from local British/French bistro La Rue – a new way for businesses to try and keep afloat in these challenging times. I’m assuming the UK Prime Minister has an excellent plan for dealing with the 2020 pandemic; I can only hope that upwards of a million infections and over 50,000 deaths were part of his vision. Otherwise, why would he keep trying to tell me it was all looking promising (me, with the rose-tinted spectacles)? To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be a member of the cabinet at the moment; though next week might feel better without Dominic Cummings who many government insiders describe as malignant and mendacious. Just saying.

Sever from my lot your lot

I can usually conjure something from Shakespeare or poetry to fit the times and Lockdown 2.0 brought to mind the Autumnal poem below. It is by one of my top ten poets: Christina Rossetti, author of the soulful In the Bleak Midwinter and the wild Goblin Market. The voice of the poem “live(s) alone, (and) look(s) to die alone” having ordered all her friends to stay away and “sever” themselves from her. “I have hedged me with a thorny hedge.” There are many interpretations of the identity of the character inside this Petrarchan sonnet, and why exactly she is in her own personal lockdown. But, in November 2020, the last four lines catch my mood during the latest Covid-19 national restrictions. (Incidentally that mysterious last line is a gift for teachers trying to demonstrate the technique and effects of assonance (on the “u”) and alliteration (on the “s” and the “t”….) God and Gaia bless you, Christina Rossetti. I thank you for your gifts.

Hirst Wood, La Rue Puddings, My homemade Chicken&Mushroom Pie, Christina Rossetti - all good things....

From Sunset to Star Rise

By Christina Rossetti

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer’s unreturning track.

From Sunset to Star Rise

In the bleak midwinter

Boxing Day in the Black Rock in Wakefield

Everlasting bond of fellowship

In the parky January days it’s comforting to remember the gatherings over Christmas – on Boxing Day, Christmas Day and Christmas Eve. “Thy friendship makes us fresh,” wrote Shakespeare in the first of his Henry VI plays.

Christmas Eve with the Lancelot-Barr-Grady Brigade

Hot ice and wondrous strange snow

It was equally thrilling in the past week to have a couple of days with astonishing ice displays and snow effects. Crystal shards and heaps of snow painting blades of grass, decorating bare branches, enclosing frosty canals. Made a change from floods (see Year of the Flood blog here.) A few months from now (all being well) we will enjoy short sleeves and vitamin D, but currently it’s invigorating to tread gingerly on the frozen footpaths, slippery towpaths, icy highways and bitterly-cold byways.

Top two pictures by Harriet

Red blood reigns in the winter’s pale

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus sings about the mysteries of nature, how even in the depths of winter, blood pumps through the veins (“Red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.”) Bulbs sprout through snow. The depths of winter contain the promise of spring. “What is six winters?” asks John of Gaunt in Richard II. “They are quickly gone.”

Frosty wind made moan

My (joint) favourite Christmas carol is the Holst setting of Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter. (My other  favourite is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.) I don’t know why In the Bleak Midwinter gets me so much: is it the tune? The minor key? Or the fact that Rossetti is in my top five poets of all time? The exquisite metaphors and similes? Or the final punchline in answer to the last verse’s question “What can I give Him?” – “Give my heart.”

Giving My Heart

This is my 18th month “retired from” teaching and at the turn of the year (Christmas/New Year) it’s a good time to look back and ponder. Since being retired I’ve noticed how much easier it is to tune in to other people without the distracting white noise of work, jobs, lists, tasks, schedules, phone calls, emails, annoyances, irritations, crises, lesson plans, timetables, assessments, marking, deadlines…. How do teachers do it? How did I ever do it? I truly madly deeply don’t believe I could do it today – or tomorrow. I don’t understand how I managed to do it for 32 years. I see my career now as a period of near-insanity. I can’t decide whether this is a natural feeling common to all retired teachers, a stage of retirement-grief, or a transfer of guilty feelings about how much energy, time and attention teaching stole from me. I know, though, that it feels good to have reclaimed my heart and brain and soul and begin the process of  “seeing” again. Seeing family. Seeing friends. Seeing winter and imagining the promise of spring.