flowers in the rain

my dear friend Betty {who now lives in Australia}

said i could put some flower pictures on my time line {facebook}

and she gave me Ranunculus to find...

little did she know that that is my favourite flower...

as this blog could to with some cheering up
i placed some here too
:-)

found on  this site once

picked from here

from this site

miracle worker

who's Reality is the Right one?

this question has been sitting with me for as long as i can remember...

who's Right is right?

why is my Right wrong to those around me?

my family {love them to bits but...} have a knack of making me feel that i don't really know about the Realities of Life, how i should Cope with stuff, that i live in some sort of fairy-land, waiting for Miracles to Happen... this has been their fear, i suppose, when i told them about the imminent break-up with me and Mr G. they've seen him as my Saviour - without him i would've carried on floundering, i would've been treading water until god knows when... 

maybe i would've... maybe i would've carried on not really knowing what to do, how to make the move away from them, but the thing is - that didn't happen... i did meet Other Half, i did learn truck-loads of stuff, about life and how to cope with stuff, cos i have... the past twenty-odd years i've managed, i've found answers inside myself, i tapped into the immense resource that is my intuition, or whatever it's called, and the fear that used to take over, the panic, and the despair have subsided. they made room for Trust and Faith... in Me... in Life... in The Universe...

but they still won't see that...

they still assume that as soon as Mr G moves out, i'll crumble...

cos i don't know much about the Realities of being a Single Parent...

and i can't just keep thinking that Miracles will happen...

but i also see that they seem to relish Disaster... any one they see, they'll home into... personal disaster {my brother and his family, my auntie and her incurable disease, a friend who's daughter's baby has a problem}, national disaster {crashing air planes, the financial market}, international ones - it's all they can talk about... not the beautiful things that happen - my auntie who's found new love, my brother who's found a way to deal with his situation, the strength the friend's daughter seems to have found, somewhere deep inside - the miracles, the sunny sides. in the face of that, my reality is invisible to them... 

my reality is fine. it's mine, it's what it is.

and i believe in Miracles, cos they Happen.

all the time.

you just need to be able to see them... 

{one happened in June, when i got to see these guys play live, and i remembered what Happiness, Intense Joy and Ecstasy felt like...}

sunday songbook - r.e.m.

back to an old love of mine, one that seemed to spring on me in a time when the music that came out of my radio was absolute rubbish, in my eyes... can't exactly remember how i discovered them, but i do remember the feeling of having discovered a BAND that made songs that had an energy that i understood, sang about things that meant something to me, had a worldliness that i wished i possessed... and the singer...

i don't like falling into a kind of nostalgia for my teenage, cos i don't feel it, but when i hear music from this lot, it just happens...

...orange crush
{from Green, the album that blew me of my feet...}

...you are the everything
{lovely song, also from Green}

...so. central rain
{from a time when hardly anybody knew them, apart form a handful of art students in America, a time when Michael Stipe still had hair...}

...{don't go back to} rockville
{see above}

...nightswimming
{pretty song, love the sentiment}

...love is all around {troggs cover, unplugged}
{sung by Mike Mills, which he hardly ever did, when they did their Unplugged thingy on MTV}

...i walked with a zombie
{a b-side or a track from an EP, which the (flemish alternative music) radio station that had only just started then, to my intense joy, kept playing for weeks on end, cheering up my days in the office no end...}

digging for treasures

as long as i can remember, i go to Emmaus,

a second-hand shop/organisation 

founded by a priest in France, 

and run as a commune,

set in an old convent 

just outside of Breda.

* 

it's lovely there, as the convent is an old place,

restored a few times,

but it was allowed to retain it's character

{rare in Holland...}

the convent originated a long time ago,

was a lot bigger originally,

but unfortunately a big part was destroyed.

the small outbuildings have survived

and now house the many different sections.

there's a sweet bric-a-brac part,

the electronics-section,

an enormous clothes area,

children's clothes, paraphernalia and toys,

and a caf where they sell cakes

the picture underneath was taken this summer

when i was there with a few of the kids,

looking for treasures,

or just some bits and bobs.

the kids {17 and 10, then}

were having a whale of a time 

on the sea-saw,

and the swings...

the building looks a lot like my dream house, 

as i picture it in my head.

same feel, charm,

with less chairs though 

and a lot less people hanging around...

kitchen happines

pretty swedish illustration

or so it looks

*

love the simplicity of it

the colours

*

used to have a few items 

that look just like 

the coffee jar

*

♥

the stranger on the train

short story, about a fantasy i've been having since the end of November... 

partly real life, partly my imagination gone wild

****************************************

She took the first available seat without a reserved sticker on it, in carriage 6. Most of them had, and Lucy spotted a four-seater with a table in between, plonking the big rucksack under the small table, noticing a figure in the seat near the window. The man, professional looking, slightly annoyed that his state of peace had been curtailed, gave her a pleasant smile, which she answered with one of her own. She sat down after she'd taken her coat off and enjoyed a few moments of calm. The wait for the delayed train had been long, despite standing in the main hall of Kings Cross Station being fun, listening to the conversations by people near her was enjoyable, and the notion that many of the trains on the boards were leaving for Edinburgh, or Aberdeen, filled her with a mild form of excitement. Places that she'd wanted to go to as well. One time. When arranging it wouldn't be the hassle that this trip had proved. 

Lucy checked the display of her phone, to see if anybody had been trying to contact her in the time it had taken her to go from the waiting hall to the seat she was in now but there was nothing. The train slowly juddered itself into motion, and she knew that it would take at least another hour and a quarter before it was going to halt again, so she placed the phone on the table in front of her and intended to make herself as comfortable as possible. The man next to her had taken his laptop out and waited for the wireless internet connection to be established. The young woman in the seat near the window on the other side of the isle was listening to music; tinny rhythms drifted through the air, and she tapped her fingers on the window sill. 

The seats opposite weren't taken, despite the claim made by the bits of paper on the headrest. 
"I'll do you a deal," she suddenly heard the man next to her say, "I'll take that chair over there in a bit if nobody else does. I'll give it ten more minutes."
His smile was winning, and she nodded.
"Can't see why not."
They carried on in silence for a while, in which nobody but an elderly woman wandered along, looking for the coffee carriage, and Lucy let the sound of the voice that had just spoken to her bounce around her head. It was a nice voice, with an accent that she hadn't heard much before. Apart form a children's programme that her oldest son used to watch, years and years before. Northern, Yorkshire probably, seen as that's where the train was heading for.

Nine minutes later the man grabbed his laptop, turned it to face the chair opposite  him, grabbed his jacket and scarf, and waited for Lucy to get up and make enough space for him to squeeze through. Another smile adorned his face, but she felt too shy to keep looking his way. She hadn't, apart form staring at London which rolled past the window he was sitting next to, lights coming from office windows, then houses, shops, petrol stations, and slowly there was darkness. She didn't want to make him think that she was trying to work out what he was doing on that laptop. Though she had been curious enough to consider it. 

catweazled

beauty is in the eye of the beholder

funny sometimes, how one person's perception of beauty 
is another's idea of ugly...

on Facebook i'd put a photo of an actor that i really like, as a customer in the health food shop where i work reminded me of him. my boss hadn't heard of the man i mentioned and so i placed a picture of him for her. this caused two reactions: one saying that they too thought he was cute, and that he played in a series that i'd not hear of, and another asking me who the creepy guy was...

another friend had placed a picture of a bloke on her timeline - a dude with long-ish grey hair, and a beard. the comments {many, as her friend appear to be more vocal...} varied from 'wow!' {mine, i think} to 'Yuck, that bloke looks like Catweazle...' 

one person's yummy is another person's yuck, it seems...

a few yummies in my eyes

andrew scott

draco malfoy
{played by tom felton} 

florence welch

eddie izzard

marilyn monroe

john lennon

rupert graves
{the picture i'd placed on my facebook timeline}

margriet van der linden
{dutch journalist}

david tennant
{being Doctor Who}

mark gatiss
{personifying Mycroft Holmes...}

eddie vedder

tom sturridge
playing alan ginsberg}

rupert graves again
{25 years earlier...}

desirableness

for  as long as i can remember, i struggle with the notion of being desirable...
i'm rubbish at it, so it's not as if my ability is waning, or in any other way diminishing, but when i look at my daughter, who seems to have a naturalness in this area that i've never managed to find, i ask myself: why am i still bothered by it?!

women need to look desirable, in order to 'catch' the right man. this message i received from my mother a long time ago, though not spoken to me. it was more of the looks of disapproval i received that made me realise that me looking like a tomboy, refusing to 'do my hair', or any other act that would make me look more feminine, and therefore pleasing on the eye, were not the right way to go about life. teenage, as a result, was hell to me...

i just didn't get it...
i still don't...
i don't get why people look at me disapproving when i dress the way i do, that men don't ogle me the way they do - say - my cousin {tall, blonde, classic dutch woman-look}, or whatever other woman i walk next to usually... not that i want to be ogled as such, i just don't want to be stared through, ignored, treated like the unimportant side-kick... it's getting me down...

so, says my enlightened colleague: dress up! look the part! put make up on! get noticed!
ew, is then my answer... no thank you...
as i said: i don't wish to be ogled, or approved of: i want to stop feeling like i'm an undesirable for Being Me...! that's all...

another part in the long process of Life, and one that i really hope to tackle very quickly...

fear eats the soul

{translated on request, from my dutch blog}

Once every so often i venture out into the Normal World, mingle with Normal People, just to see if i can do it yet: be Normal...

Reason this time around was the massive commotion that’s arisen around the baby vaccination issues {here in Holland there has been an outbreak of Measles amongst the so called bible-belt, where they don’t vaccinate for religious reasons}. A week or so ago, friend of mine, a kind, beautiful, intelligent woman with 4 kids as well, was interviewed for a Reformed Protestant National newspaper, to talk about her ideas with regards to vaccination, but it turned out that most of what she’s said was taken out of context, written down wrong and she was furious about this. The only thing that was right was that her youngest was indeed not vaccinated and she did have a penchant for Anthroposophy.

Keeping that in the back of my mind, I read the article online, and then the comments from ‘concerned citizens’, and with every new comment I felt a little bit less happy, a little bit more gloomy. There was also a reaction-article, written by someone who described my friend as a spiritual nut-job, one that you should be careful to be around as she and people like her had weird {read: dangerous} notions. I was ready to withdraw form Regular Society completely…

To stay with this issue: for a long time I have felt insecure about whether or not to vaccinate, and with the eldest two it felt so terribly wrong, intuitively speaking. But I had no information – back then there was no internet to find stuff like that on – and I went completely against my feelings, let it happen. The fact that the kids were unwell afterwards was apparently normal, and I was just being an overprotective mum. Later on I tried a bit harder to find information, and found so much that made me feel uncomfortable, angry even, but hey: I wasn't a doctor and they were, so who was I to doubt…

Until a while back I found a site – written by a doctor who was also a mum, with the same questions about the necessity of vaccination. Her digging and delving resulted in quite a few remarkable facts, like the one that Measles, for instance, had already been reduced to almost nil in occurrence, years before vaccination started. How did that happen? Natural immunity, which developed over years, and better Hygiene… every page that I read made me raise my eyebrows a bit more, and my jaw dropped a bit lower… I was so glad our youngest 2 didn't get any of that stuff in the name of Being Responsible…

But apparently I’m fairly alone in this, apparently I’m very irresponsible, its people like me who expose Society to Dangerous Diseases, and my kids to Death, and I’m insane to think that I can go around thinking that Measles and other infectious diseases are not Lethal … how can I know better than doctors and science?! In god’s name…

Fear, it seems… Fear still rules impeccably, gets stirred up time after time, used to keep Normal People in Normal Society… well, what… under? Really? I fear so…

Using Fear as a weapon is apparently all you need… To stay with measles: every so many years there’s an outbreak. X-amount of people get infected, a tiny amount die. People with a strong immune system get through it reasonably easily, other have a harder time… Just like with normal Flu… More often though, folks perish from walking Under A Bus, or get fed up with Normal Society and end their lives… But I can’t mention that…

In the above mentioned article, my friend is declared mad for saying that there’s nothing wrong with challenging the immune system every now and then, especially for kids, as it makes them stronger, and I wholly support that notion - a strong mind in a strong body can cope with a lot. That fact that whole hordes of people died a century ago in big towns like Amsterdam was to do with the fact that there were no sewage systems, and that airing and cleaning and hygiene were seen as something for the rich… Bacteria and germs loved the conditions that industrialised communities a hundred years ago had to live in. They love a bit of squalor…

Oh well… my outing to the Normal World, even in newspaper- form, has been it for a while. Not my cup of tea… all those scared people who keep following each other, declaring others to be fools, confirming each other’s fears… no thanks… leave me to be the Airy Fairy who want to spread love and happiness and see the beauty of life and the people around me… anything is better than being Normal…

village in france
van gogh

hard day's night

The cinema that we like to visit has a regular showing of old classics...
we discovered this by accident, then saw that we'd already missed loads, so vowed to keep a close look on the weekly list, and almost a year ago i saw that  A hard day's night would be on, next year, in August... And that was last night...

And what a delight it was!! I've been a fan of the Beatles since i got to know them after John Lennon was killed, now 30 years ago, {although i've known of them longer - they were always on the radio} and of John Lennon on particular {you wouldn't believe how much i enjoyed watching Nowhere Boy...} and i would've been thrilled beyond words if i had been able to see a film of theirs {apart from Magical Mystery Tour, which was a bit of a joke...} back then... But i had to wait until now, and watching it on a big screen, in it's original form, with the guys being so lovely and naturally themselves, the dialogue so clever and sharp, and the black & white pictures so wonderful, the music crisp and delicious, England looking almost innocent, i was left with a strange feeling of joy... Simple and intense joy...

even 48 years after it's release...

lennon, 

a still from the film

apologies

really sorry for being so utterly useless 

at keaping up with this one...

started doing my picture blog again, 

for however long it'll last... 

pictured by daan