London Bridge to Marden, Sunday 16 March 2014

London Bridge to Marden
Sunday 16 March 2014

Total duration: 1h 06m
Changes: 1

15:00 from London Bridge to Tonbridge (arriving 15:49).

15:53 from Tonbridge to Marden (arriving 16:06).



Sent from my iPhone

hi-a-tus (hahy-ey-tuhs)

noun, plural -tus·es, -tus.

1.  a break or interruption in the continuity of a work, series, action, etc.

2.  a missing part; gap or lacuna: Scholars attempted to account for the hiatus in the medieval manuscript.

3.  any gap or opening.

4.  Grammar, Prosody . the coming together, with or without break or slight pause, and without contraction, of two vowels in successive words or syllables, as in see easily.

5.  Anatomy . a natural fissure, cleft, or foramen in a bone or other structure.

It has been a very long time.

I have definitely been having a break or interruption.

I was making something fairly special, a little bambino.  But it didn't work out this time and we lost him at week 25 of the pregnancy.  It wasn't a great pregnancy to be fair and I was ill most of the time (oh, the benefit of hindsight), I didn't go out much, I didn't laugh much and I certainly wasn't up for making much, badly or otherwise.  

Noah was still born on 14th July, poor little chap.  He was tiny and he looked perfect, which is a certain kind of irony because he wasn't.  He had severe swelling in the ventricles in his tiny brain - those scans are bloody amazing - and it was heartbreaking.

But, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, what does not kill you makes you stronger and I hope that I will find that to be true.  And this is helping, oddly - http://www.justgiving.com/Noah-Spanier

So I am back, I am hoping that my hiatus is over and I plan to bore cyberspace with my waffling until someone posts to tell me to stop.

Avoidance Strategies

I started an Open University module in history this year. To be precise in "Total War and Social Change: Europe 1914-1955". I thought that it would be fun to use my brain for the first time in a while plus Toby is off studying at London Business School, so why not?

Why not?

Where to start. I feel as though I am just about treading water at the moment. Some of the concepts (mainly Marxist it seems) are vaguely familiar from my undergraduate days but in truth it is the distance learning thing that I struggling with. Having to be self motivated, eurgh. Having to be motivated to get up and read, a lot, and some of it is quite dense, academic stuff - I refer you to my earlier comment on Marx, and I find myself wondering just what am I doing.

Still I have discovered that of an evening all I want to do is sit down, glass of wine and knit. This means that my Amy Butler cardigan may get finished around the same time as this module...


So far there is more cardigan than there is learning.

Belle Mere

This is one of my favourite recent pictures of my darling mother in law, or belle mere en francais. It was taken last summer on holiday in Normandy.

My darling belle mere died at the end of January.

She had been very bravely battling osophageal cancer for almost two years. Her cancer diagnosis came not long after the sudden death of her husband, Peter. Whilst that was unspeakably awful the silver lining for me was that I started to see more of her and get to know her more and fall slightly under her spell.

Belle mere was warm, funny and never short of an opinion on just about everything. But I loved listening to her stories of her family, her early life, her love for Peter and her sons and I especially loved hearing some of the more amusing ones that involved my Toby and his brothers.

I love my own mother very much but belle mere was a different kind of mother to me. She felt like the mother that I chose for myself. I would find myself wanting to talk to her about things that I would never think to talk to my own mother about and the thing that came with that was that she would tell me exactly what she thought - no sugar coating.

Never again will I have to think about what I wear in quite the way I did when I used to when I know that I was seeing her (belle mere was a 1980s convert to the world of colour analysis) and whilst that makes me quietly happy, it makes me really sad because I miss her.

I miss her so very much.

I miss our hour long telephone conversations where we seemed to talk about both everything and nothing.

I miss hearing her laugh.

I just miss her.

Sloan alone

I have been meaning to post for days.

First of all the festive season got in the way. There were family members draped over every bit of furniture that we have and our perfectly big enough 3 bed cottage was suddenly straining at the seams. Then they all left leaving sleep deprivation and a slight dependence on advocaat in their wake, not to mention all the bed linen, bath towels and general returning the cottage to the way it should be.

Then came New Year. No resolutions made by me because they would only even last until about midday on 1 January! But there was a cracking good time at our first murder mystery dinner. I am still in shock that Ju La next door was not only my mother but the murderer, zut allors!

Then there was a little week away with himself to sleep, relax, eat yet more delish nosh and catch up with some friends.

And now, well life is certainly different that it for sure. Toby started as a full time student last week at London Business School and spent a night staying at his mother's and the other two nights getting the last train home. So we managed about three words of conversation all week until he got home on Friday night. I had got out of the habit of cooking for one, and most nights I was alone (or Sloan alone I like to call it, his course has some mouthful of a title called The Sloan Fellowship in Leadership and Strategy. Give me learn to knit any day of the week!) and ended up sharing my bed with Rex and Rufus. I know, I know, they should be downstairs, but sometimes a girl needs some company and even doggie company is good enough sometimes.

Just for Sammers

Because she asked, so nicely, here is the 2010 festive tree in all it's 4 foot glory just for Sammers....


And, because I thought that they were smashing, here are my dangling baubles....

Family, schamily

For the fourth year in a row Old Church Cottage has been the venue for the combined festive efforts of the Piddock and Spanier clans. And each year it seems that it has got better and better. But this year, on Boxing Day, we managed to capture the gathering for posterity.