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.