Another year, another hairstyle

Changed my hairdresser for the first time in over 30 years. Wish it wasn't such a yellow picture, as I rather like it.

Fancy being vain enough at 91 to want a new profile picture for Facebook! Did you ever notice that once
there are grandchildren about Granny seldom gets her picture taken ... and I daresay Grandpa has the same problem.

The going is beginning to get hard now, and I've had to resort to a stairlift. Thank goodnes arthritis has not entirely destroyed my skill as a touch typist ... I mean of course, the old fashioned kind of touch typing,  without looking at the keys, not typing by touch on the screen of a hand-held device.

I didn't get my first computer till I was 70, and it has given me so much joy. But the brain tires as well as the body, and that is even more saddening. My GP has done a simple memory test for early signs of dementia, but apparently I scored OK in that. However, short of dementia, memory loss can still be very troublesome. 

Well, there is still laundry to be done, and washing up, and I only manage about a 12-hour day, so a cuppa and something nice to eat is next on the list.

If anyone actually reads this, it would be a great delight to hear from you. I hope there is still a functioning system for making comments. I don't think I shall ever work out how to do this properly again. Blessings to all!

 

Calculate your BMI

 
 

Knocking on at 90.......

I thought I would come back and change my profile picture, now I am starting on yet another decade. Unfortunately the software won't accept it so I have to put it in my post.

I got distracted by other things in 2009, and stopped blogging regularly, but I have been back once or twice since to make the odd comment. I always plan to take it up again, but each year that goes by makes it harder to do all the things you want to do, and still look after the shopping, cooking, eating, tidying up, paying the bills, and unscrambling the stupid confusions and cockups that seem to beset so many older people as the clarity of their focus dims a little. (Whew, what a long sentence!)

I set up this blog in 2005 saying that I would "tell it like it is" and that is still my intention. I would like to put in a link here to a post I made almost 10 years ago, but I am afraid I may mess it up. It is going to take me time to relearn the way to do this, as I am sure there must have been more than one update to the programme while I have been gone. So I will leave it to the next post ..... (if there is one).

LOVE POEM - (without benefit of accents)

Love poem

Ya du noir tout au long des nuits

Ya du noir tous les chats sont gris

Ya du gris dans un ciel de pluie

Ya du gris dans les yeux de ma mie.

Ya du bleu tout au fond des cieux

Ya du bleu dans le fond d’tes yeux

Ya du vert dans l’printemps d’mon coeur

Ya du vert d’l’espoir du bonheur.

Ya de l’or dans l’reflet d’tes cheveux

Ya de l’or on dirait du feu

Ya du blanc dans le creux d’tes seins

Ya du blanc sur ta peau d’satin.

Ya ton rouge pour tacher mes levres

Ya ton rouge qui me donne la fievre

Ya l’argent qui n’fait pas l’bonheur

Ya d’l’argent qui choisit l’malheur.

Mais d’la joie y’a a plein ma tete

Toute en rire tout en fete

Mais l’amour y’en aura jusqu’a la fin des jours.

                            ~~~~~

    ˜™  

Charlie off to Bolivia today....lucky thing.
Posted by The Barn by Sarah Collins on Monday, 6 July 2015

April Fool ?

It's about 3 years since I stopped blogging here regularly. I have been busy, but I have missed it, and today I think I have found the right note on which to begin again. 

I am now 87, and a good deal slower and more wobbly than I was when I began this blog in 2005. Unfortunately, I have taken to falling over rather a lot in the last year or two, with a couple of tumbles which pretty much put me out of action, for a chunk of time I didn't want to miss. My GP has referred me to a local falls clinic, and today I went to be assessed for which of two exercise  classes would be suitable for me.

I arrived rather early and found the hall empty, but shortly a young man came in who had ‘INSTRUCTOR’ in large letters across his chest. I thought this looked promising, but was a bit confused by the fact that he was not only lean and muscled, but also long-haired, and covered from shoulders to fingertips in some pretty intricate and stylish tattoos.

I had expected, for assessment purposes, a nurse- or doctor-like figure, but this was more in the way of the ’personal trainer’ type, that causes such havoc in much of popular drama and fiction. Surely he wasn’t going to be looking after me, and the other rather wobbly looking lady who had joined me in the hall? But he was....

After I had filled in a form about how much I feared falling in various circumstances, he sat me down and began to ask me questions. He was gentle and easy to talk to, and I ceased to find him inappropriate to my situation. He then asked me to stand up, and proceeded to test my balance and flexibilty by putting me through various positions and moves. (No matter how I word it that sounds suspect - he never laid a hand on me). Suddenly I heard him say “Good Judith, nice hip movement” and I began to wonder if I was in an April Fool’s fantasy. It was all I could do not to burst into giggles.

I came home feeling rather jolly and lighthearted, instead of the awkward and anxious person who had set out.       

What do you call a government who ...

What do you call a government who.... Posted: 12 Jun 2014 03:13 AM PDT If this article makes you think, please don't close it without using the buttons at the end to tweet it, share it and send it to your friends. This has been a scream inside my head for months now.  What do you call a government who's first act is to make it virtually impossible to remove them from power, no matter how badly they perform? Who attempt to redraw the boundaries and cut the numbers of constituencies purely so that it benefits their own side, thus making it much easier for them to hold on to power? What do you call a government who use the media and their own departmental outlets to run a partisan propaganda campaign against vulnerable groups? Who ensure that lies are printed, policies are not criticised, information requests are not granted and statistics are misrepresented? What do you call a government who overturn laws retrospectively to make court rulings against them obsolete? What do you call a government who erodes justice by ensuring the least able to defend themselves can no longer access it? Or who remove the right for ordinary people or organisations to take them to court? Or who limit the right to appeal decisions? What do you call a government who introduce a gagging bill making it virtually impossible for third parties to oppose them through democratic channels? Who threaten charities and our independent national news service for covering important stories in the national interest? What do you call a government that ignores the advice of it's second chamber entirely, effectively neutering it from providing the checks and balances true democracies demand? What do you call a government who ignores court rulings not once but repeatedly that find their policies discriminate but ignore that ruling? Or who whitewash consultations and entirely falsify their results - or ignore them completely? What do you call a government who tries to scrap the human rights act and buy your employment rights from you? What do you call a government who send misleading and partial reports to our world partners on what effects their policies are having on its citizens? What do you call a government who restrict education for disabled people and books for those in prisons? Who design our children's education based on personal whims and construct a syllabus that matches their own world view? Reports today show that Trussell Trust, the charity responsible for the largest network of food banks in the UK modified their campaigning after threats that the government might get them shut down if they continued to make links between government policies such as welfare reform and the rise in food banks. http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/17632/trussell_trust_chair_told_the_government_might_try_to_shut_you_down#.U5llhF5H1FJ This following a week that saw Oxfam criticised by a Conservative MP for highlighting growing poverty not abroad, but here in the UK. I have proof from FOI requests that Chris Grayling, that the then Work and Pensions Secretary asked civil servants repeatedly about closing down my own blog. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/correspondence_regarding_tribuna#incoming-316228 If you read this today, RT it, share it and ask everyone you send it to to ask themselves exactly what the actual definition is of a government who behaves like this? And I only scratched the surface.  Reposted from the blog of  Sue Marsh : Diary of a Benefit Scrounger

Sue Marsh speaking at the TUC "Better Way" protest demo

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Nursing the Nation

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Bedroom tax song

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Published on 27 Mar 2013


A song about the Bedroom Tax, written for the demos all over the UK on Saturday 30th March, 2013, the Glasgow one in particular. Set to the tune of 1960's folk song "The Jeely Piece Song", by Scottish singer-songwriter Adam McNaugton.


LYRICS

I'm a welfare state wean, we live on the bottom flair
But we're no allowed to even live there any mair.
They say we've got too many rooms, in our social rented flat
We've an eight by ten foot boxroom where you cannae swing a cat

Chorus:
Oh ye canna have a spare room in a pokey cooncil flat
Ian Duncan Smith and Co have put an end tae that
They say "live in a smaller house", they say that is their plan
When the odds against you finding one are ninety-nine to one

Noo ma auntie's in a wheelchair, but these Tories dinna care
They say they have a deficit, she got to pay her share
£60 a month they'll take, then leave her tae her fate
Whilst gieing millionaires a tax cut, cause they say they're due a break

Noo that Buckingham Palace looks a pretty roomy gaff
And the ludger there gets benefits at rates that make me laugh
A civil list, plus perks, worth nearly ninety million pounds
With her other dozen mansions lying empty a' year round

Noo those MPs doon in Westminster must think that we're 'a dense
Wi their second home apartments, where the public pays their rent
They're even get a food allowance, two hundred quid a week
But they're claiming we're the scroungers, is their arse up in their cheeks?

So we've formed a Federation and we're gonna have our say
The Bedroom Tax it has to go, and we ain't gonna pay
We're gonna march on London tae demand our civil rights
Like nae mair Tories and their Liberal shite

Help us! We're begging you!

~

"No-one likes a nagging over their cornflakes. Actually, no-one likes to be told that they're lazy, unfeeling or cruel at all. But Britain, for God's sake, are you ever going to listen to these News stories about disability and care?"

So says Sue Marsh, a well respected writer and campaigner on behalf of people who are disabled. Please follow the link below to find out why we should all be listening and doing whatever we can.

Diary of a Benefit Scrounger: Help us! We're Begging You:


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WHITBY GINNELS?

I inherited these four watercolours from my husband. They were painted around 1900 by his mother, whom I never met, as she had died only weeks before I first met him in 1946. The pictures stayed packed away in boxes until after he died, but I have brought them out to see the light of day, and had them framed as a set.

The artist herself named the top two, and I made a trip to Whitby to visit the scenes myself - a rather eerie but somehow romantic experience, to 'meet' one's mother-in-law in such a way, 60 years after getting to know her younger son, and several years after his death.

Sandsend, Whitby

Arguments Yard, Whitby

 











The second two pictures, below, were un-named, but I began a search of the web to see if I could confirm my feeling that they too are Whitby scenes.  I found old photographs that seemed to be looking past Whitby Old Town Hall to Market Place, seen from a point very similar to the painting on the left. The one on the right shows a ruin on a hill which could well be the old Abbey.

I shall be immensely grateful if anyone is able to confirm these two last locations for me, so that I can name them all and hang them as a group on my diningroom wall.

Whitby harbour and Abbey ruins?

Now confirmed as the view from Church St, Whitby,
looking past the old Market Place on the right
towards the River Esk 




Alone we whisper, together we shout!

~

Making an appeal to the Social Security and Child Support Tribunal

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The Robin Hood Tax

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Welfare Cuts in the UK

On Wednesday the 11th January the House of Lords was debating the Welfare Reform Bill. They won the vote, by considerable margins, on three major amendments which they had tabled, in an attempt to mitigate some of the severest effects that the cuts will have on sick and disabled people.

Here are two articles appearing afterwards, in two newspapers at the opposite ends of the political scale.

Sonia Poulton in The Daily Mail - 12.01.2012:

We're all desperate for welfare reform, Mr. Cameron, but hiding the truth is not the way to achieve it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2084706/David-Camerons-Welfare-Reform-Bill-Hiding-truth-way-achieve-it.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Polly Toynbee in The Guardian - 13.01.2012:

Cameron's problem is that people are nicer than he thinks. When these welfare changes come into force, their savage effect will be seen – and then the public mood will turn.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/12/welfare-cuts-cameron?CMP=EMCSOCEML657

The Spartacus Report on Responsible Reform

This report into Disability Allowance Reform has been written, researched and funded by disabled people, who see their basic but essential support benefits under serious threat by government reforms. I am very concerned by its findings and the misrepresentation of disabled people that it exposes. Here is an extract from the press release that accompanied its publication:

"A report published today (9 January) finds that Government misled MPs and Peers over the hostility to disability benefit reform. It finds that Parliament has been given only a partial view of the overwhelming opposition to the Coalition’s planned reforms of a key disability benefit, Disability Living Allowance (DLA). It finds that this opposition was previously not released to public scrutiny by the Government.

It is based on the responses to the government's own consultation on its planned DLA reforms, which were only made public once disabled people requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. Findings included:

· 98 per cent of respondents objected to the qualifying period for benefits being raised from 3 months to 6 months
· 99 per cent of respondents objected to Disability Living Allowance no longer being used as a qualification for other benefits
· 92% opposed removing the lowest rate of support for disabled people. "

The report has already been backed by organisations and disability experts including:
Disability Alliance, Mind, Papworth Trust, Scope, Bert Massie CBE & Ekklesia.

I am backing it too.

Oh yes, and just in case you wondered: The fraud rate for disability benefits is less than 0.5%, but the Government wants to reduce recipients by 20%!

[Illustration by Andrzej Krauze, first published in the Guardian on 8th January.]

Surviving Winter Appeal

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I am lucky enough to receive the Winter Fuel Payment, which I do not actually need. There is stuff in my life that I could easily do without, before I would have to think of doing without heat. But the numbers we read of old people like myself, who die each winter of cold, are dreadful - and it seems that they are likely to be worse this winter than ever before.

So I am donating my Winter Fuel Payment to the 'Surviving Winter Campaign', which is being organised around the country through local community foundations. Donations are channelled directly to local people who will benefit from them , and if you gift-aid your donation, admin costs will be taken out of the amount claimed back, and not out of your donation. If you want to donate, go to the Community Foundation Network website where you can find the foundation nearest to you, and look for a link to the appeal.

Help to keep someone else warm this winter!