HAPPY NEW YEAR! (2012)

Yes, I know I'm a few weeks late, but shush, this is the first chance I've had, so there.

Well, it's been one hell of a year, with one thing and another, and not all of us have made it, but there have been bright spots too.

One such bright spot was Graduation, and it was absolutely wonderful to see everyone again. The Masters was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and

on paper it doesn't seem to have been much of a help in terms of employability, but the people I had the opportunity to meet have more than made up for it - and I suppose it taught me what I was capable of in extraordinary circumstances... and some ordinary ones. Anyway, we all had a great time meeting up, bemoaning the lack of work, drinking a fair bit and letting our hair down. Most refreshing.

Another bright spot that involved the letting down of hair was Chi and Mat's wedding - the first of my school-mate's weddings. It was a bit scary being all grown up, but it was fantastic to see everyone again after so long - and the church where they had the service was beautiful.

This year also heralded the creation of Lazy Days , the craft blog that me, Bones and Krystyna occasionally update. It's been a lot of fun finding and sharing things to talk about on there, including giant pom-poms, sock monsters and do-it-yourself corsets - and hopefully this will only get stronger as time goes on!

Another highlight was the visit to Alnick Castle (HOGWARTS!) with Krystyna, and going to Beamish the next day - all good fun, and probably the subject of a belated post in the next few weeks. As will the trip to Litte Moreton Hall with JacAbsolute and Erador :)

I also took the difficult decision to actually start writing this year, and have been religiously practicing on fanfiction, and planning my original stuff. I wrote

an entirely new fanfic this year - it was supposed to be really short, and turned out to be 37 chapters and 200,000 words long. Suffice it to say that I don't appear to 'do' short. The fic, Much Ado About Hogwarts, is a very silly teenage romantic comedy, and is the complete antithesis of what I normally write - which is what made it so much fun :D It lives here.

I'm having great fun with my own stuff, and live in a weird combination of excitement and dread of the day that I have to actually show it to people :) I started it off during NaNoWriMo, which was great - it was so good to know that all of us were pushing ourselves together.

There's also Erador, who continues to be the man of

my dreams, and puts up with me for reasons best known to himself.

The next year, well... it looks busy, from here, and like it will last forever (which of course they never do)... But there are Big Things afoot, and the world is waking up again. Hope yours is a good one :)

To absent friends.

(Photo: Cuthbert, kicking it back in Biddulph)

Rioting Around the UK

This has to stop.

There is no point to it - what can be achieved by burning things down and hurting people? The only reason things have kicked off is because it gives people a sense of righteous power - and for what? For nothing! These riots aren't in protest about anything - yes, I am aware of what happened to Mr Duggan, but I think it's fairly obvious that this violence has absolutely nothing to do with that and a hell of a lot to do with bored, stupid people wanting to feel good about hitting people.

Anyway.

I kept watching the news reports and reading the live feeds and the phrase from Robert Browning's poem 'Home Thoughts, From Abroad' kept coming to mind. I'm afraid I was moved to my own protest: poetic vandalism.

Home Thoughts, From the Bewildered

Oh, to be in England
Now that Summer's here,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest thugs and basest fools
Round the once quiet towns take up their tools,
And set to raise a riot – and how!
In England - now!

And after London, when others follow,
And chaos reigns, we’re forced to swallow
Bile as our streets and cities burn!
Around our homes and shops the flame
Blossoms and cracks – as our people we spurn
And our children set the pace in their new game,
Lest you should think they never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And though the streets look rough with hoary dew,
All will be lost when noontide wakes anew
And people think hate gives them a power, -
Far brighter than this gaudy fire-flower!

Oh, to be in England - Robert Browning (1812-1889)
(Greatly abused by Lauren Hughes, 9th August 2011, in response to the mindless violence across Britain)

I can only apologise.

On a brighter note, thousands of people have begun helping to clear up the mess this miniscule minority of mindless morons have created - largely coordinated through twitter and other networking sites. It's good to know that the spirit that kept us walking over the debris in the Blitz, and sending aid to where it's needed across the world, and lending a helping hand when times are tough has not deserted all of us.

If you're near London (and I hope you're safe) the clean up operation is being co-ordinated from here.

JacAbsolute would like to add:

'The great and admired beauty of the English flowers is their tiny, fragile but resilient drifts. Otherwise, for those getting high on excitement, may an eternal and ineffectual priapism afflict them (Marston, The Malcontent).'

(Images 'looted' from the Guardian news website.)

Excavations in the Bureau

So we've been sorting through some of my wonderful Grandad's (otherwise known as the Venerable Bede) stuff, which is much easier said than done, given the sheer volume of stuff he had. I can kind of understand it, given that I too have a lot of projects in various stages of preparation, progress or finished and kept for when they're useful, but some of the thigns we found were beyond bizzare. I mean, what could you possibly want with an incredibly small box of chocolates that are over ten years out of date?

Anyway, we started with the bureau (largely because it's a contained space) - Grandad made it himself, and I think it's beautiful; I can't remember what wood it's made of, but it's a light honey colour and he made the keys for it himself. It's probably got a cubic capacity of roughly one and a half meters, but it took us about three days to sort through it all, and the contents covered several rooms. I'm beginning to wonder whether Grandad had some workshop training on Galifrey...

There were old photograph albums I'd never seen, with some wonderful pictures of JacAbsolute (Mum), Mithrandir (Uncle Keith), the VB and The Lovely Madge (Grandma), along with shots of more distant family members. Some of them were lovely - and some of them were just plain hilarious: photos of JacAbsolute and her best mate dressing up when they were kids :D

There were lots of interesting clock parts, and strange looking implements from the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries... there was the insignia from Great-Grandad Harry's WWI uniform (he was a sapper and fought all over the place, but most notably the Messine Ridge) that the VB was converting into a brooch for TLM... even some ivory - a statuette of a man in a boat (I suspect the VB was intending to fix it) and a letter opener.

And envelopes. LOTS of envelopes.

I took pictures of some of the most interesting bits (except the ivory, which I forgot about), and a couple of other things the VB made :)

This puzzled us for a while, but we eventually figured out that it was the inside workings of a pepper pot (the VB made several of these, this one is still in potentia).

Not wholly sure why this made us laugh, except for the zombie Windle Poons in one of Pratchett's Discworld series... the VB got very interested in fixing and making clocks and watches... wonder what the life of this clock oil is :)

My Great Aunt Sara is one of the most accomplished and inventive crafters that I've ever met - these are four of the many and awesome cards we've had over the years. My favourite - which lives in the christmas box and is therefore absent, is a partridge with a fanned paper tail. Making things sort of runs in the family :)

A carved, wooden clock made by the VB - 'Tempus Fugit' or 'Time Flies'!

This is a silver rose bowl designed and smithed by the VB - it's based on the structure of a carbon atom - hence the shape of the feet. It's one of things he was most proud of, and it was good to see it full of roses once more. The mat underneath was crocheted by TLM :)

Allotment Photos

And more pictures, because I can :)

Bee in chives

Parsnips

Captive strawberries

More flax

More bee in chives

There are more, as ever, on my dA profile.

Early Summer at the Allotment

(Late June-ish)

Once again transport problems have prevented our being at the allotment much, but things are growing on pretty well. we've got raspberries and redcurrants and cherries and blackcurrants and strawberries and apples and rhubarb (NOM).

There's also potatoes and tomatoes and pumpkins and sweetcorn and onions and cabbages parsnips and radishes and lettuce and spinach and carrots and broccolli and peas and beans and courgettes and all kinds of wonderful things to eat in a few months time!

The lovely Amanda's lovely Mum has given us some cucumbers to replace the ones I destroyed, and there's chervil and basil to go in at some point.

It was a lovely day, and nice to get some physical labour done in the light and the air instead of sitting and writing indoors :)

Photographs: the boys, hard at work in the evening; redcurrants; peas; flax; salad.

Pretty, Pretty Pictures!

You may remember me posting a while back about some artwork that my good friend Limlight was working on for me in exchange for some knitted projects. Well, the work's all done at both ends now and I'm happy to say we're both pretty chuffed :D

The hats Limlight asked me to make were great fun, and I blogged about them over on my craft blog; they were both on a sci-fi theme and were really satisfying to make. She chose them both because they were cool hats and they were from two of her favourite shows: Ma Cobb's Firefly hat and Starbuck's Mandala hat, and here they are!

Jayne Cobb's 'cunning' hat that his Ma made him :) (sans pompom, which went on later)

Hat based on the mural on Starbuck's wall (Battlestar Galactica, as if you needed to ask!)

The pictures I asked Limlight to create for me are based on characters from my Harry Potter fanfiction Dreams and False Alarms (which I've heard is quite a good read, hint-hint!) - well, my versions of some of Rowling's characters, anyway, and one of my very own. Here they are, in all their glory:

Severus, Amelia and Remus; Amelia Brown, the new Muggle Studies Professor at Hogwarts has something of an effect on these interesting young men...

Amelia and her cousin Hermione Granger, being cousinly and winding each other up - it's Hermione's third year and she's beginning to develop that famous fiery temper!

I think these pictures are absolutely brilliant, and I can't think Limlight enough for bringing my character and her friends to life! By the way - unless your name is munchkin, Limlight or Rowling, mitts off :p

Much Ado About Hogwarts

Most of May and June are a bit of a blur now - mostly involving preparing to move house and large quantities of rain, along with the passing of my wonderful Grandad.

One thing I do remember though (largely because fanfiction.net provides you with a 'published' date) is starting a new Harry Potter fanfiction. I've been working on A Given Value of Safe - the sequel to Dreams and False Alarms - for a while (along with my proper novel, Daffodils in the Twilight), and needed a bit of a break. A few of the lines from Much Ado About Nothing kept rattling around in my brain and I decided to have a play (hah) with fitting it into a Marauder-era story - you know, try new styles, have different characters to mess with, see what new techniques I could fiddle with - and I'm having a great time! It's not how I intended it to go - the characters seem to have more say over what happens than I do in some chapters - and I really didn't intend it to be this long, but for some reason it works! I'm learning lots about how I write and what does and doesn't work in a narrative, I'm playing with poetry and prose and I get to get up close and personal with one of my favourite plays :D

Oh, and the reviews don;t hurt my self-esteem, either ;)

If you want to read it (please, please, please!) it lives on fanficiton.net and is called Much Ado About Hogwarts. Along with that pretty 'review' button. You know you want to!