Must Write More Often...

I keep saying this to myself and then I don't... Not sure anyone reads it anyway!

A lot has happened this month, the saddest thing being that Flower, the older of my two greyhound ladies, was put to sleep last week. Her back legs collapsed, I think her spinal nerves stopped working, whatever it was she couldn't get up and was in great distress. The same thing had happened to Tiggy, my previous dog, so I knew that it was the kindest thing to do for her. She was 12, she was clumsy and she tripped over me and I tripped over her, but she was such an affectionate thing and she did at least have 6 months sleeping on the sofa in the warm instead of being in a cold old kennel.

Whizzy looks a bit lost and sad, but I don't think I will look for another companion for her yet. I will see how she gets on as a single dog..

The album has now been tweaked and twinkled and is being mastered in the US as I write.. hopefully Tim, Alistair and I will be happy with the result and then that will be that! The lyric illustrations have been completed by Koldo, so now it is just up to Michael of Urban Art to pull it all together and that will be that bit done.. Jon the manager can then get on with everything else that has been waiting for the finished album and that will be that. As well! And I shall say hooray and have a celebratory biscuit..

With Anji (and lots of other nice people) I was part of the Artist Liaison team at the Oxford Folk Festival this last weekend. It was huge fun, but vastly tiring. Made lots of tea and coffee and made sure all the artists were comfortable and happy.. I managed to see a bit of The Dhol Foundation - how fantastic are they? (well they jolly are!) and a minute of Kate Rusby and a song from Spiers and Boden and also a song from Cosmic Aubergine. They were all excellent!

Caught up with lots of people I haven't seen for ages including my son and his wife and the bump which is nearly ready to be born. Anytime now....

I have been looking after my daughter's zebra finches while she and her husband have gone on a belated honeymoon to Canada. We had a pair of these very cute little birds when Neff was young and they were most entertaining (and noisy!) and I am now remembering just what a strange little song they have. And four of them sound like a whole factory of little machines. They are very sweet, the sitting room is now full of feathers and seed along with the usual dog fluff..

Right then.

Time to feed the Whizz who has been watching me with one eye open for the past five minutes in case I should head off to the kitchen...

Good Grief! It's March!

...and I am officially elderly. If I were to be knocked down by a bus (heaven forbid!) the incident would be described as an 'elderly female pensioner was hit by a bus. eyewitnesses have stated that she appeared to be trying to balance on a skateboard...' or something like that..

However the upside is that I now have a bus pass, can have my eyes tested for free and don't have to pay for prescriptions any more. Yippee!! Where shall I go on the bus? How about Haverford West? (Where's that? I dunno, be interesting to find out.....I expect..)

I was bored one day last week and decided to google the address that I lived in when I was a child. We (my parents, sisters and brother) moved into a newly built block of council maisonettes, one of four similar ones, from the soon-to-be-demolished prefab where we had lived since I was born, (and possibly longer).

We had a lovely garden at the prefab, it seemed huge to me anyway, but the maisonette just had a piece of ground divided up into squares, one bit for each family. Enough room for a washing line and a bit of grass and some flowers. My dad soon took over the next door's bit of earth as they didn't want to grow anything and soon after acquired an allotment to grow vegetables.

The blocks of maisonettes, functional, but truly ugly as only late 50's council buildings could be, were end on to the railway line, the London/Scotland line (whatever that was!). It was still the age of steam trains and the Flying Scotsman was a regular passer-by and shaker of windows and rattler of walls.... In the summer the sparks from the engines would set light to the grassy sides of the rails and then we'd have the added excitement of watching the fire brigade come to douse the flames..

We all went to different schools, mine was Minchenden School in Southgate, which was quite a distance from home in Wood Green so I either took a bus, a train or a tube depending on how much walking I wanted to do. During the summer I would quite often walk home from school, I think it was quite a long way but then that was what we did in those days in the last century!

Now why did I get nattering about this? Oh yes, having googled my old address I discovered that all those maisonettes are now desirable places to live and sell for £250k. Well they did before this current credit upheaval..

Anyway, enough of all that, I had a fantastic birthday, going out to lunch 3 days on the trot with different bits of friends and family, only slightly marred by Whizzy slicing her foot while running in the icy woods and needing stitches and anaesthetics and bandages and a huge mortgage to pay for it all.. I had thought about pet insurance, but because the dogs are so old, the premiums would have been £30 per month each and that is quite a lump. Even then it wouldn't have covered all the treatment. So I just paid the bill and told the dogs they'd better not have any more disasters for another 6 months (touch wood!).

Whizzy's all better now...and is asleep on the sofa. Flower is also asleep but on the floor. I vacuumed about a ton of dog fluff from the sitting room the other day and there's probably as much again now. I should put the fluff outside for the birds to build nests with, but I'm afraid they might suffocate under the weight..

Right that's enough for now, the album continues to continue and I am beginning to believe it's all a figment of my imagination and will never be ready. I expect it isn't and it will though!