easter trees

I know technically it's still Easter Saturday and all that. But we laid our lawn yesterday, with the help of the wonderful Olivia, and there's no where to put the seasonal bonfire... So, after about 2 weeks of beginning to make an easter tree and meaning to get around to making things to get on it, today finally it's ready. With the wonderful crosses the kids made at Rachel's and the Danish hearts we made at Sunday school and some titchy crocheted leaves I made in a nod to the new buds of spring. So, on day 40 (and if anyone wants to check and confirm my Lenten counting I'd be most grateful!) it's the end of the Lenten 'fast' and the look to the Easter morning. He is Risen indeed! (But also v much enjoying Ian's updates on the pagan beginnings of the festival and the goddess Ostra!). 

good friday gardens

Something very nice about the kids making the Easter Garden look so beautiful in the sun of the church garden while the adults meditated on the Good Friday stories. They wanted to decorate the tomb too which seemed fitting.

maundy moments

OK, so it's the best advert yet for my desperate need for an i-phone (or any phone actually with a half decent camera!) but it's a quick Lenten snap of a Lenten moment. We took the kids this year to the Maundy Thursday meal. They've been before in various guises, mostly as breastfeeding babes or toddlers with toilet training to distract them. But it was good to have them along this year. A bit of a different experience for us, but then it's change a lot in the last few years anyway. It's hard not to remember the meal we shared the day after Ali died. Feels like a lifetime ago. They loved the foot washing. Hardly anyone else got a look in. Oops. Then I came back a bit early with a flagging K. Straight to bed and then to sleep to whispered stories of when a man, a long time ago, in a faraway land, washed the feet of his friends.

happiness is...

... getting home from work and finding your children have made (with a little help from their dad and lovely friends!) home made pizza and Easter nests for tea. Yehay!

eggs eggs eggs

Today: a brief moment of disappointment when I realised that the Great Big Easter Egg hunt had finished just one day into the school hoildays and a whole week before Easter itself (great planning Faberge, thanks!). This was followed, I admit, to being rather grateful that the more than 200 three feet high eggs, which have been decorated by leading figures in the art and design world, had been gathered from their hiding places to be displayed together in Covent Garden. Means more eggs seen for less little leg fatigue! And they were simply marvellous! I mean Hockey's Bigger Picture at the RA last night was amazing, but these were just a little bit more 'community' somehow. I loved the fact that the kids dashed from here to there going 'Look, look at this one!' ticking them all off in their little books. And nice humour present in the egg decoration as well as inspiring art. Lots of nice takes on new life ("Birds don't have a placenta, so it's eggs through which this world they enter!") and hope and growth and renewal and, oh, lots of other lovely Easter related imagery. It's hard to pin point, but I think this is my favourite. Called Fragile. Selling for a few thousand quid at an auction near you!

family fun

Could have posted a couple of pics today. One had Milo on top of a chair, on top of our up-turned table, on top of the car roof. Got a few concerned looks as we trundled Great Grandma's table down the M25 to its next home, at big sister's brand new, purpose built, small mansion sized vicarage. It made a good noise with all the rigging in the wind and we said it was crying because it had never been out of London in its long life. 

Then nice afternoon in the sun at aged parents'. Lots of great kids and neices and nephews etc (not to mention the parentals!) Families always feel good in the sunshine!

This was the snap that made it. Nice to see my 2 lovely nephews jamming away. Even though there's a big age gap they seemed pretty happy with the team they made. The younger providing percussion when he didn't know the cords. And the lovely niece them later. Quite a family Von Trapp really!

But really the snap which should be on my lenten blog is the one I didn't take today. I didn't take it because somehow it didn't seem right. Kay Esther Styles, who my girl and first boy are named for, variously called Kathleen, mum, grandma, Nana, Nan and Great Grandma, is 99 and really hanging in limbo land between life and death. It's hard to see someone who was still doing country dancing in her early nineties such a shadow of her former self. Thin and papery she is totally blind now and lies and sleeps and is cleaned and fed and turned and washed. A bit of a flicker when I rubbed lavender for her to smell and when I sang 'Lavender's Blue, Dilly Dilly', but really it's hard to tell what's going on for her. She's the one I'm thinking about and laying before my God this Lenten time.

Complicated lenten counting

I have tried to approach lent with commitment and discipline, after all if you don't then what's the point of observing it? But I have to admit somewhere in there is a flourish of my old charismatic evangelical distaste of all things law abiding (in the spiritual sense, if you get my drift). So a day has slipped here and there and I've had to play catch up occasionally. I can tell you that on more than one occasion my brain has felt pretty bamboozled by the whole 'which day of Lent is it?' question. I've been counting, recounting, marking days off in my diary, checking the number of photos, recounting, wondering which day lent is actually sposed to end etc etc. Gimme Advent any time for a nice easy countdown to religious festival formula. Anyway, today's one of those days when, even though it is bloomin' one o'clock in the morning I will still post these two pics.

Fanstastic fun in the blossom along our street. Usually it quickly turns brown and mushy, but the lack of rain means that it was swirling all over the place in the wind, helped along by 3 small lovelies.

Then a wonderful array of the crockery we're unpacking from boxes and trying to fit back into our kitchen cupboards. I think Neil was a bit horrified to see the quantity of jugs I have accumalted over the years. Whoops. I think I probably should have given them up for lent.

Occupying the steps?

Now that they've moved on one bunch of people cluttering up the steps of St Paul's, another lot have moved in. I know who I'd prefer to have in my back yard... Seems more than a little ironic that this new bunch seem to be in the main swanky looking banker types spilling out from super duper Paternoster Square buildings. What have we come to??

Bikes in Broadway Market

Ye hay! The Boris Bikes have come to our part of town. Not quite on the doorstep, but Hackney nevertheless. The guys putting them in told me they'd had someone come up and say 'These? In Hackney? I'll give 'em a couple of days before they're all in the canal'! But several weeks later and they're all there still. And, apart from a marked increased in wobbly bikers who don't know what they're doing forming a public hazard on the tow path down on the canal, all seems to be well. Certainly the guys who were trying them out today seemed to be impressed at the very limits to which they could be pushed (I didn't stop around to see if they were going to investigate their floating properties). Very exciting. Now all I have to do is get my electric key replaced - it fell to pieces and the chip fell out - so I can enjoy them in my back yard.

Only in Hackney!

Yesterday in Westfield I noticed, for the first time, a 'Brow Bar'. Yes, a 'Nail Bar' but for eyebrows and eyelashes. I have never once in my life seen the need for false eyelashes (OK there was  brief moment on my 40th that I thought I might put them on for a laugh, I had even bought a pair impulsively having seen them at the supermarket - I kid you not - but to be honest it was hard enough getting my party clothes and make up on, what with everything else, and I just couldn't be bothered!) but judging from some of the mums in the playground, and the Brow Bar in Westfield, and this beauty parked along a street next to ours, I guess others have a different view.

Olympification part 2

I went to Westfield today to take something back for my eldest (yeah, yeah, any excuse!). The shopping city leaves me feeling slightly sweaty and nervous, even downright shocked to be honest. I am not sure whether it's the enormity, the newness of it all - including touch screen i-pad like information points, the numbers of people in it all the time or what, but I just feel a bit more shocked by it than other Cathedrals to Mammon which grace our shores. But the chance to get an eyeful of those fabulous Olympic buildings is enough to make me want to make regular trips. This is a glimpse of the basket ball building. If you can call it that. We call it the marshmallow, in the rather recent trend to name buildings in our great Capital after bits of food. I love it! Don't know why. But the big white squadgy sweet, especially lit up by the royal blue of a spring sky gets my vote. Not the absolute best in the Park, but just another great aspect of the exciting urban landscape that will be the Olympics.




I couldn't even get out of the car to photograph it, such is the security, but someone obviously has - and taken it from the landscaped side to boot. It's off an Australia website with the tag 'The ugliest building in the world'. No accounting for taste eh??