The Boy who Bit Picasso....

Only a week to go till the election and I am deeply interested in it all. How I wish one could organise for all the party leaders to go to a Quaker Meeting . It would do them a power of good to sit for an hour`s silence together instead of hurling insults, threats and insinuations at each other.     I carefully read the leaflets that rain through my letterbox and the only one that I have found to be plausible and sensible is the the one from the Green Party, so I am glad that I joined the Greens a few months ago. 

I went to a lovely play at the Infants yesterday. It was a touring drama group doing a play called The Boy who Bit Picasso, and it was based on a true incident when Picasso visited a family in Sussex many years ago. The Year 2`s were able to participate by painting and drawing in a Pcasso-ish way and they simply loved it. Incidentally, the director and writer of the play, Jake Oldershaw is the son of my one time dentist in the Isle of Wight and I remember lying in the dentist chair having my tooth drilled when his dad told me he had just had a baby boy, and this was about forty years ago!    It just shows how we are all connected up in various ways.

Daughter J is holding a Breakfast Party (with impro games and entertainment) at home on Sunday week in aid of the Nepal Earthquake Fund. It reminds me of the Indulgent Breakfasts at the Meeting House in Winchester, many years ago with dear C and G frying over a hundred eggs   J says she is serving porridge with fruit and nuts,  No eggs or kippers. 

Appointments and Waiting Rooms

Our Julia died ten years ago and her anniversary was last Monday. The BBC did her proud. They put on a dramatisation of her blog called the Waiting Room and five fifteen minute plays called Appointments during the week. It was wonderful to hear it all.  And there will be more plays,poetry and readings at Live Theatre and other places in Newcastle at the end of May, so we are are all planning our trips up there.  The only problem is finding someone to look after B.Wiggins and Jumble. I am hoping they can go somewhere together as they are very fond of each other in a doggy sort of way.
I went to Waterstones on Wednesday to a book launch: Patrick Gale`s latest novel  A Town called Winter. I have loved all his books. He grew up in Winchester and he was a contemporary of my children including Julia and he would meet up with her at literary festivals. One of his novels: Pictures from an Exhibition was set among the Quakers and it encouraged lots of people to go to Meeting though he is not a Quaker himself at all Anyway it was a great evening and I was so pleased to see him again,  I look forward to reading the new book.
We have revived our extempore writing group :Nibbles and Scribbles and five of us met at the cafe below the bandstand on the sea front last Thursday, We laughed so much at our own efforts that the Hungarian waitress asked me in halting English what we were doing. When I told her she said` Oh we do just the same in Hungary. I was very surprised..

Son in law D and I went to a new restaurant in Brighton on Easter Sunday called The Silo.  I had read a good review of it in the Guardian.  All the waste goes into a huge composter and then they grow their own mushrooms in it. .  The chairs are made of chipboard,, the water glasses are jam jars and some of the plates are made of melted down plastic bags. The food was delicious but unnusual!  Mostly local and organic, the menu  includes wild boar and venison but we had a tasty mushroom risotto and local Sussex wine.    

Daughter J and ggT are still away in New York and Washington. I will be glad to see them safely home at the weekend.   Here in Ditchling, everyone is revelling in the Spring sunshine and B Wiggins and I have been sitting out the back, me reading a weighty tome lent by a Dumbrellite neighbour called Lamentations by CJ Sansom,about dastardly Tudor goings on which is an absolute page turner. Wiggins is on constant alert on squirrel patrol. He would be horrified if he caught one.

I decided I would get a more grown up mobile instead of the £5 Nokia I have had since they were first invented, but what a palaver!    It turned out that somehow I had given the wrong date of birth on the original deal and D and I have been on the phone for hours and hours trying to sort it out. At one point they asked for my birth certificate. I have heard that those cheap phones are used by drug dealers so perhaps they think I am an eighty five year old arch criminal. I may give up the whole thing and continue with my battered old one with big cracks across the screen.