Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

An entire month has passed since I last blogged. I would like to say such a long gap has come as a surprise to me except that not a day has gone by without a little voice chastising me for not settling down to write something. I think when I got back to full time living at home, something in me sagged and then I found myself wilfully wallowing in sagging. The rot started with not having a Christmas card design ready to embroider in November and then, although I’d managed some hand embroidery for the Christmas list while I was dividing my time between Cheltenham and London, I realised I hadn’t done nearly enough sewing. I would have regarded it a real failure to have cut down on projected presents, so the only thing to do was put the head down and get on with things. However, the handmade Christmas cards – well any Christmas cards – have been jettisoned. (I shall suffer for it and will probably spend the first three months of the new year sending handwritten  letters and emails to people reassuring them that we are still alive and haven’t forgotten them!)

T shirt with appliquéd and embroidered stag beetle for an 8 year old.

In mitigation of what I at first thought has been a slug like December, I now remember that I came home with my grandson’s very sneezy cold and took to bed for nearly a week. At the point of my recovery, a new floor was laid in the kitchen and as cupboards and shelving units had been emptied and pulled away from the very scuffed walls, I gathered unwilling elements of myself together and set about the much needed repainting. (My paintbrush hand is still twitching and after Christmas I have my sights on the little loo downstairs and our tiny bathroom upstairs. I used to do lots of painting and decorating but somehow seem to have got out of the habit. Not entirely sure I’m any longer flexible enough to get down and paint behind the loo but I don’t think I’ll think about that until the moment is upon me. The thought of nice clean paint work and the after effects of a job well done may be just the spur I need.) Meanwhile my husband gave a talk in Chapel Arts in Cheltenham on Christmas and Art as well as 2 Art Appreciation sessions for Cheltenham U3A. I managed two out of three of these talks but by the time of the last one, with postal deadlines looming, I  tucked myself up with needle, threads and a batch of unadorned T shirts for the children in the family – well that is 8 of them will be beneath trees in time for Christmas and 2 will arrive sometime after (one, I have yet to start!) You do your best.  (Memo to self : start much earlier next year. These things always take longer than you allow.)

T shirt with appliquéd and embroidered stag beetle for an 8 year old.

Daughter No 1’s Achilles tendon injuries seem to go two steps forward and one step back. Having resigned from her Downing Street job, she and her family had escaped to her husband’s family in the North-West to recuperate over Christmas. She promptly went down with Covid and now she, her husband and children are quarantined on one floor of the house until just after Christmas Day. A handwritten letter from my grandson (photographed and sent by phone) told me his mother hadn’t been too unwell with the virus. He’d been passing the time learning to play ping pong and that together they’d been reading John Masefield’s Box of Delights. (Perhaps they can find the BBC TV production of 1894 which I remember finding very atmospheric in a slightly eerie way. Strangely I was reminded of this recently as I listened to Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s podcast ‘The Rest is History’ [great to listen to and argue with while doing embroidery.] It seems it’s become a tradition in the Sandbrook household to watch this every Christmas, although Dominic did add that his wife thought it was rubbish. Well, there you go.) This T shirt is for said grandson. A stag beetle (v. like one I did earlier).  The T shirt is purple as that’s favourite colour – fortunately he reminded me of this not long ago.

More T shirts to follow. Life seems to be voluntary lockdown for most people at the moment, so there’ll be lots of time to sew and read – which sounds alright to me. HAPPY CHRISTMAS.

Frilly T shirt top with butterfly embroidery (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

One of the things I shall miss when I’m no longer in London on a regular weekly basis is the way small children change, and even grow, in front of your eyes. While mum was away at COP 26 for two weeks, the smallest person finally adopted her own bed as the place to stay in for the whole night, wistfully, telling her aunt that this single achievement was the really difficult thing about being a big girl now. Sleeping from 6.30pm to 5.30am (after which she couldn’t resist a visit to the parental bed) also meant she became much calmer and sweeter tempered which was especially helpful when on 2 days of the week the school journey starts earlier so her brother can do group violin practice and choir before the school day proper begins. The early start has its rewards, however, as she then gets to go to a café with daddy where she enjoys hot chocolate, a pastry and a one to one chat (and sometimes a free cookie if the owner is there). She has a taster violin session next week and their father expects her brother to be enthusiastic and encouraging about this so that, in due course, she may join an early morning music session herself  and he can then have hot chocolate and pastry with his father instead. How these small ambitions propel us through life – especially if food related and even more so if it means half an hour bonus time on your own with someone you love and adore.

Detail: Frilly T shirt top with butterfly embroidery (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

I try to help out with the violin practice as much as I can but it’s not easy fitting it in of an evening when there’s swimming, cricket and chess club – and that’s not to mention homework (and I shall be extremely happy if fronted adverbials are never mentioned again. In the same way that Mr Jourdan in The Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovered he’d been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I have been using fronted adverbials – in perfect ignorance and until now, utter bliss.). Returning to the violin, however, my grandson has surprised me with his perseverance with what can be an unsympathetic musical instrument and I admired his ability to get a half decent noise out of what I now know to be a not very nice sounding instrument provided by the school. Then a couple of weeks ago he came home with a new violin, a gorgeous thing of gleaming golden wood, with a sound of honeyed creaminess and subtlety of tone that really hit a sweet spot in the hearer. The transformation in playing was a revelation. Lucky him for such a lovely instrument to be available – or is it the norm for a child to grind on with something that speaks the sound of chalk on a blackboard and then for resilience to be rewarded with a real instrument?

Frilly T shirt top with butterfly embroidery (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

When you’re 7 (very nearly 8), hair, teeth and limbs grown visibly by the week. The smart hair cut just before the autumn term started has become a thatcher’s nightmare, which even when smoothed over with Tangle Tease reverts back to something more like a hamster’s bedding than the crowning glory of a chorister. We sort of love it anyway, though the email about nits in the school may make us consider a taking the scissors to it. For his sister we’ve opted for the pony tail solution but already what was once a good stock of hair elastics has diminished to the point where mornings find one or other adult trawling the kitchen floor, peering behind the cards on the mantlepiece and turning out pockets for just anything that will do. (Like pencils, biros, teaspoons and the second of a pair of socks, it is a law of life that you lose them as quickly as you buy replacements,)  Happily, the 7 year old’s teeth are coming on very nicely and though the new ones are pretty big he seems to be blessed with a jaw arch wide enough to take them. Seemingly short baby legs have turned into ones fine for his age, though his lack of a waist does mean almost all school trousers we buy and attempt to adjust end up fitting him properly for a matter of days and then revert to the default position of falling halfway down his bottom – fortunately it doesn’t bother him. Belts don’t work and though we have thought of braces, we can just see him shrugging those off too. Suddenly we’ve rediscovered growing pains – and though I can no longer remember whether these are real or parental fiction, the very fact of naming them seems to have kept their severity at bay. Surprisingly, the tie has not been a problem but this may be because he has a badge for being School Counsellor which acts as an anchor to what can be an impossibly wayward piece of masculine attire. Things could be worse – like getting tights on somebody wriggly and giggly in the morning. All this, I shall miss, but I think I shall cope as I lie in my bed with my newspaper and breakfast tray.