Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Despite doom laden news reports of vaccine batches not materialising, my husband, David, had his first jab of the Pfizer BioNTech Covid 19 just before the sun rose yesterday at 8.05 am (it rises at about 8.15 at the moment). Hurrah. A momentous day.

Heavenly hellebores

The night before promised a heavy frost so with David still subject to unpredictable amounts of double vision, we’d booked him a taxi – it would have been the ultimate irony to have fallen on an icy pavement and broken a limb in his eagerness to get vaccinated! There was no frost, though he was glad of the taxi as the driver knew exactly where to go which wasn’t quite where my husband thought he should go.! Cars arrived from the hills with inches of snow on the roof and out poured elderly relatives. Through put was efficient and fast, including a 15 minute socially distanced rest after being jabbed, but all worked smoothly and no one seemed to be waiting too long in the cold looking for their lift home. Elsewhere in the complex of buildings –  for part of a fire station had been converted for vaccinating – fire engines stood poised for action. (One bonus of the lockdown – you hardly ever hear a fire engine now.) Reinvigorated, David walked happily home. Twenty four hours later and all is still well.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (pub Arrow Books, 2009)

To calm agitation from computer challenges, I’ve been giving myself free rein to read more. I’m loving re-reading Josephine Tey’s ‘The Daughter of Time’ which for those of you who don’t know it concerns what are probably the most productive ruminations and research ever performed by anyone in a hospital bed  – fiction or non fiction. If you are sure the princes in the tower were killed by Richard III, read this book and be prepared to think again and even throw over Shakespeare’s sloppily researched judgment on a monarch who, to borrow the sort of in depth analysis of ‘1066 and All That’, may well have in fact been a rather  ‘good king’. Once I’ve finished this little book of just over 200 pages  I think I must re-re-read it immediately as there’s so much to take in. Josephine Tey (who I’ve blogged about previously somewhere but can’t yet find – how useful is it when I include a photo of book covers!!!) died in 1952 (the year I was born) and left her entire estate to the National Trust. In recent years Nicola Upson has written a series of crime books with Josephine Tey as a semi-fictional character in them and over the last few weeks I’ve been working my way through her oeuvre.  I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, though I find Upson a bit too wordy, which is odd as Josephine Tey herself tended to be succinct. But  perhaps that’s me at the moment.

Patchwork. A Life Among Clothes by Claire Wilcox (pub. Bloomsbury 2020)

Before Christmas I’d also treated myself  to Patchwork. A Life Amongst Clothes by Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator of Fashion at the V & A which I thought I would love as the fly leaf says the book “deftly stitches together the story of her own life lived and through clothes”.  The darting dragonfly approach to topics –  flitting and iridescent, touching but not dwelling on – left me exhausted, on edge and never quite able to picture the writer behind the teasing, perhaps too teasing, hide and seek writing style. As I say, perhaps that’s me. I think the book had me emulating the dragonfly writing as I dipped in and out. I shall go through it again and see if a calmer approach yields what my dartings in and out missed.

In general, terrible to relate, it’s crime writing that gets me off to sleep! I draw the obvious psychological conclusions about myseslf.

Post Script: My husband bought me a bottle of Blue Grass Eau de Parfum for Christmas (upon very precise instruction from me of course). I love it and memories of summers 50 years ago have come flooding back. It’ s seems a bit different from what I remembered when first sprayed on but after settling down on the skin or when it rises from deep impregnations within the coils of my cashmere scarf, it hits the spot. With just the two of us, I spray in on more than liberally, several times a day and just wallow in the comfort it gives! Joy, joy, joy!

Embroidered Indian elephant (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Having had a technologically thwartful few weeks, I came to blog posting in a less than jolly mood but trying hard to be positive, I  entitled my draft ‘an elephant for good luck’. Happily, it seems feng shui does hold them lucky creatures, though if you do want an image of one in your house in accordance with feng shui principles, it should be placed just inside the front door and face into the house – which may not be possible for the recipient of this particular elephant. But there we are,  my spirits have risen a little.

Embroidered Indian elephant with David Attenborough quote (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Nanoseconds later spirits have, however, sunk again as a warning from Adobe Flash Player flits across my screen telling me it will cease functioning from 12 January this year. No one has ever been able to work out why I have Adobe Flash nor what I use it for. And anyway, I thought I had already got rid of it!!! . Grr, grr, triple grr…

Embroidered Indian elephant with flowers (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Small rant ensues. I’m of the generation for whom a television set came with the parental edict never to touch any button other than on/off and channel change – there were 2 channels. Touching the horizontal hold  seemed to be a particularly heinous crime but thumping the top of the set when things went fuzzy seemed perfectly permissible. In recent times new computers/phones, etc., come accompanied with my children’s direction to ‘just play with it’, an exhortation which fills my generally biddable soul with such horror as to render me incompetent and incapable, frozen in anticipation of things going wrong. And they do. Consequently, I try to avoid updates of any sort unless I have a trusted person beside me with an afternoon, or even day or two spare and a willingness to devote themselves exclusively to me in my nigh on pathological fear of inviting change into my computer. In these times , of course, no such support is available.

Embroidered Indian elephant with David Attenborough quote (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

By late December, computer irritations – slow downloading, the aforementioned Adobe Flash warnings, non downloading of photos from my camera, etc., etc., seemed to be mounting and I made the wild decision to update the operating system before the old, troublesome year was out. This, I was optimistically and irrationally convinced, would enable me to start the new year with a smoothly functioning machine. Zealously and semi-ritualistically, I first cleaned my Mac Book until it looked like new. On New Year’s Eve, under the telephone direction of daughter No 3, with a few hiccoughs, we  seemed successfully to have set the download in motion.

Embroidered Indian elephant with flowers (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Ha, Ha, Ha! Well, of course, that wasn’t the end of it.  The download seemed to have happened but my password no longer worked – I couldn’t even shut the machine down. A day later, I set out computerwards again, striding womanfully onto the shining uplands of the new year.  This time the original password worked but passwords to other areas didn’t. Passwords slipped through the air like autumn leaves, as they were tried, failed, reset and failed again, while security messages sent to my at that time inaccessible email languished unseen, unread and unusable. Downhearted, I abandoned the sleek silver box of pain and tried to forge a pathway through the next few months which included no catch up TV and radio, no emails and no blogging. Life was looking very grim and I realised how dependent my happiness had been on such things during the last year. Slump. slump, slump. Sob, sob, sob.

Embroidered Indian elephant with flowers (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Gradually over the next few days, most applications juddered back to life, responded to former passwords and were opened to me!!!

Then we had a new hub …the BT engineer is returning on Monday.

Embroidered Indian elephant with flowers (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Today, however, in joyous validation of the much maligned pathetic fallacy (which often works in real life, though should be avoided in literature), the sun came out and I worked out how to download photographs!!

Most of which is great but exhausting beyond belief. No longer fully human, we flop over the things we want to do like 2 over-wrung dish clothes ready to be consigned to the rubbish bin. It has been a trying start to what may well be a demanding year.

The Indian Heritage: Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule (pub V & A Museum, 1982) & Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin (pub. Ashmolean Museum 2012)

Returning to the elephant which I first showed and wrote about here. The writing was quite wrong. Black cross stitch didn’t work. Small ears reminded me it was an Indian elephant and as such I felt it needed colour. Scanning books, like the two above  (my running elephant was taken directly from an Indian Miniature in Howard Hodgkin’s collection), I realised the embroidery needed little clumps of flowers and a colourful border. Instead of black cross stitch, hand lettering in Mulberry is clear enough to be read but fine enough not to intrude on our elephant as it frolics in a field of flowering plants. Finished, this is my Christmas present to Daughter No 1.