I am now well and truly immersed in moving my Mum to her new flat. At last she is showing signs of being a little bit excited at somewhere new to live, though she cannot cope at all with the packing so just sits in her living room and lets me get on with it. This is a boon, to me, she has told me, I am just to do exactly as I want and take any decisions I feel justified in taking. This is making life a lot easier, though I am living in a fog of exhaustion at the moment. She has specified the items she wants with her, such as favourite ornaments, pictures,and photograph. The rest I am packing taking home and there I will sort through them. She will have moved, hopefully before the end of the month, then I will spend a couple of weeks finishing off the packing in her old flat.
The move will be in two stages, my son and I are in charge, and I spent thirty minutes on the phone to him in London last night, planning our strategy. He takes after me in his organising capacities. He is coming up from London next weekend for the first part of the move. I think you would all laugh if you could see the notebook of lists that I am carrying everywhere with me. The other thing connected to the move is pleasant and fun. My mother will need new curtains etc as she has never had windows this shape and size before, so I am to undertake a shopping expedition on her behalf and buy her various new household items. I am picking them and organising them so its a bit like playing interior decorators, that will keep my inner child happy. I love advising people about rooms and decor.
When this move is completed, what I want to do more than anything is to go to my workroom and create, create, after sorting black bin liners. The best thing about this move is that I have come across much fabric and vintage material that I can use. Also, I found a couple of boxes of old greetings cards from the 1950's, put together with the buttons, ribbons, threads and broken beads I have sorted, I am going to have some wonderful treasures for collage and altered art.
The other evening when I returned home from sorting, had my dinner and settled down in a chair with my candles and incense, there was a real treat on television for me. I don't watch a lot of television, and sometimes forget to look at the listings, luckily my husband had spotted this and told me. It was a vintage Joni Mitchell concert from 1970. It was a small studio concert in London made by BBC television [ our public broadcasting station]. It was just so good to hear her play all the very early work, accompanying herself on guitar, piano or dulcimer, especially as she played my favourite early song For Free. I do hope they repeat it again sometime. When I first bought her albums in those far off days I also bought her songbooks as well and used to spend many a happy hour playing her songs on the piano and warbling along with my playing. At some point everyday out would come the music books and plink plonk on the piano I would go. [Big secret, I still have them and my dream is to find a piano again sometime and resume playing them]
The next evening it was a Neil Young concert from the same time, that pleased my husband as well. It was good too, but he was so totally out of it, he forgot the words to one song, couldn't decide which guitar to use and had a pocket full of harmonicas. The few songs he did were fantastic but was guy was sooooo stoned when he did that BBC concert. I think they have been putting these concerts on as they have had a documentary series on about the musicians of that time that hung about LA. You know the Byrds, Crosby Still Nash and Young, Joni etc. - Fantastic!
When I was writing my last posting about long ago holidays in Scarborough, I was wishing I had to some photographs to hand of that time, there was one in particular I liked of me sitting on steps with the Boarding House's Jack Russell Terrier. The strangest thing happened, I was sorting out another bag of my Mum's paperwork last night and there in the middle of old receipts etc was the very photograph I had been thinking, amazing. I have posted it above, I think the dog was called Pickles. I was so pleased to learn on my comments site that another blogger had been on the Hispaniola voyage and had been frightened as well, though she doesn't remember digging for treasure, maybe as the years went by they changed the concept of it. I am sure there must be more people that remember it. Glad to here I was not the only child with a vivid imagination, Tinker, seems to have had a similar experience with a wild west theme.
