Tuesday 11 November 2014

I set myself a rule when I started writing a  blog - it would always be fun and never take anything seriously.  Today I break this rule!




Its not a Flanders poppy, but it is a red poppy with the black centre. It is always starts to flower  in the second week of November  and there is always a new flower open on Remberance Day.  This one greeted me this morning!

Everyone is knitting poppies for the Anzac Day centenary but my memory is always of poppies for  the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the War to End All Wars officially ceased.  

This year I felt sadder than usual so I made a poppy for our joint grandfathers and great uncles, then I thought about our parents generation and the second war  and family in occupied Europe. It is a day of great sadness so I made a Rememberance Day bird for all of them and both wars.

This is a bird of contemplation - is he looking backwards or to the future.........


All our family of both generations came back and made great lives for themselves and their families.    We always stop to remember the dead but over the years the living and their families have paid a price too.




Same bird settled in a wattle tree.  This photo is for Tom.  He lived just down the road from us when I was at primary school.  One day when I was about eleven he loaned me a book to read.  It was his published diary from his days at the front in France and later as a prisoner then as an escapee.  I'd never seen a horror movie, or read a horror story - and this was horror but with a sort of happy ending - after all he got home, raised a lovely family and had a good life.  But it was a true story, and even harder to comprehend it was written by a lovely gentle old  man I actually knew!

Four years later  when I read all Quiet on the Western Front I got a terrible shock when I found I'd been barracking for the "wrong"side for most of the book - what a lesson!

Tuesday 4 November 2014

Cup Day Holiday for Birds

What an exceptionally beautiful day, the sun will shine on the Melbourne Cup.



I think he is inviting her to share a punt on................oh dear, I'm ashamed to admit that this year I dont know the names of any of the  horses running today. 

 Or they could be discussing the cup in the background.  It was my wonky attempt at mood setting, no it does not contain ashes.  It is in fact a sugar bowl - those little horse shoes all round are for hanging teaspoons.  Where did it come from - well it was a wedding present given to my parents and as it was just  postwar it was secondhand so no idea what its history is.  

Of course he could be paying her a compliment on her hat or her necklace.  The Cup is after all an excuse for flirtatious dressing.  

Just a brief blog as befits a most important holiday.