Losing your cool; the need for time travel

Exactly how much can you lose in one morning and still get yourself plus children to school without completely losing your cool?

Shoes? - where you left them, scattered across the hall floor; tights? - no idea, scribble name on new pair, and resolve to excavate down to the bottom of the wash-basket, later; school bag? - somewhere, under the kitchen table? (grit teeth, cool definitely beginning to trickle away) - no, in your bedroom? - no, what's that in your bed?; cello? - in the car already, miraculous!; water bottle? - don't know, and losing ability to care. Ah okay, we'd better find it then, if you'll get a minus point for not having it - try the fridge. Yes! (warming up again); piano music? - have you tried the piano?; coat, tennis racket, car keys? Find the keys - in the car with the cello - tennis racket half way up the stairs and coat no where to be found. Child sulks and cries most of the way to school, then finds the coat beneath a pile of bags in the foot-well of the car. Cool seeping out, but not lost.

Bags, coats, instruments, rackets, little sticky hands and lead stumble toward the school gate, mother as pack-horse, shepherd ... and guardian of the steaming pile of poo that dog has just deposited on the pavement. Mother drops everything and frantically starts to dig in her pockets - poo bags? Forgotten. Cool? Well and truly lost. If only she could wind back time ...

Actually, only the earlier part of that story was me (and is me most mornings, but more stressed on the days I also have to get to work - cool very precariously held onto on those days); the frantic mother on the pavement dropping everything was observed yesterday. And I resolved never, ever to add Four-legged-friend to our morning routine.

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Colour, Delacroix, flochetage and why don't we all have a go at inventing words

Yes - it is a real word. Flochetage. Well, a real-ish word. One invented by the painter Delacroix, when he found the dictionary cupboard bare and required a word to describe his technique of layering different coloured paints, using lightly pulled brush strokes to create texture and pattern and thereby enhance his base-layer colours (... lost? - stick around, read on and all will become clear. Or perhaps muddier ...). Flochetage implies both stringiness and threadiness. Apparently. And it sounds good - in a filling-the-mouth-with-sound sort of a way. Try it ... flochetaaaage. Not that I speak French. So I am probably mis-pronouncing it. Nor am I an artist. So what do I know about painting techniques - except that I think this one works. What I do like is the concept - you invent a new technique in whatever it is you do, hunt around for the vocabulary to describe it, find the dictionary is lacking, so make up a word of your own and announce to the world what it means. Delacroix isn&#

My beloved boy, how lucky I have been

It's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die ... and I say someone here even though the one in question was a dog - but to us he had character and a place forever in our hearts and was more of a familiar someone than some of the people in our lives. So, I'll start again - it's an odd thing that when we are waiting for someone to die, our senses go into overdrive. We notice things that normally would be part of the background of our every day. We breathe more - or rather, we don't but what we do is notice our breathing more, as we watch his. We pause. We think. We listen to ourselves and our inner voices speak. Memories flood our dreams ... though sleep is fitful. Why am I telling you this? ... ... we lost this beautiful boy today And in the hours before he went, I saw perfect spheres of dew on blades of grass - little orbs holding micro-images of our world; a bumble bee drunk on nectar, yellow-dusted with pollen, resting in a crocus; ten - yes, ten!

Confetti for the brain. A little bit of history regarding a use for holes and a couple of quotes.

Confetti - noun: small pieces of coloured paper thrown over a bride and groom following their marriage ceremony. Also the bane of church yards and wedding venues - who wants to exit church after their favourite spinster aunt's funeral and slip on the papier mâché mush of last weekend's weddings, or step, in your wedding gown, onto a pink spattered step when your colour theme is lilac? Confetti - derived from the Latin confectum, meaning something prepared. Which suggests that there is something missing from the traditional wedding rhyme 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue ... something prepared.' How about something shared ... declared ... or ensnared?? Nature's confetti is all over the ground at this time of year - The garden, footpaths, and pavements are covered in blossom snow. And, when he falls asleep beneath the apple tree, it speckles Four-legged-friend's black coat. The confetti we know today - bits of b

Walking The Dog

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