New light through old windows...

I recall recently bemoaning the fact that I felt as if I didn't have enough fun.

I've mourned for my Free Child, the child within me as adult, whom I believe - I know - I over-feed to keep happy.

My Free Child likes to go to concerts, theatre and the cinema. She likes to stay up late, watching old movies or stuff on TV that only she likes, while her other, older half lies snoring in bed... She likes to sleep in late till Midday, being softly awoken with orange juice, toast and a boiled egg, or preferably two.

Last weekend, for our intensive training course, we were asked to bring in photos of ourselves from when we were younger... As I type this, I'm still not sure what this exercise will evoke.

As I searched, photo after photo of me and my life to date came out from under the bed.

Pre-Grizz, post-Grizz, weddings, birthdays, holidays...

In the oldest photo I can find amid my stash, at seventeen, I stand happy, reaching down to the family dog in my parent's back garden.

The sun is out, the dog, a scruffy Yorkshire Terrier, Shandy, is as sweet and loveable as he ever was, and I'm in a blindingly white cheesecloth hippy tunic, wearing a long cotton cross-over Indian Paisley print skirt in china blue and white.

I can still sense the softness of that cotton on my skin now. I know on my feet that I'm wearing flat, white toe-post sandals with gold script, that I lived in during my teen years...

When I wasn't going barefoot!

The thing is, in all of the pictures I have chosen, from seventeen on, I am happy enough. ...The smile is real, shows all my teeth, and crinkles show at the corners of my eyes.

There's me at Henley with Sarah in our early twenties after Uni, both with wide-brimmed hats, very Eighties', holding on for fear of losing them to the wind, while whishing past the sculls, seated with her father on his referee's boat; There's me clutching Grizz in a sailor suit on my knee at home in my late twenties, just after his Church christening; I still have that suit.

There we are, Grizz and I, perched by the harbour upon a metal bollard just after going to see the vast boats; I'm seated rather precariously, holding on to him because he wants to run away from me, full of excitement and boundless energy - He was so full of beans when he was little, I could hardly keep up with him most of the time...

Shortly after that photo was taken, I lost my mother.

I still don't really know where she went, but bits of her live on in me.

She puts words in my mouth some days. They come out, and I hear her voice, what she would say, the expressions she used, and I remember these are not my words...

And I wonder if it is then, at that time, that my soi-disant Free Child got stuck, then was pushed down still further and forgotten in the torment of watching my dad slowly ebb away, after years of cancer made him thin and brittle-boned...

I'm sorry this hasn't been a very uplifting post.

For me, it's probably been quite revealing though.

Can I invite you to look through your photos, mes bloggy loves, to think things through, and to consider bringing more fun into your lives, if you so desire?

And Paulo Coelho tells me this:

Avoiding problems you need to face is avoiding the life you need to live...

Evitar los problemas que debes enfrentar es evitar la vida que tienes que vivir.

Mwah!

Six Word Week!

Fhina wants kill sister-in-law!

Upstairs, Downstairs...

I've borrowed this from my dear friend, Derrick of Melrose Musings, whom I've been neglecting awfully recently... He has such talent, I don't have the discipline to follow writing and poetry prompts so skilfully, so diligently as he does, but this caught my fancy.

I wonder if you can guess why?

From Rallentanda. POW Prompt Number 15

So as not to appear rude, to wake the house, or to be found in dereliction of her duty, Eliza stilled her beating heart, tip-toeing through the darkened hall, holding a fragile silver tea-tray between her trembling fingers. She watched the full peach bloom of the rose wobble in the cut-glass vase, threatening to topple and ruin the carefully prepared breakfast. Remembering the warnings, she stilled it with the tip of her thumb.

They spoke such twaddle downstairs, she thought to herself, prickling with irritation. What gossip, stuff and nonsense. In the kitchen where Eliza spent much of the morn, her girdle bones pinching tender flesh as she toiled away, the older staff took such joy in filling her head with foolish things. She shouldn't let it bother her, but the scandalous words they used concerning the family could make her pale cheeks burn. Especially the new boot-boy, wet behind the ears. He thought she was just a maiden, and had derided her gleefully and without mercy since his arrival at the Hall over a month ago now.

'Little sparrow', he called after her. Words that sent a frisson down her spine, as if someone had run a feather across her white skin, like her brothers used to do when they would tease her, causing goose-flesh. Once again she felt ill at ease. She had to be strong. Her lip trembled, the promise of a trickle of tears springing to the corner of her eye. These she would store up till she found herself alone in her tiny garret bedroom. It was small but it was hers. She had finally found a semblance of privacy, coming from a family of thirteen her home had grown cramped almost overnight.

She dabbed at her face with a white embroidered silk handkerchief trimmed with Brussels lace that she'd glimpsed upon the marble-topped washstand, tucking it swiftly away in a pocket of her starched apron. She'd make sure to take it down to the nice laundry-maid later, who had treated her like a daughter since she'd come here... No-one would ever notice it missing. The mistress had lots of them, all the same. Eliza had but one, cotton, tear-stained, and pulled at the seams.

She recalled the brittle compact she had made with her Mother, 'Never let them see you cry, Petal', she called out to her from the station platform, wreathed in steam, and waving her off into a life of service at the tender age of fourteen; All she had in the world was wrapped up in a care-worn crimson shawl on her lap. She'd see her on Christmas Day, if she was lucky, and the master wasn't planning a ball; the mistress shining in her fine gown of mauve tulle.

Gingerly placing the tea-tray down beside her mistress's bed, she jumped with fright as the logs crackled in the hearth, then fell down with a thud, and the glow of the fire rouged her cheeks with warmth and a trace of hope.

Knickers to the lot of you!

I've done it again, me bloggy waterhogs... I've been to that dark place... That Statcounter thingummiejig...

I was curious to be looking at where you all come from, where you live, and what brings you here, into Fhina's World, and into her waiting, warm and always loving, embrace...

One of the latest word-searches that has brought some, (probably very disappointed!), traffic to me site, is apparently this one:

"I love going knickerless"



Putting my moue and my upset aside for a moment, I pondered the word, "Knickers..."

knickers

"short, loose-fitting undergarment," now usually for women, 1881, shortening of knickerbockers (1859), said to be so called for their resemblance to those of Dutchmen in Cruikshank's illustrations from Washington Irving's "History of New York" (see knickerbocker).

So knickers stems from knickerbockers...

Doesn't it sound old fashioned and a bit naughty? Is it mainly used by the English, or does the term travel the Pond?

It used to be more frequently used as a good substitute for a swear word, when you're not too serious about what's got your knickers in a twist in the first place...

My Other Half occasionally reverts to his youth, brought up in a bizarrely politically extrovert, and yet hypocritically repressive, family... And he emits the word, "Knickers!"

It always makes me laugh out loud...

Knickers to the lot of you! ;)

Red Carpet Season, Some Shouting, oh and Happy Valentine's, whether you love it or hate it!

Awards Season and Valentine's Day

I was given a charming friendship award from darling Dusty Spider earlier this week, with the proviso that it is to be passed on, a bit like viral flu, to 8 others! That's it on the right there, with the beautiful hearts and colour...

The reasoning behind such a lovely award is that:

"These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbon of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers.

Deliver this award to eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

So, with all due ceremony, and blushing from the kindness behind this thoughtful gift, I pass on friendship praise and this award and all that it stands for to:

1. Moannie at The View From This End
2. Protege at Life,Work and Pleasure
3. GB at Eagleton Notes for his kind support!
4. Kate Coveny Hood, The Big Piece of Cake
5. Ann's Rants
6. French Fancy
7. Meredith Teagarden, The Things We Carried
8. Michelle, Raw Cool, Black Is The New Blog!

Please feel free to spread the Friendship love, ditto?

Some of my closest bloggeristas, (there's that word again - Fab, isn't it!) are already in possession of this award - Well done to you all! ...And there are others who espouse all awards; They enjoy them, I guess, but never allow them to darken their blogging portal, so I shall not embarrass anyone by offering them one... but...

For 'Blogging in the Face of Adversity': I offer this award up to bloggers who have faced considerable home-based and/or health issues this past week, and yet they have continued to soldier on, as if their lives depended on it - They are wonderful! And this award, yes, I know it might not fit your sidebar, unless you shorten the birds wings, thus making it forever stunted, but I just wanted you to know I thought you were magnificent, okay?!



This award is proffered to;

Diane at Diane's Addled Ramblings for facing down and conquering drainage problems;
Jinksy at Napple Notes for dealing with drainage deluges;
and once again, Michelle, who is suffering from a lack of running owing to a probably broken toe!

And finally, it just has to be done, and I said I would in my 'whine and rant' episode yesterday. I like to call this 'Awards for All'.... Should you wish to participate, please feel free to help yourself to the mini-Oscar on the right hand side of my blog page - Yes, it is all yours, even if you are not going to be wearing Valentino or Lagerfeld on the red carpet this season...


Don't concern yourself - Even if you are currently sitting in your PJs or jim-jams, slurping tea and buttering toast - You deserve this! You are worth it!



I call it Fhina's 'Blog of Distinction Oscar', and please take it with you, any of you who drop by today to leave a comment, or you might be someone whose blog I read religiously and regularly - You're all there, and you know who you are, and you are more than entitled to this Oscar.



You write with beauty and tenderness, humour and love - You are, in short, a Blogger of Great Distinction -

Speech, speech; Go on, speech...! And, with your art, you have my heart!



And so, "Lead on MacDuff", to Valentine's Day and its history, proper like... (By the way, I'm ignoring the fact that it's Friday the 13th today, and I'm doing that finger in the ear, lalalalalallalllllaaaaa, again...)

It's all this bloke's fault, you know - Cupid!


In Roman mythology, Cupid (Latin cupido) is the god of erotic love and beauty. He is also known by another one of his Latin names, Amor.


In popular culture Cupid is frequently shown shooting his bow to inspire romantic love. For the equivalent deity in Greek mythology, see Eros. The more common representation of Cupid is a putto with a bow and arrow. Cupid is most often seen either nude or diapered (i.e. wearing a nappy). Cupid is sometimes blindfolded, as in the expression "love is blind."

Here is another interpretation of winged messengers, the statue of Eros in Picadilly, London.



Did you know as per my darling Wiki: "Saint Valentine's Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14 by many people throughout the world. In the West, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine's cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery". Oh, is it now?! Sez who? "The holiday is named after two of the Early Christian martyrs named Valentine. The day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

Chaucer's love birds

While some claim the first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer, this may be the result of misinterpretation. Chaucer wrote:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

By the time a Saint Valentine became linked to romance in the fourteenth century, distinctions between Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni were utterly lost, and in the 1969 revision of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints, the feastday of Saint Valentine on February 14 was removed from the General Roman Calendar and relegated, (a bit like Saint Christopher, remember him?...) for the following reason: "Though the memorial of Saint Valentine is ancient... apart from his name, nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14."

"The Early Medieval acta of the Saint Valentine(s) were excerpted by Bede and briefly expounded in Legenda Aurea. According to that version, St Valentine was persecuted as a Christian and interrogated by Emperor Claudius II. Claudius was impressed by Valentine and attempted to get him to convert to Roman paganism in order to save his life. Valentine refused and tried to convert Claudius to Christianity instead. Because of this, he was executed. Before his execution, he is reported to have performed a miracle by healing the blind daughter of his jailer.

"A "High Court of Love" was established in Paris on Valentine's Day in 1400. The court dealt with love contracts, betrayals, and violence against women. Judges were selected by women on the basis of a poetry reading.

The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau written by Charles, Duc d'Orleans to his "valentined" wife, which commences.

Je suis desja d'amour tanné
Ma tres doulce Valentinée…

At the time, the duke was being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415. Valentine's Day is mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in Hamlet (1600-1601):

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine...

"Today Valentine's Day is most closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of "valentines."

Modern Valentine symbols include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards. The sending of Valentines was a fashion in nineteenth-century Great Britain, the practice appears in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mr. Harrison's Confessions (1851),

In 1847, Esther Howland developed a successful business in her Worcester, Massachusetts home with hand-made Valentine cards based on British models. The popularity of Valentine cards in 19th-century America was a harbinger of the future commercialization of holidays in the United States. Since then, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards.



"In the second half of the twentieth century, the practice of exchanging cards was extended to all manner of gifts in the United States... Such gifts typically include roses and chocolates packed in a red satin, heart-shaped box. In the 1980s, the diamond industry began to promote Valentine's Day as an occasion for giving jewellery. The day has come to be associated with a generic platonic greeting of "Happy Valentine's Day."

I understand fully that some people hate Valentine's Day - Exhibit A, M'lud:

They believe it is a huge conspiracy to get you to spend money on tat and nonsense, and they feel browbeaten to participate... or not, as the case may be! Others do lament being alone, without a paramour, and pine when it appears as if the whole world is in love, and not them. That's not really true, 'though, is it? And, why should we feel bullied by Hallmark, or indeed the diamond industry (never short of a bob or two!), to give and receive a plethora of sparkly, fluffy, glittery, plastic and cardboard, gifts?

If you are feeling down in the mouth, as it were, I just thought I might offer you a gift for the coming weekend - It's a lovely pink bouquet:


Or if you prefer a more arty and modern, neon heart:


Personally, I want to use today to wish for you, wherever you are, and whosoever you are with, the following very heartfelt greeting:



Peace and joy, love and light...



And, if you're still more traditionally inclined, this:

or



Or even this saucy minx for those of you with a more masculine bent:


I love you, I do, for what it's worth, I love you! Please enjoy your weekend!

Time of the Season

I didn't want to blog at length today, because I know we are all very busy souls, coping with all kinds of life's strains and stresses. There are obviously days when we do not know whether we are coming or going, and there are sometimes days when we don't even recognise the person that we have become...

I know many of us find that blogging is cathartic and a release. I know that because this is what I have found here, in reading others' tremendous life stories and fragile, fond fragments - Pieces of the jigsaw, smidgens from the heart.



Over the past few days, reading a number of blogs, I get the impression that we are all feeling the chemistry that descends upon us and infiltrates our very souls at this time of year.

Some of us are feeling as if a fog has descended, and we aren't sure what, if anything, we can write about.



This brings me to an interesting link, please stick with me, to our Pagan forebears, remember them? They were there before the Christians, more or less... We have evidence of them everywhere, and the Victorians, who wrote much of the history we learn today, chose rather to refer to this period of our history as The Dark Ages, thereby leaving us a bit in the dark.

Just a short detour, I promise, courtesy of my friends at Wikipedia: Paganism (from the Latin paganus, meaning "country dweller, rustic") has various different meanings, though, from a Western perspective, it has modern connotations of a faith that has polytheistic, spiritualist, animistic or shamanic practices, such as a folk religion, historical polytheistic or neopagan religion. Phew! Just to clear up, Pagans have nothing to do with satanism, just in case I lost any readers there!

You can't live where I do, in the frozen north of England, without picking up a little bit about the Pagan pre-Christians; their signs - particularly Cup and Ring markings - are to be found scattered across the beautiful Cheviots around my home. (This photo is of markings in Ireland, which are very similar).



Pagans have a bit of a calendar on the go, and celebrated the passing of the seasons, particularly the Winter Solstice, around 21st December. "A solstice (from Latin sol (sun) + stet (standing)) is simply the point in the year when the sun appears to be at its highest or lowest point in the sky. The earth's wobble means that this date and time varies from year to year, but it is easy to predict.

The winter solstice is the date of the shortest day, and has been celebrated by many peoples for thousands of years as the time when the sun reaches its lowest point and begins to rise higher in the sky. As both hunter-gatherers and farming communities relied on stored food to see them through the long winters, the return of the longer days meant that the plenty of spring was approaching.

We know that the ancients were certainly aware of the movement of the sun. For example, Newgrange is a megalithic stone structure in Ireland. Believed to be five thousand years old, it was built to allow a shaft of sunlight into its central chamber at dawn on the winter solstice.

A cairn at Maeshowe, on the Orkney Islands admits the winter solstice setting sun along a passage to the back of the chamber.

Native Americans certainly celebrated the solstice, marking the changing seasons and the return of the sun. Winter Solstice provides an interesting analogy through its association with the birth of the Christ-child. The solstice, the entry of the sun into Capricorn (at least for a few years), marks the shortest day of the year, the day when the sun shines upon the earth for the least time and all seems lost, doomed to the eternal snows and ice of perpetual Hel, to crystallization and death. From this day forward, the light overtakes the darkness, until eventually reaching equality of night and day at Spring Equinox (on which Easter is celebrated ), and then gradually overcoming the darkness, until the Summer Solstice.

There are probably as many celebrations, feasts and rituals as there are cultures and religions, if not on the astronomical solstice, then certainly around that time. The desire to see lengthening days and a return to fertility are behind all of them, and in the 21st century we still look forward to shorter nights and an end to the seasonal gloom, a rise in the spirits and an optimistic look to the future."
(Source: http://everything2.com/e2node/winter%2520solstice)

Had enough of the history lesson now?! Wake up there at the back, Billy!

Finally Fhina gets to the point of her dialogue, Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) is a real condition for many of us, affecting four times as many women as men, and as many as one in eight of the population suffer from 'Winter blues', a less severe form of S.A.D., so we are right and justified in looking forward to the coming of spring and the new year and the appearance of spring lambs again. That is for those of us unfortunate enough not to be able to spend a winter vacation in Miami or the Caribbean, unlike most of Hollywood, it seems, or is that just me reading too much into The Daily Mail online!

The exact cause of S.A.D. is not clear, but with less sunlight in the winter months, changes in the balance of certain chemicals and hormones in the brain may affect our moods, perhaps triggering some form of depression.

S.A.D. is linked to a feeling of everything seeming 'black', a lack of energy, abnormal sadness, often with weepiness (that's me covered then!); feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or uselessness (ditto); poor motivation, and poor concentration, and is often associated with sleeping problems, as well as other more physical manifestations. If you are interested in more information, just use our friend Mr Google, as I didn't want this to become a science lesson, or Medicine 101! There are loads of bits and pieces, gadgets and things that might help S.A.D. cases, including taking lots of exercise and trying to get out into some kind of sunshine, or at least daylight, each day.

There is a part of me, as I've said before, that feels as if we have lost our connection to the past, and for those of you who are keenly researching and preserving family history, well done! And, for others of us who are feeling a bit low or glum, blame it on the Pagans for not being clever enough to pass down their celebrations properly to us - If only they'd had Comedian and t'Internet then!

Oh, and humour is important in helping S.A.D. Apologies for any strong language in this video.