We had a nasty moment yesterday with that sweet, innocent looking hen on the right of this picture. That’s Willow, usually found wandering around the garden on her own, looking confused and, well, a tad gormless. She never knows quite where she’s hidden her gorm. We love her anyway. She’s Willow.
I’ve been faithfully renewing this domain every year, and it’s nearly due for renewal again. Of course I hate blogging. I hate journaling, though I give it a try at the beginning of every year. It’s just one more thing to beat myself up about. And a lot has changed since my last post back in 2014. There’s been a change in the family personnel. Jack, our dear and beloved black-and-white cat, died in may last year of kidney failure. We now have Ollie and Luna, two dark brown and white tabbies. Luna is featured in the photo at the top of the page, and Ollie is at the top of this post. We also have new hens in Willow, Laurel, Hazel, and Holly. We still have Shelley, but Buttercup died of a heart attack in january this year.
I should have written this yesterday. But I forgot! F is for forgetful. Well, I’m not used this blogging every day lark. I shouldn’t be writing this today as I’m so bone tired. But if I don’t then that’s three I’d have to write tomorrow and that way lies madness. So you’re getting F for faith today.
Which is my way of saying I am stumped. I’ve thought about it all day and I cannot come up with an entry for “e”. I know, I know, you’re thinking for heavens sake woman, it’s staring you in the face! E could be for Easter. Thing is, I don’t celebrate Easter. I’m a Pagan, so this sabbat is Ostara. And it actually began on march 21, which was the spring equinox. Oh yes, we had chocolate eggs, went out on saturday to Llanarchaeron and watched the children running around on an Easter egg hunt. But it’s not the same, when it’s not your festival. I “get it” when devout Christians get narked about how commercial Christmas has become, because Samhain is my sabbat. But it’s Hallowe’en for everyone else, so it’s all about cute costumes for children, sexy this-and-that costumes for women, and lots of sweets. But for me it’s about honouring the people I love who have gone on into the Summerlands. Okay, people I care about who have died. Ahem, so it’s a solemn and serious time for me. Also, my mother died on november 1 2010, which makes it even more serious.
But y’know, I wouldn’t stop people from enjoying it in their own way. Nor would I want to even tell people they shouldn’t overindulge on oval shaped chocolate, or stop calling it Easter. It is what it is. It doesn’t matter whether it started thousands of years ago or just two thousand, or whether it goes by other names: when you boil it down, it’s a nice time to spend a day or so with the family, out in the spring air and enjoying the end of winter. Or the end of summer, if you live on t’other side of the world.
So this isn’t much of a blog entry, but it will do for today. I’m just getting into the idea of blogging every day so I’ll be gentle with myself and accept that there are going to be some days when I will struggle.
We’ve just come back home, from an afternoon in Llanarchaeron. It’s a Georgian mansion with model farm, walled garden, lake, walks in the woods etc. For some odd reason we always seem to go in the autumn or winter. This is the first time in years that we’ve visited when the sun was actually shining. It was pretty busy as they’re running a children’s Easter egg hunt over the weekend. But it was lovely to see families of children actually running around, enjoying the animals and all that fresh air and sunshine that so few of them seem to get these days.
I grew up on comics. My mother allowed my sister and I to read just about every girls’ comic going, in an attempt to encourage my sister to read. Of course, they were all British weekly anthology comics. Even then, in the 1960’s, there were no American style “comic books” for girls. But we would swap our girls’ comics for our boy cousins’ DC and Marvel comics. Eventually, Mum let us buy Spiderman, Superman, Batman and X-Men comics from the local paper shop.
The two legged kind! And you have to say that with a leer and a wink. Today I would like to discuss my daughter and her struggle with bloomin’ stupid men who think that people of the female persuasion cannot possibly know anything much about their pet hobby of ornithology.
…and wouldn’t you know it, my mind has gone blank! I had a busy morning as it was wednesday. Well of course it was and is wednesday, silly chump. What I mean is, every wednesday, I go walking with a group of friends. We met three years ago at a gym for women only. Well, I met them three years ago. I gather that they had been going to that gym for a year or two before I turned up.
In a mad attempt to force myself to blog more regularly; for if you build it, then they will visit; I signed up to two blogging marathons in april. (Marathons? Is that a good term for it?) One of them is an off-shoot of NaNoWriMo, Najowrimo. And the other is Blogging From A-Z. (Only as I’m British, it’s Blogging From A-Zed, not Zee.)
Why do I need to “force” myself to blog? It’s not as if my life depended on it. The thing is, I get that blogging and journalling is a good thing. But it doesn’t come naturally to me. It falls into the category of being not nice. It feels like showing myself up, as my mother would say. And who would want to read the ponderings of what I like to call my mind anyway? I find I tend to write journal entries in letters to penpals. Sometimes something someone will write will spark me off. Several pages later I’ll realise that I have written a journal entry. Meanwhile, weeks will have gone by before I dust off my actual journal or log into my blog.
So, here I am, journalling and blogging every day in april. Will I do it? Will my mind dribble out of my left ear with the strain of it all? Stay tuned, same bat-channel!
…but I could swear I had made at least one more post after the one about religion. Ah memory, how you like to play around with my poor brain. I must have dreamt I had written something.
Anyway, I am here today to rant away about body image in the Pagan press. Ah yes, if there was a group of people that you would think would not be all over the thin-is-good thing, and ageism to boot, it would be Pagans. Of which I count myself in that number.
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