I've been reading back through my blog of 2011 and amongst other things came across this link to a story about my dad, an RAF navigator during WW2, having to bale out over occupied France and being captured. If you scroll down to the heading ESCAPE VIA 'PAT O'LEARY' LINE, Alan was my dad. He'd have loved these two piss-taking bastards:



I keep meaning to mention that I've recently got into post-crossing where you send and receive postcards to and from random people out of the almost half a million who have joined. I love it. I'm rubbish at geography unless I have a connection and already I have the locations, size and general shapes of Taiwan and Belarus fixed in my head. These are my favourites of the cards I've received so far:



from (l to r) Hong Kong, Taiwan and Seattle. I'm liking finding good ones to send - sometimes I have to buy an extra one for me, like these two. The first is the old wrecked pier in its heyday:



and this, by an unknown artist, painted around 1840, when they were just starting to build a few houses, which eventually turned into a city - the artist must have been standing right on the beach, facing inland:



Those houses on the left are the beginnings of the area I live in - these ones below are part of the same group as the painting, the same design as mine, but my road wasn't built till 1860.

Yesterday JSing invited me for coffee in the park up the road, which is bursting into spring:



and full of really tame squirrels. It's very hard to take a decent pic of a squirrel. This one was trying to get that massive apple up the tree - I took loads of shots as it went up the tree, dropped the apple, struggled to get a good grip of it, tried again, failed again, all the time moving so quickly it's not even in most of the pics, and all but this one are just a blur:



There's loads of them living in the trees at the back of my house - little bastards spend all day digging up my bulbs or burying peanuts in my pots, though I shoo them away rather than trying to snap that:



J took some pics of me, one for my FB profile:



and one without my glasses to serve as a 'naked face' photo for the cancer-fundraising thing that's raising loads - over two million quid in a couple of days. Strange to me, how beautiful young women talk of 'bravery' regarding posting a picture of themselves with no make-up.



I must say, the thing I noticed most was my teeth, and how wonky they've become, though this may have been affected by watching a documentary about Bowie over the years - his teeth used to be well wonky. I'm quite mirror-averse, in case you wondered why I hadn't noticed this before.


A lot of this weekend I've spent thinking about my dear friend Mrs Lovely, who died nearly three years ago. We worked together in two different schools and despite being completely different (beyond the shared love of English teaching), we became very close and I feel her loss deeply at times, like now. There's a big 'world foods' shop just down the road, so I decided to be adventurous and in her honour made a Jamaican 'curry goat':





I meant to take a pic of the whole meal, with the rice and peas, but I'd eaten it before I remembered.

Thinking of Mrs Lovely took me back to my old blog, reading about her and her funeral and bloody hell, I'd forgotten what my life was like back then. After one particularly trying day in May 2011 I made a list of 'points worth noting', including this: I am a recoverer and this has been a gruesome fucking few weeks (death of much-loved friend and colleague; child into wheelchair [for the very first time, involving me doing most of the organising, up and down the motorway - it was the end of her working life though we didn't know it then]; child with mental health episode [being admitted to psych ward, where she discharged herself after being head-butted by another patient, requiring all my powers of persuasion to stop them sectioning her, more up and down the motorway] ; call back on my own health checks on heart/lungs[they eventually decided the weird shit was 'normal for me', but scary times waiting for that diagnosis]; fucking up the money and getting cut off the internet - they're just the ones that spring to mind). It has taken all I've got to keep as steady as I am.

Crikey. That was just the start of it all going tits up - it got a lot worse and only some of it has got better. But. Points I take from reading all of 2011 (which took hours - I do blether on):
1. I am fucking strong. I am Davina, in my own way - I weep and wail, then get on with it.
2. I am a good mother and have done right by my kids
3. I am also a good writer and I'm quite funny at times.
4. I don't slag people off or gossip about their shit half as much as I think I do - hardly at all in fact.
5. I could make sections of it into a book - there's lots of 'how to live a good-ish life with mental health problems' and the tale of my poor darling's descent into MS hell as well as other stuff I've forgotten again already.

Today I am grateful for: Messaging with Hil last night (I do love her with a passion); enjoying spending time in my head with Mrs Lovely; YD being much stronger than she was in 2011, much, much stronger; having found this flat after all the angst back then; having remembered that my dad was a bit of a one as well and was always quite proud of the way I threw myself into things, no matter how unwise

sweet dreams xxx