My Memoirs – 1997 – a School Panto.

In 1997 I was working as a school secretary at an Infants School. It was decided to put on a pantomime (see below) for the children, who were all between four and seven years old. We did a sort of Cinderella and I was the King. Here I am in my stage clothing with one of the teachers who played the Queen of Hearts.

The children were told that a theatre company was coming to entertain them so they had no idea that the teachers would be performing for their delight. When they realised who they were watching, there was uproar and they absolutely loved it.

The headteacher was a good sport! Here he is as the wicked stepmother:

Yvonne was the fairy godmother:

and Dorothy and Karen were buttons and the prince:

but I give the prize for the best costumes to Flo and Jan who made some fantastic wigs, which transformed them into the ugly sisters:

Just look at the work that went into make the wigs from paper ringlets:

At the end of the performance we all danced with the children to the Barbie song. Remember that one?

My days at the school lasted for thirteen years and I loved it until we got a new Headteacher and then it all went pear-shaped!

Have a love Sunday.

from Wikipaedia:

Pantomime (informally panto), is a type of musical comedy stage production, designed for family entertainment. It was developed in England and is generally performed during the Christmas and New Year season. Modern pantomime includes songs, slapstick comedy and dancing, employs gender-crossing actors, and combines topical humour with a story loosely based on a well-known fairy tale.^[1] It is a participatory form of theatre, in which the audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers.

Pantomime has a long theatrical history in Western culture dating back to classical theatre, and it developed partly from the 16th-century commedia dell’arte tradition of Italy, as well as other European and British stage traditions, such as 17th-century masques.^[1] An important part of the pantomime, until the late 19th century, was theharlequinade. The pantomime is performed today throughout Britain and, to a lesser extent, in other English-speaking countries.

Oma

 

Baby Oleg has arrived.

We have a new car. It’s a Vauxhall Agila. Isn’t it cute?  Larry decided he didn’t want to drive over here so we chose a car which was just right for me and this is it. Then we needed car insurance so we went to a website called http://www.comparethemarket.com and chose the best one for us. That entitled me to a free meerkat toy. They are so very funny on the adverts that I couldn’t resist and went for the baby one. Here is the advert so you’ll see what I mean:

I had to wait a while for the toy to arrive because it was travelling all around Europe but eventually! here he is complete with adoption certificate and everything. His name is Oleg.

He was packed in a box with his toy, a grub. Even that is cute.

I know you enjoyed the video of Oleg so here’s another one. Enjoy it.

 

Oma

 

Dylan update – July 2014 and a flash back to the past.

It seems that Dylan’s transformation into Spiderman is complete!

Dylan is now nearly four years old.  His birthday is in October, like mine and so the big 4 is just around the corner. He is a very active little boy who enjoys dressing up and posing for photographs. Whenever I see pictures of him or observe his behaviour when he comes to visit, I can’t help thinking back to my own three little boys when they were the same age. It doesn’t seem so long ago to me, you see; although in reality it is 36 years since my eldest son, Robert, was four years old.

This is Robert, aged 4 and his brother Edward aged 1. David wasn’t born yet. The year is 1977.

 

The photo was taken by a professional photographer. I know that at the time we could hardly afford it, but I so wanted a nice picture to keep so we stretched ourselves. The days when my children were little were the happiest of my life. It is hard to compare those days with these days when I am almost a different person. I look back and I think, did this really happen? Why did it go so quickly? Looking at the picture above, it would not be long before Robert started school proper and then it would be ‘teacher said this or teacher said that.’ and I would no longer be that most important person in his life. For now he was mine, all mine and we shared everything together. We lived in a happy bubble, not having much money, but having plenty of time.

My grandson, Dylan, has just had his first professional photograph taken at the Nursery where he goes twice a week. I think it turned out very well, don’t you?

Have a lovely Sunday all of you. Just want to say a big thank you for following my blog and sharing my life and my memories.

Oma

 

Starlight Promotions – 5, Mangoneworld Records

If you’ve been following these posts you will know that Starlight Promotions diversified. We added an Indie Record Label to our catalogue and made our first CD: ‘Universal Understanding’ by the band Grief Society.

Once we had the CD at the manufacturers, life got exciting. Just think of the work! The songs had to be written, learned, performed, recorded, set to CD. A barcode had to be found. Barcodes don’t just drop out of the air. There is paperwork!!!! Above is the backside of the CD cover, complete with barcode. The barcode starts with a 5 denoting that it is European. To be sold in the U.S. it would need a different number. If I remember rightly, it is 9. Look at one of your CD’s and see if I’m right (those of you in the U.S.)

Once we had our initial run of CD’s, they needed to be promoted and distributed. We are in the 1990’s  here! One of the ways of doing this was to market them around the record shops.  Record shops? you ask – what are they? At the time there were lots of them and what better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than trotting round the town seeing who’s about and what is new. Distribution involved legwork. We managed to get a few copies into some edgy London record stores on a ‘sell or return’ basis.

Of course the band has to play its part.  They have to perform their songs over and over and get their followers to buy a copy of their CD. Everybody gets involved. It’s as successful as the amount of work you put in to it. The design of the CD cover is important. If you hire a designer, it’s expensive. Luckily we knew one – a good one as you can see.

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At the time this CD was coming out, people had started downloading music bigtime; so that was another avenue we could explore. We contacted CD Baby in America and sold some through them. They pay in dollars but we soon discovered that once the dollars are converted to our local currency, the profit is lost. Downloading music for free became endemic. I can see how one download hurts nothing. It is a good way of promoting the music but to give away a whole CD’s worth of music, is just not on.

Search engines sprung up, scooping up all the music they could find on the Net and playing it for download and listening all over the world. How did they get paid? Advertising, I suppose. Undaunted I decided to launch another website, just to promote the new bands and to sell their CD’s legitimately. I’ll tell you about that next time.

For now I’ll leave you with the thought:’ Never take your music for granted. It is hard work to produce new music and really does deserve the money you pay for it.

Here’s another track from the CD, it’s called ‘That Girl’. You can still buy the CD from ITunes. Search on ‘Grief Society’.

‘ Oma

The Polworth Fleece

 

 

The Polworth fleece, which I acquired recently, was quite dirty so it needed a good wash. It’s amazing how much dirt came out of that fleece during the three washes I gave it.  It’s important to use hot water for washing and not to agitate the wool. The results were good.

My husband very kindly made me a lovely drying rack so I could dry the fleece in the garden in the sunshine.

 

 

Next I needed to card the fleece and that is a work in progress. I was anxious to try spinning it to make sure I was carding it properly and after a few goes I think I’ve got the hang of it. I’ll leave that to a future post.  Suffice to say that I will probably have enough to make a pretty shawl so now I’m looking around for patterns.

Have a lovely day in the sunshine if you can.

Oma

 

In a field near me – July 2014 – these are the plots.

 

The view above shows the approach to the first of the meadow plots, which has been called ‘A’. From this angle the first plot gives a pleasing view of what may be ‘things to come’.

The ten meadow plots are experimental. They have been sown with a variety of native grasses and flowers, many of which are bi-ennial (i.e. flowering in the second year after planting). If you look back at the pictures I took last year, you will be able to see the difference a year makes.

The plots are part of a major research project into improving urban biodiversity.

Luton Borough Council staff are cultivating a variety of seed mixes at this site and managing the meadows using different mowing frequencies. Researchers from Cranfield, Sheffield and Exeter Universities are monitoring the sites.

Here is the first of the plots up close:

 

and the second (B). At first siting I didn’t like this one very much. It is brown(ish). After I’d studied it for a while, I decided I did like it after all but I wouldn’t want to see a whole field full of it. Of course that is not the idea. When the designers take over, there will be areas of planting and areas of mown grass because the object of the exercise is to create an urban environment which is beautiful and useful to people, animals and insects alike.

Plot B is mainly grasses, as you can see:

 

Next is plot C. This looked like a weed patch to me and I wouldn’t want to see more of it. However I’m sure there are plenty of insects who would not agree with me.

One of the considerations being taken into account is whether or not the plots are likely to attract unwelcome wildlife and/or litter. I think this one would welcome litter!

 

Plot D I thought was very nice. The plants were not too high, lots of variety, colourful and certainly popular with bees and flying insects. So plot D got the thumbs up from me.

 

Plot E on the other hand, was not attractive. Again it looked like a weed path; bearing in mind that a weed is just a prolific plant in the wrong place. Most of the plants in this plot were going to seed. There wasn’t much colour to be seen and I think litter would easily blow into it.

 

Plot F was a nothing sort of plot. I don’t know if that was deliberate, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t think it was an improvement on just mown grass.

 

Plot G was my favourite. It was bursting with colour and interest. On the downside the plants were big – taller than me, some of them and I’m 5 ft. 6 inches tall. A whole field of this selection would look gorgeous but be totally impractical I think.

 

Plot H was another no-no to me. Another weed patch in the making although there were some rather attractive field poppies in there. I think they had sown themselves.

When I counted the number of plants in each plot, I found that there were an average of six different varieties in each plot. I don’t know if that was deliberate but it probably was intended.

The intention is to cut all the plots down to ground level at the end of the summer.  This will encourage new and healthy growth to come in the new season.

So there we are. I may take some more pics before the end of the summer, but I doubt if they would be much different. If anything new happens, I’ll let you know.

Enjoy your environment as much as you can for as long as you can.

Oma

 

Starlight Promotions – 4 – My Memoirs – sounds get more selective.

 

So it’s the mid 90’s; Starlight Promotions is up and running and I’m getting busier and busier. The website is getting a lot of hits and I’m learning about sound recordings. I figured out how to put the sounds on the website and I asked the bands to give me one song that I could use so that the customers could listen. I used the Windows sound recorder to pick a part of the song which best reflected the sound of the band or artist. So most of the clips were 60 seconds long. The trick was choosing which 60 secs to record. Sometimes it was the intro. which was the most interesting and at other times it was the guitar riff in the middle or the fantastic drum solo at the end. Choices, choices!

For the party bands, I had the demos. but it was costly to post them out all the time and sometimes I didn’t get them back so the sound clips became more and more important. The sounds of the party bands needed to show their singing and playing abilities whereas the unique,new,Indie bands needed to show off their particular strengths.

So Starlight was evolving. There were the bread and butter songs and then there were the new bands, looking to be famous. I wanted to promote them more even than I wanted to provide music for weddings and parties. At this point I will say that there wasn’t much money in it! It was more of a hobby and a very interesting one at that.

Together with a friend from one of the bands, who I shall call A, we decided to break off the individual band part and set up a record label with our own name. We thought up a name to suit us both. We called it Mangoneworld. I found out how to get a bar-code for the CD. That also proved to be very interesting. Once we had the name, the business and the bar-code, we made a record and assigned it to our own label.

This is it:

 

The band is Grief Society and the song below is called ‘Pin Cushion’. You can buy it or the CD on Itunes.com.

 

Can you let me know please, if the sound thingy works? Thank you.

Oma

 

 

 

Sand

Our lives are short and full of sand

which shifts and trickles through our hands.

No longer can I take for granted

That tomorrow we shall not be parted!

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We fill our buckets on the beach

with dreams and hopes we try to reach

But sorrow knocks on every door

The shifting sands are here once more.

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These grains of sand like hairs are numbered

but bronzed and lazy we do but slumber.

Unaware that days like these

Will disappear upon the breeze.

 

S. Jones

In a field near me – July 2014

Last year an experiment began in a field near me. The experiment is being run by a nearby University and is ongoing. The idea of it is to plant up areas of wild flowers in urban areas to see what effect that has on our wildlife. Before the experiment, the field near me was just grass, cut once a week and available for use by the public who live nearby. The main use of it was for children to play football and for dog owners to exercise their pets. I don’t remember seeing anything else much going on there. I wrote about it in a blog post here.

Now here we are a year later and lots of changes have occurred on the ten plots. Looking at them today I can see many more plants and flowers. A lot of the plants from last year are bi-ennials so only came to flower this summer. Here are the plants which have been planted:

Larry got this picture with his camera-phone and took it whilst on his knees in the field. The original belonged to one of the students who was reluctant to part with it today. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get my own copy, then Larry can take  a better pic. Meanwhile it is good to have because at least the words are clear and we can always to to Wikip… and get a better picture.

The students are handing out survey forms and asking all our neighbours to take a look at the plots and see which ones are most appealing to look at. I can see how important this is because we are all so used to seeing manicured lawns with flat, green grass and nothing much else except the dandelions, daisies and buttercups.

It is so important that we encourage our wildlife to return to our urban spaces that we must learn to find space for them and learn to live with the difference in our environment.

At the moment the plots are slap bang in the middle of the grassy areas but in the longterm I suppose they will be moved to the edges and become part of the landscape.