Some South Woodford scribbles from DD, our resident diarist and observer of all things local. Illustrated by Evelyn Rowland
Thank you, dear readers, for your encouraging feedback. If you missed the last edition, allow me to recap. My life completely changed when my late husband suffered a massive stroke 30 years ago. I became his chief carer. I found writing letters to my children and nephews and nieces and many other young friends was a lifeline, keeping me in touch with the rest of the world. Here’s just one more example. We’ll be back, in the present, chatting together in George Lane in the next edition.
Dear friends all,
This letter is predominantly green. Not green as in bilious, or green as in the first time you picked up a golf club, but green as in recycled potato peelings. Redbridge is going green. Today, a handsome black plastic box materialised on the front path for the purpose of ‘kerbside recycling’. I note that paper is wanted but not cardboard. Glass bottles (washed), but not if they contained milk. And magazines but ‘sorry, no Yellow Pages’. In addition, we are being encouraged to make our own compost. Various green bins of various designs and sizes are on display at the library. All cheek by jowl with the biographies and science fiction. My mind was filled with the prospect of muck. Barrowloads of the stuff. Alastair heartily approved. I knew he would, even if he would never be able to take an active role in the project. But I can seek his advice at every stage. He comes of a long line of vegetable growers. His father would think nothing of chatting to his potatoes and runner beans decades before Prince Charles gave such activity royal approval. Our compost bin is now discreetly in situ within easy reach of the back door for receipt of daily offerings from the kitchen. Yesterday, I emptied a jigsaw puzzle into it. Alan Titchmarsh says you should drop in small bits of card from time to time and I can’t think of a much better definition of a jigsaw than that. Anyway, there were several pieces missing and the picture was almost 100% trees, so that’s sure to add to the goodness quotient. Mike next door sensed our new enthusiasm for compost and kindly handed over some pailfuls of worms from his heap. Even as I type, I expect one of them is getting to grips with an edge piece.
If further proof of our green credentials were needed, I should tell you that we have recently had a water meter installed. On a trial basis. Two beefy young chaps in woolly hats turned up one frosty morning and dug a large hole outside the front gate. When I later handed steaming mugs of coffee into the hole, now more of a paddling pool, they impressed me with their resilient sangfroid and friendly informative chat with Alastair, who was by now looking on from his wheelchair. A very welcome diversion in our hard-to-fill daylight hours.
We have some friends – wonderful friends – who turn up almost every Tuesday evening with a hot dinner for four, on a tray, and we eat together. “We have to do something!” they say. They told us last week that they had been astonished last summer when visiting ex-neighbours, now living out in Essex, to find that their garden was a complete desert, with not even a flower or a blade of grass to be seen. It seems they also had been metered. And now the husband is almost obsessively unable to turn on the tap. Even the suggestion of making a cup of tea causes tremors of apprehension, and as for turning the hose on the asters or giving the lawn a nice refreshing shower of an August evening, that is now in the realms of the unthinkable. Pity really, because they had such a nice show of colour at their old address in Forest Approach. I think it unlikely that I will be similarly affected, though I have to confess to you that I now tend to walk downstairs in the morning and empty the leftover millilitres of water in my overnight glass into the front room pot plants – in rotation, of course – rather than just pouring it down the sink upstairs. But then, that is actually the point of metering, isn’t it?
I am gradually covering the breakfast room walls with still lifes. A print or two from the National Gallery, some from charity shops. There was a time when it seemed wholly inexplicable to me that anyone should settle down, with brushes and paint and deep concentration, to create a picture of a kettle. Or maybe a few pots. Cracked ones even, however nicely arranged. I could understand why people painted people. And celebrations of historic or even mythical events were self-evidently worth recording on canvas. But it was harder to grasp the allure as subject matter of a random collection of items that might pass unnoticed in an average kitchen or garden shed. Sometimes, I supposed that artists were just practising on something that happened to be close at hand. Sometimes, I even got so far as to wonder whether they took pity on the humble pots and pans, rather like the poet Gray who wanted to celebrate “his little flower, born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” I can’t really pinpoint the moment when I saw the light. Who knows? Perhaps I’m still in the dark. But it could be that these strange years of confinement together have enabled me to look at the extraordinary value of ordinary, unremarkable things. Things for which familiarity hadn’t bred contempt but merely lack of awareness. There are probably a great many things that I ‘see’ differently these days. Things like walking. Getting up and sitting down. Quiet conversation between clear and equal minds. Even flower pots and kettles.
With love and thanks to you all. Carpe diem! Seize the day.
To contact DD with your thoughts or feedback, email dd@swvg.co.uk
