Things have changed...

 A little.  

 

Sometimes it's the little things that matter.

Like my husband making me countless cups of tea.

The cats playing in the garden chasing butterflies.

Me writing again.

So let's come clean.

I've had a stroke. 

It was an ischimic one caused by attrial affribulation.

 

I have a broken heart.

I beat to a different rythmn.

I know when it happened.

I know how it happened.

There is nothing I can do about it now.

So I hope that nothing else will happen.

I have the drugs that I hope will help me.

I have the love of a good man.

It is enough.

Haven't written for a while...

Mainly because no one has been reading my posts.

Bad day yesterday, constant rain over the weekend ramped up my pain from the Rheumatoid Arthritus. Couldn't do anything much.

A lost day, depressing myself reading tweets of how this country is turning into the Third Riech.  

Covid is killing thousands across the world and the things we could do to stop it are quite simple, but will people do it? No, not all of them.

First of all. 
Chinese people stop eating rodents, endangered animals, dogs and cats. Close the so called "wet" markets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIr_dCgNAjM


Secondly 
Wear a MASK if not to save yourself breathing in Covid, but to stop spreading it if you have it and don't know. Even 17thCentury people knew this so why cant 21stC people get the gist?
 
Thirdly
Keep your distance. The UK Government don't care if you do this or not, all they care about is YOUR money in THEIR pockets.


Finally and most importantly  

WASH YOUR SODDING HANDS THIS IS NOT A DRILL

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/best-way-to-wash-your-hands/https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/best-way-to-wash-your-hands/

NO BEACHES NO PARTIES NO CROWDS NO FOOTBALL YET.

If we keep to this it will be SOON like in NEW ZEALAND where people don't act like idiots,

Keep safe every body.
 

New Books out last month: The Witch the Knight and the Djinn, and The Collected Hilary Long Mysteries Volume 2

The Witch the Knight and the Djinn

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/099340684X/

Be taken back to a time when Knights fought for their King, when silver sprites roamed the wildwood and witches cast spells so strong, hundreds of years could not break them.Following the Wiccan way leads Lorna to love, adventure and more magic than you can wave a wand at.The new Legend of the Rollright stones mixes myth and magic, throwing in a few truths for good measure. A new take on the Legend of the Stones from historical fiction author Margaret Cooper Evans

 The Collected Hilary Long Mysteries Volume 2

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0993406858/

At the end of her first year in Overdown Hilary is invited to Overdown Manor for the holidays. Her visit is full of surprises, the other guests unusual, and strangely she finds herself taking part in a real life Christmas ghost story.As the New Year starts Hilary and Toby decide to look further afield for their property renovation business. Meanwhile a mysterious dark eyed Irishman turns up at Harding Hall piquing Vanessa's curiosity. Why is he there? Why does he have guns in his luggage?In a previously unpublished short story. Back before Hilary Long disappeared from her life in the City of London, a yearly ritual was taking place in her offices. What would be the result this year?The popular Hilary Long series is now in paperback. Lay back & relax with a nice glass of something and let Hilary take you into the Cotswolds for a little adventure

17th Century Sex Scandal

It just goes to prove  there is nothing new under the sun. What Millenials think of sex today young people in the 17th Century had already thought of back in their day, and done it. It was just hidden.

In 1687 a musical broadsheet (or the MTV of the day) released a ballad called:

The Female Captaine or The Counterfeit Bridegroom.

It was called after a scandal that appeared in the Bloomsbury press. An eighteen year old woman Mary Williams, put on men's clothing and started to court a young woman in Bloomsbury with the consent of her friends and family.

She called herself Captain Charles Fairfax and pretended she was heir to the Fairfax fortune. When the young woman's family heard this, they were only too pleased to have her settled with a rich young man of fortune.

They were married by a Jacobite Parson who provided the ring, the wedding clothes and the wedding feast. Everyone involved was hoping that the young woman's new husband would be generous when they had settled in their new home.

They lived together for a whole month without the 'Captaines' true sex being found out. It was said she had used a strange instrument on her new wife during the act of generation.

An old woman discovered the sordid affair by accident, she had known the 'Captaine' as Madam Mary Plunkett,when she was a whore, and reported her to the authorities.

She faced a court, was judged a cheat and a charlatan and sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell where she spent the rest of her life.

Her life spawned one of the bawdiest ballads of the century sung to the tune of "Ladies of London." It was popular for about a year, being reprinted many times.

 

All fools day 2020

All fools Day, or hunt the Gowk Day.

In the 17th Century, the best method of making April Fools was to send them on pointless errands. Such as a glass of pigeon's milk, or fetching striped paint or a jar of elbow grease.

Gowks are Cuckoos, and the chicks appear in other birds nests around this time. Gowk was a word also used for jokes. They used to pass the "Gowk" on, as one was fooled with a prank another had to think of one to do to someone else, and so it passed on.

Such an old tradition that in my father's day apprentices were sent to look for a left handed spanner, (you can probably get them nowadays) or a skyhook!

Today no-one has told the natural world that we are in the middle of a disaster. Our apple trees are blast of leaves and flower buds. Goats in Llandudno have decided to visit the town now it's less busy! In France wild Boars are rummaging through village streets.

Magpies and crows have been busy breaking twigs off the huge oak tree at the bottom of our garden to make nests. I saw a red admiral butterfly yesterday.

The swamp of our flooded garden is starting to dry out and Rhubarb, Chives, Rosemary, Lavender, are growing like mad. Even my perfume rose has got leaves.

In these dark times it shows life goes on. Spring will come every year, lambs will jingle about on their new little legs, birds will nest. The urge to get Spring Cleaning and get out and about will be strong. Do the first not the last.  Keep safe and well everybody.

 

The Supernatural Experience

Everyone it seems has an interest in the supernatural. Some people make a living out of it.
Not everyone who wants to experience it does. Some who don't want ro experience it do. 

I come into the latter. I am not a trained medium, nor am I a schizophrenic. Throughout my life though, the dead have spoken to me.

We had just left Barts hospital, my father was suffering cancer of the throat. He had been lying hooked up to drips and my mother and I had been holding his hands. The day before he had been up and about and even fixed the ward tv as it had been getting on his nerves.
8am the following day at home, the phone rang. I was up making tea mum and little sis were still asleep.
"Tell your mum I'm okay." Dad's voice garbled down the phone.
"Hold on, I'll get her." I said.
"No, no, just tell her I'm okay." He hung up.

I gave mum her tea, told her dad had rang, which wasn't unusual. So we started getting ready to go back to Barts to visit, when the phone rang. 
"Mrs. Cooper?" a young female voice asked.
"Yes." Mum answered quietly.
"I'm the cancer ward sister at Barts Hospital." She went on, "I am sorry to have to tell you that your husband Sidney Cooper died this morning at 2am."
Silence.
"I'm sorry that can't be right." Mum answered eventually. "He phoned here at 8am."
"I think someone is playing a cruel joke on you Mrs Cooper." the nurse sighed. "I was with him all the time holding his hand."

We sat stunned, Mum phoned up one of Dad's friends from work who was a well known practical joker and blasted him over the phone. He denied it, Dad had kept how ill he was from everyone at his work, everyone thought he was having treatment for a stomach ulcer.

"Are you sure it was him?" Mum asked.
"Yes, he just phoned as usual it was him, he sounded a bit foggy, but he was on a lot of drugs yesterday. It was him." Mum knew I wouldn't lie to her. I wasn't lying to her.

The years passed I was walking past Harrods in Knightsbridge, and I heard Spike Milligan's voice loud in my head. "Tell the guys, I'll  meet them for lunch. Don't forget."
Imagination of a writer I told myself, until I heard the news that Spike was dead. The guys he was referring to were Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers.

My boyfriend's house was a tip in the process of renovation. An old lady had lived there, she and her daughter had both met him and liked him. He said he wanted to take the house back to a Victorian look. The old lady said "Don't sell it to builders will you?" He said he wouldn't. About a year later, the daughter came round to say her mum had died. She liked what he was doing. Taking out the 60s boarded doors, putting up a wall to make a front room again, sanding the floorboards. "Mum would be proud." she said as she left.

The first time I stayed overnight I was woken up by shouting in my face, an old lady was screaming at me."Get out! Get out!  This is NOT your house it's his! Get out!"
Strangely, I just said sleepily, "it's not your house either so go away!" 

In Cornwall, we had a host of ghosts as did Tim and Sue next door. Hardly surprising as we had mine captain's houses built over the top of the Levant mine shaft. In 1919 men were trapped underground when the lift crashed. Sue & Tim's ghosts were slightly different, still Cornish miners, but they died in the 1960s, and they would go up the stairs that Sue and Tim had removed from their front room. Sometimes just legs in a nice pair of slacks Sue said!   

Then we both had the visitor, a young man in a duffle coat who had got lost in the 1970s and who periodically came back to look for his friends. We had a medium visit one time when he turned up, apparently he sat in an armchair for a rest. He looked arty, beatnik style, long dark hair beard, duffle coat, she told us. She told him his friends had gone home.
"To London?" He asked.
"Yes." She said. He never came back after her visit. 

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."
W.Shakespeare.

This is CarnYorth, gateway to Hell apparently, on the moor behind our house, it's where the young beatnik guy got lost.

Time travelling

Apparently time is a loop in space that twists and turns and crosses over itself. Sometimes, when it does this a door opens to another time. 

This theory was used in "Quantum Leap", "Goodnight Sweetheart", "The Lake House" and my all time favourite "Somwhere in Time".

The "Time Machine" by H G Wells, accidentally caused a rift in time.

As a re-enactor our time travel is more practical, we try to make a living drawing of the time we re-enact.  

When in my 1940s kit, I am always surprised when people take photos of my husband and myself. To me the clothes are modern enough. However it wasn't fun at Goodwood a couple of years ago when my "roll on" corset decided to "roll off" !  After wrestling in the portaloo with it for about 20 minutes, I gave up and put it in my handbag!

Easier for men, a nice scarf, either a straw summer fedora or a brown or black one for winter. In the country a flat cap. Short back and sides and clean shaven. Cream slacks or linen for Summer and black, tan or brown trousers for winter. Always black brogues for work in office or brown shoes for blue collar workers.
I remember my father telling me that when he was a child, the only description of a criminal the police had was that he was not wearing a hat, this was in London 1940s and he was caught. Hats for men have made a comeback. So if like Gary Sparrow you find a doorway into the 1940s and you are a man, make sure you are wearing a hat!

This is Edna's sweetshop at Goodwood, she is talking to some children dressed as war evacuees. She's explaining what sort of sweets were allowed on the ration, and how hundreds and thousands became popular as you got more for your money. Chewing gum generally came from friendly GIs stationed in England. Somewhere I have a fascinating little book called, in it advice for dealing with the British!

"The GI Handbook".

The British Are Tough. Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.
Sixty thousand British civilians-men, women, and children-have died under bombs, and yet the morale of the British is unbreakable and high. A nation doesn’t come through that, if it doesn’t have plain, common guts. The British are tough, strong people, and good allies.
You won’t be able to tell the British much about “taking it.” They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They are far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.

Bear that in mind at this moment guys!  

WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS WE ARE TOUGH.