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Scene-Change
What do they say? Moving house, retirement, divorce and bereavement are some of the most stressful events most human beings undergo. In the last month, I've been hobnobbing with two of them. Not...
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Creative Challenges
Blogging can be a bit like medieval agriculture. A mixture of productive and regular strip-farming, sporadic common-land grazing and sometimes leaving the landscape fallow, for months on end. The...
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Summer Art Journal Week One
As you may have gathered from my previous post, I am joining in with the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge over the coming weeks and compiling a kind of summer art journal. You can read about the...
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Summer Art Journal Week Two
The theme of the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge week two is 'A Different Perspective'. When you think about it, it's disconcerting to realise how easily our perception of things, both physically...
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Summer Art Journal Week Three
Week three of the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge is about 'acting like a tourist'. In other words, looking at the world with curiosity, without rush, and with openness to joining in with what the...
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Summer Art Journal Week Four
This week has seen the final instalment of the Slamsey's Creative Summer Challenge which I've been taking part in for the last while. This week's theme was 'Same Time, Same Place'. Intriguing and...
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Cryptobiosis, a Concertina-book and Pink Grapefruit
In Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play 'Under Milk Wood', there's a repeated phrase that acts as a leitmotiv linking together the separate vignettes of the small, fictional town on the Welsh coast: 'Time...
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Summer Art Challenge Part One - Marking Time
This year, Slamsey's Creative Summer Challenge, with its focus on regular creativity, has several different prompts rather than a single one each week. To get over the daunting barrier of the blank...
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Summer Art Challenge Part Two - TomatoFest
For the last few days, I've been obsessing about tomatoes. Not eating them so much but painting them, drawing them, printing them.The experience has been slightly reminiscent of that surreal nursery...
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Summer Art Challenge Part Three - Gathering, Recycling and Murmurations
Tuesday's prompt for the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge was pared down to a single word: gathering. My first thought was to go out and gather some wild plums encountered unexpectedly on a walk late...
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Summer Art Challenge Part Four - Ink One, Stitch One
The Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge prompts at the end of last week and beginning of this were 'sharing', 'self portrait' and 'reflection'. I think I blurred the boundaries of each of them rather...
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Summer Art Challenge Part Five - 'Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn...
One of the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge prompts last week was 'Shake it up and do something different'. So I have been dabbling, (both literally and figuratively), in the witch's cauldron of eco...
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Summer Art Challenge Part Six - Witch's Brew #2
Two of the final Slamsey's Creative Summer Challenge prompts last week were 'develop' and 'same time, same place'. which fitted rather neatly with my plans to revisit my eco printing...
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Thought For Food
It's five years since I did my 'Live Below the Line' challenge in 2017 and reading my blog posts from back then and considering how I've cooked and eaten since, I'm struck by how much it irreversibly...
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Leftover Loose Change
As I mentioned in my last post, my food-for-£1-a-day challenge in 2017 radically changed a whole raft of my housekeeping habits and I thought it might be interesting to chart that five years on....
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2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #1
Yesterday was Day 1 of my little food challenge. Sadly, I don't seem to be able to access that website that generated those rather fun little library cards that I used before. So I will have to use...
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2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #2
Breakfast yesterday on Day 2 of my £1-a-day Food Challenge was the same as the previous day, as you can see from the pic. I changed the porridge bowl to a smaller one though so that the portion didn't...
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2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #3
Breakfast was exactly the same as the previous two days apart from using a spoonful dandelion honey instead of the fig-leaf syrup on my porridge for a change. This makes not a ha'p'orth of difference...
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2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #4
Breakfast - not porridge today for a change! As a Sunday treat I broke out and made some oatcakes to have with my dandelion honey. This may not sound like much of a treat but believe me, it feels like...
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2022 £1-a-day Food Challenge - Day #5
Breakfast was back to porridge again for Day #5. I made it with slightly less water so that the drizzle of fig-leaf syrup stayed on top a bit more which looked nicer and the porridge tasted slightly...
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