Just a quiet weekend

A spring day at Gorleston-on-Sea

It is spring, with trees in bud and blossoms bursting out all round. Alas, in our garden, there is a great gap where the fencing man ripped out the heavy ivy that had covered the old fence. Mum's old bird table, where Ann faithfully fills bird seed dispensers each day, used to swarm with small hedge-row birds that nested in the ivy, but have now disappeared and the bird table is deserted. Determined to try to woo them back, we visited a garden centre on Saturday to buy some replacement hedging. I get too breathless to dig now, but we got a friend in the village, keen to earn a little extra, to dig them in: two varieties of ivy, and some New Zealand shrub that is supposed to grow quickly.

Life is certainly much quieter since I am winding down at work. A visit to the pub or a meal out represent the limit of our adventures at present, and we had a fine day out at Gorleston-on-Sea at the weekend, with a good lunch in the Pier Hotel. I cannot walk too far now, even with my stick, but I enjoyed a Sunday afternoon shuffle along the front. Even driving tires me now. Coming back from staying with Ben and Kaz in Wales was exhausting, and I spent most of the next day in bed recovering. 

Ann's sister, Jane, made an unexpected request for me to paint a portrait of her daughter who died so tragically a few years ago. Jane does not use the web much, and I don't think she can have seen many of my pictures, nor does she ask for many favours, so it was a surprise for her to ask for this. I will naturally do my best to oblige her, but Michelle was such a beautiful girl, so full of sparkling life yet with so many hidden depths that it will be hard to do justice to her memory. 

Today is International Women’s day. Nowhere is this more appropriate than in Ukraine, where there are two million more women than men, many of who are learning to fight, lending the Ukrainian resistance to Herr Putin’s invasion a strong female face. Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska, posting on Instagram this week, paid tribute to the women of Ukraine, saying she “admires” and “bows” to her “incredible compatriots”. “To those who heal, save, feed... And those who continue to do their usual jobs – in pharmacies, shops, on transport, in utilities, so that life lasts and wins,” she wrote. “To those who take children to shelters every day without panic and entertain them with games and cartoons to save children’s consciousness from war. To those who give birth in bomb shelters.” 

Death

They do not see the tiredness
the lack of hope,
they do not see the apathy -
the loss of self,
they do not ask
and do not try to seek
the loneliness and finality
of the ice cold grave
and the never ending sleep.

by Annie Elliott

Ukrainian women’s magazines illustrate how drastically life has changed. They now offer advice on how to give birth underground or register a baby in the midst of a war, with instructions to chop off acrylic nails so that you could hold a weapon if you needed to. It's not just active combat – a number of women are working diligently to provide care or supplies for their military, such as this group making camouflage nets and learning how to use a Kalashnikov. This is women’s equality carried to the extreme of war.