I've just seen a thing on twitter about how to be a better blogger - honestly, I forget there's a whole world of people who want something from blogging, as well as us lot who just like to witter on a bit about what happened in our lives today.

I've been doing badly I was thinking, until I remembered what was going on, above and beyond the usual. A lot of walking 'through the valley of the shadow of death' as it were, what with one thing and another, and that's hard shit, when you love people, would make anyone low. So I'm doing OK, considering.

The latest concern is the care home where daughter lives, which I'm not going into here and I think she is OK, but talk about last fucking straw. Jesus.

We went up there yesterday, the full bloody line up, me and him and her and them, Team Paramental, at ED's service. We went to the river again because most of them hadn't been before and it's pleasant enough. This was my best shot - lovely water:



There was a pile of Christmas cards in ED's room, one for each of us in her immediate family, all written by someone else, as if from her, with a tiny faint squiggle where she'd held the pen and moved it against the paper, below where someone else had written her name. I became a bit demented with fury at this - I don't want fucking Christmas cards pretending to be from her - I KNOW where she is, she can't do it herself or even think of it, so let's just accept that and try and live with it, this is just like salt in the wound. Fuck them and fuck Christmas.

That's what I said at art group today when offered the activity of making Christmas cards. I'm not doing it this year and you can't make me. I didn't do it last year either - ED had just moved into the care home then - there's still not much jollity in my heart a year down the line and I won't pretend because what's the point? I will buy my grandson a present - he says there's nothing he wants (he's a good, anti-materialist boy) so I'm going to get him a pair of expensive pyjamas, in a soft fabric and some bedding, also expensive, so that he can have that nice feeling when he goes to bed.

I'm planning on Christmas next year being worth celebrating. Bloke and I will have established ourselves in a house that has become the family home. It will be decorated with stuff from our garden. There will be an open fire. All the kids will be there - YD and SIL2 with their new baby, Son with his partner, and ED and her lot too, as there will be wheelchair access (not nine fucking steps up to the front door), and there'll be a room downstairs that she can sleep in, with a hoist on loan from the Red Cross and care workers from the agency to help her in and out of bed. I'm calling that to me, to us.

Anyway, today I refused to make cards. I found a book about flower-arranging - quite an old book - and decided to paint this:



For the first one I started with painting blobs of colour then drew round them



but didn't like how it turned out when I drew round the chrysanthemum - too heavy. So I tried again, drawing first but I picked up the wrong pen - this wasn't waterproof and it ran when I applied paint and that pissed me off too



but actually they both turned out OK as photos and the doing of it is such a soothing, lovely thing. My favourite bit is the lavender in the first one.

I walked back from the hospital (where the art group is) to the acupuncture clinic, bloody miles, but I am stuck with the daily walking. It turns out I have this thing called peripheral vascular disease - not only that but I've had it for a while and was told about it over a year ago apparently - if so the information failed to lodge in an accessible part of my brain, but quite by chance I've been doing the right things. It's clogged up arteries from decades of smoking, which puts the heart at risk, but improvements can be made by not smoking, exercise and good diet which I've been doing anyway. Sigh.

Grateful for: you; a tidy front room; a lunch date tomorrow; more than enough money; a dream; Patti Smith - I love her



Sweet dreams xxxx