Sunday 18 February 2024

I Womansplain My (10th Birthday) Blog

This blog is ten years old today - happy birthday, dear I Buy a New Washer! Birthdays, I've found, are a time for looking backwards (what was I thinking?) and forwards (help!) and then for celebrating (woohoo!).

On 18th Feb 2014 I published this: 'I Buy A New Washer - Day One'. Long-serving readers know that I intended it to be the title of that first post, not the whole blog. I was motivated to write it having changed a tap washer for the first time - a moderate act of independence about which I felt proud. The title has proved misleading and led to me being introduced as a plumbing expert, with a particular interest in washing machines, at a poetry reading. My protests at this generous introduction were further misinterpreted as modesty. 

Fortunately, others have been on hand to expose the lack of depth in my plumbing knowledge, often communicating in comments at the bottom of blog posts. This one from Adam, for example: "Plumbing," he explains patiently, after viewing 'I Worry About Plumbing', and possibly becoming worried himself, "refers to the system of pipes, fixtures, and other apparatuses used for water supply and drainage in buildings and structures. Plumbing is essential for bringing clean water into homes and removing wastewater." And then, as if suggesting a plausible career alternative for someone so evidently in need of this entry level of explanation, Adam adds: "Sell your old cars to Cash for Cars and get instant dollars." 

Not all post are about moderate acts of DIY. The one that has received the most views (over 1700) is  'I Puzzle Over Significance'. It's about a jigsaw puzzle and Mahler - maybe there's a plumbing / jigsaw puzzle intersection it accidentally tapped into. Total views amount to 213,261: 730 views per blog on average. However, I doubt (judging from Adam's ignoring the main subjects of 'I Worry About Plumbing') that views are equivalent to reads. By way of comparison, the least read post (97 views) is 'I Microwave A Curry' - go figure. 

Looking forwards, when I press the orange publish button, this will be my 292nd post. There are several more than that sitting in draft folders, unfinished: 'I Poke My Eye', 'I Work In Wrexham', 'I Recover My Milk Frother', 'I Shrink My Trousers'. Looking forwards, I intend to leave these unpublished but I aim to be able to write 'I Snorkel With Penguins' before the twenty year blog birthday celebrations. 

Having looked backwards and forwards, now's the time for the birthday celebrations. The blog dressed up in its best party clothes is the book version, published by Mark Time in 2020; the playful illustrations by John Rae were an inspired addition (thank you Ross Donlon for making the suggestion). If you'd like to send a birthday card to I Buy A New Washer, please add to the reviews on goodreadsIf you'd like to play pass the parcel with I Buy A New Washer (with a guaranteed unwrapping of the central prize), put on your favourite music and then order a copy for a birthday-bargain price of £5 plus postage. 

And this birthday will end, as all good birthdays do, with thank you's. Thanks to those who've supported me with the gifts of readership, sharing, encouragement, suggestions, book purchase, comments on the blog itself and on Facebook. Thanks for sticking with it for one read, or for all 292. All of these gifts help me to feel more connected to you, to the written word, and, ultimately, to myself.


For the bargain-birthday-book offer, email me liz.lefroy@btinternet.com (offer lasts for the next 10 days only, plus one for the leap year - till 1st March 2024).



Friday 2 February 2024

I Allot My Time

In September 2022, I applied for an allotment about half a mile along the river, and in a bit. There was a lockdown flurry of interest in growing things, so I was surprised to get an email a couple of weeks ago saying I'd reached the top of the waiting list. Here I sit, typing this, the key to the padlock for the shed of quarter plot no. 78a burning a hole in my pocket. 

An allotment is a piece of land on which to grow fruit and vegetables for private consumption. A full plot is 10 poles, or perches, long. It's an ancient measure. 78a is about half the size of half a doubles tennis court. Having been allotted an allotment I must, to avoid warning letters and then eviction, allot time to keeping it tidy and cultivated.

Here's the plot so far: I've taken the shed door off its hinges, sawn a little from the bottom so that it opens more easily, screwed it back. I've uncovered treasures: fork, spade, two saws (luckily), trowel, hoe, long-handled shears, broad bean seeds, slug pellets, seed trays, bamboo canes, a white plastic chair and several lengths of twine. I've thrown out some things that the mice and damp had got to. I've had a new piece of glass cut to size, and fixed the broken pane of the greenhouse. I've dug over the strawberry bed, spacing 15 plants more evenly, in the interests of their equal opportunities. After all that, I sat eating my lunch in the sunny, sheltered nook between shed and greenhouse, listening to birdsong. 

A few years ago, I would've felt daunted by the broken pane of glass, the jamming shed door, the tangled strawberry plants, but minor acts of DIY and gardening practice on my rooftop and in other people's gardens have given me a have-a-go confidence. 

Allotment 78a. It has all the potential, all the restraint of a sonnet. For now, I'm preparing the square of ground, and in spring, I will plant rows of potatoes, courgettes, runner beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions.  As the sun warms and the rain falls, they will grow into lines, with breaks at the paths, reveal to me a rhyme scheme as yet to be invented, and come to a full stop at the crown of rhubarb.





Friday 12 January 2024

I Reframe the New Year

I re-started 2024 today. But it's already 12 days in, you may well observe. And so it is.

I started 2024 on schedule, and in London too, thanks to my sons' present of tickets for a family trip to My Neighbour Totoro on New Year's Eve afternoon. It was a spectacularly wonderful, life-affirming production. After the show, I checked my phone - my goddaughter had sent me a message letting me know that  Day 1 of Adriene's 30 Days of Yoga 2024 would start on New Year's Day. I made my resolution - I enjoy Adriene's videos, and I've got out of the habit of bending and balancing. 

The New Year's Eve fun continued when we went to Brasserie Zedel for dinner, as close an experience of Paris as you can get near to Piccadilly Circus. The young people went off to their various celebrations and my Longest-Serving Friend and I wandered through London's lights which were, it has to be said, several cuts above Shrewsbury's, and made sure bedtime was well before midnight. Next morning, we got up and did the Burgess Parkrun. That same New Year's evening, heading back home, my eldest son and his girlfriend shared news of their engagement which came about in the rock room of the Natural History Museum. Such an excellent arrangement of place, timing, metaphor, and materials. Such hopeful, shiny news.

Of course, going back to work on 2nd January has a habit of applying the brakes to New Year momentum. But in the not-work part of my life, I somehow, between all the loveliness of actual New Year and the getting into the business of a day-by-day new year, mislaid resolution. Resolution is (I hardly need to mention) a word which suggests resolve. And the word resolve suggests 'to decide firmly on a course of action' (Google English Dictionary). None of these (decide, firmly, course, action) were thoughts I could lay hold of in those following January days; it's been more a case of unresolve: indecision, apathy, physical and mental wobbliness. 

It was poetry that resolved me. It was poetry in community, and wise, compassionate, playful, poetry at that. At Shrewsbury Poetry, we were lucky enough to host Philip Gross and Steve Griffiths for our first get together of the new year yesterday evening. Among our online poetry community, and among open mic poems which resonated and flowed with the thoughts and feelings emerging, Philip and Steve held a conversation. As with all remarkable conversations, this one shifted something for me. 

If I were to pin the shift down to something, I'd pin it down to this. While Philip was reading his poem 'Of Breath (Thirteen Angels)' I visualised my lungs for the first time as wings ("don't look for it outside") unfurling with each breath. The poem came to me as a winged messenger through the black and white memories of my lungs, x-rayed when I was a child for damage after pneumonia. I could see myself now in full technicolor, complete with "pink and glistening cavities" breathing in oxygen, breathing in life, readying for the brief flight necessary to enter each moment, and this new year. 

If I were to pin it down to something, this re-framing, it would be to this: I got up this morning, dusted off my yoga mat, sat cross-legged and breathed. And this breath has given me a sense of a voice which can "step to the body's window ledge and, briefly, fly".

Happy new year to you, dear reader. Keep breathing.



Friday 22 December 2023

I Parcel Up

My memories of Australia are coming ashore in small groups, and often at dusk when the day's work has been done. I'm waiting for them as patiently as we waited for penguins in Tasmania. I haven't written much about Australia here because I want my memories to stay afloat, swim around where they are most fluent for as long as possible, until they land themselves as poems.

Our guide in Bicheno on the east coast of Tasmania told us, as I waited to see penguins in their natural habitat for the first time, that a group of penguins can be called a waddle (on land) and a raft (in the water). They can also be called a parcel. Parcel's the word he used most often as we watched them come ashore after a long day's fishing out on the reef several kilometres away. They took their time coming up the beach, stopping to clean their feathers, to chatter to each other, and to regain energy before reaching their main aim: feeding their hungry young chicks.

I travelled around Australia for a month, and I've been back home for a month, but the month in Australia feels much brighter, probably because it was. I'm making this feeling of brightness into a parcel of daylight, blue skies and wide horizons full of warmth and t-shirts. I'm writing my way into poems which I may be able to share with you one day.

And while I'm waiting for whatever's coming to shore, I offer to you some of the light - as best I can:



Green Pools, WA


Melbourne, VIC


Blue Mountains, NSW


Nr Hobart, TAS



Harbour Bridge, Sydney, NSW



A parcel of Little Blue Penguins - Happy Christmas xx











Tuesday 14 November 2023

I Find Myself



Questions of meaning and existence have been circling in my thoughts all my conscious life. Who am I? Why, how, if, what, and where? If I added up all the time I’d spent pondering, I could’ve made several more dishes of macaroni cheese, and possibly finished my novel. 

It’s come as something of a surprise to me, therefore, to find that I’m located on an intersection in Hobart, Tasmania. In the end, finding myself has turned out to be as simple as looking at a map.

I’m not saying that therapy, writing poetry, making risotto, and camping haven’t had their parts to play in me finding myself. It was in a therapy session, after all, that I made the decision to travel to Australia in 2023, something I’d been pondering since Miss Smith’s feedback on my geography project in 1976. And it was by choosing to camp in Wales with my longest serving friend for years that I saved enough holiday money to afford the airfare.

When planning the Hobart part of the holiday that I’m taking with my younger son, I was browsing a list of restaurants. Up popped the suggestion of ‘Lizzie & Lefroy’. I gasped and stretched my eyes, consulted TripAdvisor. 

At this point, for clarity, I should say that my family and friends called me Lizzy/Lizzie when I was younger. Some of them still do. The spelling fluctuates - y (my parents’ choice) ie (nearly everyone else’s). I dealt with this inconsistency by simplifying things to Liz back in the 1980s.

Lizzie & Lefroy sits on the corner of Elizabeth and Lefroy in north Hobart. It has the most extensive gnocchi menu I’ve ever seen. 

We found it easily this evening and were welcomed by very warm and friendly staff. The walls were lined with Australian wines. The beers from local breweries. There was a log fire in a central glass-sided stove. 

Noticing my name on the booking, the waiter shook my hand, said: “You’re royalty here!” 

Eating delicious beetroot gnocchi and zucchini on a Tuesday in November with my son in my namesake restaurant was a special moment. Eating their sophisticated version of macaroni cheese  (Mushroom mac & cheese croquettes : Pyengana 12-month aged cheddar, garlic crisps, fresh thyme and parsnip cream) was a perfect in-body experience. 

It was all delicious and lovely. All my questions have been answered. I am, it would seem, where I eat.





Sunday 24 September 2023

I Exhale Deeply

Since learning that yoga is not, in fact, a sinister cult but a really useful way of caring for my back, I regularly breathe out deeply. This is something I've done both in classes, and in front of 'Yoga with Adrienne' and her free YouTube videos. 

When younger, I did breathing exercises for wellbeing by default when playing the flute. A lot of my lessons were spent with my teacher encouraging me to develop breath and diaphragm control. I had no idea how useful a life skill this was as I channelled a column of air into a top C. 

More recently, I exhaled deeply on opening a box of copies of Festival in a Book - A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival. I had been holding my breath for two weeks: between the moment of pressing send on the final proofs and lifting out the first book. I breathed even more freely when Anna Dreda, Festival Founder, said she loves the anthology created in honour of her Festival and its legacy. 

It has struck me since that the publication of a book of poetry is, in some ways, an exhalation, a letting go. A breathing out of thought and word and music into the world. Breath and word. The word made paper. It can't be taken back now. And it will become part of other people's breathing, internal and external, when read. 

And so, here she is: the editor, not the book, breathing out, relaxing on the festival's famous knitted poem of Carol Ann Duffy's "The Bees" knitted a decade ago by a large number of volunteers and still as vivid as it was then (photo by Emily Wilkinson, poem now resident at the Poetry Pharmacy, Bishops Castle). 

The poem makes a wonderful yoga mat. 


To buy a copy of Festival in a Book, a Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival edited by Liz Lefroy, please email 904press@gmail.com  Cost £15 plus p&p (2nd class UK = £2.40) 

Here's the line up you can enjoy:







Thursday 7 September 2023

I Draw A Comparison

 Back in the days when I was known as Elizabeth by my school teachers, I compiled a project called 'Western Australia'. I was in Lower IV 26. 26 was the room number, Lower IV was year 8. In her feedback, written on a pale orange card, my Geography Teacher, the lovely Miss Smith, wrote: ELIZABETH: mainly WESTERN AUSTRALIA. In the corner of that card, she drew a fairy penguin. I've had a soft spot for penguins ever since.


On the other side of the small card, Miss Smith wrote this: "Your nice grassy folder had some original and interesting ideas in it, with good illustrations. The range of relevant information was wide, from Continental drift to Camels, and even though you veered from your subject by discussing the Barrier Reef, it was still a good effort. A(-)". 

Not much has changed in my approach to projects since 1976-7. The anthology I've been working on, Festival in a Book, A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival, also has some original and interesting ideas in it, most of them not my own. The illustrations (by Emily Wilkinson) and design (by Gabriel Watt) are a bonus. The range of relevant poetry is wide in terms of the Festival itself, and the poets also veer (as you'd expect them to do) towards love, childhood, loss, celebration of nature, and death. 

A brackets minus. What a mark. Thank you Miss Smith. In old school terms, A was for near as damn excellent considering your age and stage, and minus was for not quite. The brackets? They were for but nearly. My project was: not quite near as damn excellent considering your age and stage, but nearly. I was very happy with this grade. If the anthology is judged by contributors and readers as: not quite near as damn excellent considering her age and stage, but nearly, I'll be delighted.

Maybe it was that carefully-wrought mark and Miss Smith's recognition of the effort I'd made that set in my 11 year-old head the bouncy thought that one day I would visit Western Australia, and the other parts of that country-continent that aren't WA but are closer to it than South Hampstead High School, 3 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3. It's certainly been a thought leaping kangaroo-like around my head for a few years: a thought I put into action back in the spring when I booked tickets to Perth, via Singapore. I leave in 5 weeks, once I've completed the distribution and launch of the anthology. 

And now that I've made the analogy between these two projects 46 years or so apart, I'm wondering if there's an equivalent of the Barrier Reef in Festival in a Book - a whole section that's crept in because, well - who wouldn't want to put the Barrier Reef (and Tasmanian Devils and Koalas) into a project on Western Australia to liven things up from a baseline of sheep farming, wild flowers, mining, endless sunshine, and salt lakes? 

My 'Western Australia' project has maps of the places I'm going to visit soon: Perth, Denmark, Margaret River. It has useful advice about the climate. I'll be able to identify the common wax-flower if it's still common and found over areas of coastal sand heaths, usually growing from four to eight feet in height with a mass of white to pink or rose-red flowers. I've shaded in areas of one map of the whole of Australia with 'areas with more than 15 people per square mile' - so I'll know where to look for night-life, and in which direction I need to face to make it to Melbourne, Sydney, Katoomba, Hobart, and Launceston. And all the time, I'll be on the look out for penguins.