Friday 1st June

Laura Knight's 'Dark Pool' Originally she was part of the Staithes Group

The daily plod! What is that you may ask? day to day living with not much going on.  The weather is good though a trifle muggy, my beans are growing, saw swifts over the road in someone's garden, screaming overhead.  So our swallows and swifts are with us.

Went for coffee the other day with friends and whilst talking about parishes I mentioned that it had all started with the Domesday Book, J rushed off and bought back the three enormous volumes encased in a box - Folio Society.  All those centuries ago, men had plodded around the country recording fields and wood.  How many working oxen provided the hard work of tilling.  Slowly the taxing or tithing of everyone came into being.  It is not much different today, we still pay taxes into the country's coffers but for different things.

Up to a couple of years ago, some households could be caught with the Chancery Tax.  Pretty scary, if your church was built before 1536 then any repairs to it could fall on the villagers.  Luckily it was altered not so long ago and when buying a house you can insure yourself against this anomaly.

a PCC = Parish County Council.

He said it was phenomenally difficult for PCCs to navigate the "unfortunate combination" of common law, Acts of Parliament and past court cases, which he said could be traced back to the 10th Century.  Saxon law of course.

I am reading ' To the Lighhouse, I love Virginia's Woolf  characters, the way she etches them out her description of Mrs.Ramsey's view of her husband at his need of reassurance that he was a genius....

'the fatal sterilityof the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure.'   He wanted to be assured of his genius...

I came across Virginia Woolf in the Statesman, Ali Smith was writing about an art show, and these words struck me,  Woolf on talking about pictures probably to her sister Vanessa Bell through her view as a writer and her sister as a painter...

"It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other.  We cannot possibly break out of the frame of picture by speaking natural words.  You see me leaning against the door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hound and you think as you go by "How picturesque" I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in the car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think what a picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both quite wrong in our judgements no doubt, but that is inevitable."

Sometimes I have a great sympathy for feminists, they plough their way through life against odds and men who see females, how can I put it, who see females as foolish and short of the necessary acumen for business or indeed for thinking, and which has just been highlighted in a study as to why there were hardly any females on company boards.  Then I get cross with the feminists, as I did yesterday, watching the 'Hand Maids lookalike, the cause is just, the symbolic use of a story line just not right... or is it?