Does anyone remember what it was like on Friday's when the wages staff came around where you worked and you were handed a small buff coloured envelope with your name and works number on it?  Not only was Friday the best day of the week being the one before two days off, it was also 'pay day'. How great did it feel when you had that small brown envelope in your hands?  I can remember the sheer anticipation of prising open the very sticky glue and with two fingers reaching inside to slide out the crisp notes.  Not so long after I started work everyone went over to bank-transfers to receive their salaries and they phased out the wages round, I suppose it was safer to have the money always in the bank instead of having security firms delivering tons of money here and there and everywhere all over our towns.  I've never forgotten though that feeling of holding the real money you had just earned that week by your toil for the engines of industry, it was exciting.  Sometimes there wasn't as much inside the packet as you had reckoned you would receive, fluctuating tax deductions or pay-docked for lateness etcetera.  The best pay-days were when you were taking your annual leave the next week and then your pay-packet would be thick and bulging with an extra fortnights money for your holiday.  How brilliant it was to have your wad of cash and the excitement of a whole two weeks ahead of you with no work!

Caricatures...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Peter_Altenberg_by_Gustav_Jagerspacher_1909.jpg

....."The time has come," the Walrus said

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes..and ships..and sealing wax..

Of cabbages and kings..

And why the sea is boiling hot..

And whether pigs have wings."

-The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll-

Look at those long thin hands.  You can just imagine shaking hands with this weird creepy little man can't you?  His real name was Richard Engländer, he was writer born in Vienna in 1859, Peter Altenberg was his pseudonym.  Apparently he was described as being a true Bohemian and was know for his eccentric wild way of dressing and his outrageous opinions.  He was inspired by the prose poems of Baudelaire and also by postcards because they necessitated a condensed style of writing.  Speaking of his prose-pearls he said,  "They're extracts!  Extracts from life!"  His own life was fractured by more than one internment in the local asylum and his writing was an amalgam of fiction and fact.  He had his letters delivered to Cafe Central his favourite coffee-house in Vienna where he used to like to write, and where there is now a statue of him permanently seated at a table near the entrance.  Apparently he wrote the phrase,  "Are we not all only Karikatures from the truly and ideal wishes, which God and nature made with our souls and our bodies." (with the spellings and punctuation as original) in English beneath Jagerspacher's portrait of him.

He would most definitely have been delighted with the invention of blogs.  I feel a certain sympathy with him, if only for the fact that sometimes he wrote his short prose-pearls whilst propped up in bed and like me his writings were liberally peppered with wild fireworks of exclamation marks!!

'Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.'  

                                  Johnathan Safran Foer

Just watched this video on another of the blogs I follow and it's SOOOO brilliant I just had to post and direct you there.  However....no doubt it's easy to put a link to the actual video itself but I don't know how, not being at all a techno.  So if you fancy have a mosey-on over to http://illustratedobscurity.blogspot.co.uk/ it's SUCH a great watch! Do go over, you'll smile I promise!!!

Hugs Jane

Give you two guesses who that babe in the big hat is! 

 How hot it has been here this past week, we of the northern persuasion are not used to it!  I have electric-fans..fanning constantly but I've drawn the line to wearing such a sombrero again.  I am actually 'pretend smoking' a sweetie cigarette in the photograph....I can remember that much, I bet they don't sell those any more, what do you think?

'Blessed are the cracked......

For they shall let in the light!'

;)

The last thing I do each night after switching out my lamp is to open up one of the Venetian blinds.  The window is a bay and as I awake in the morning the first thing I can see are trees along the top of a hill on the golf-links and one large pear-tree lacy with white blossom.  I can kid myself I am somewhere in the country even though the sounds of the awakening city intrude.  Sometimes I can catch the most glorious dawn light, the sky slowly flushing from pink to deepest rose, and even the sound of occasional traffic cannot interfere with the serenading birdsong. I can think back and place myself aged fourteen leaning from a casement window in Wiltshire, feeling the crisp cool bite of early morning and looking down towards a damp brick laid path, then out across a meadow to brown and white cows quietly lying in the grass where they had crushed the wild mint beneath their bulk so that its sweet smell permeated the still cold air.
We would drive down to Wiltshire to visit my dads sister when she was the headmistress of a school there,  that's the school-building in my header photograph.  There was also a tied-cottage where she and my Nanny lived  a little way from the school, a perk that went with the position.  It was the end cottage in a terraced row, with a long wrap-around garden to one side, and all that lush meadow out at the rear, and to the front across a lane in the purple distance arose Roundway hill long reputed to be a haunted place.
 There were enough rooms in the cottage for us to stay and I remember mostly the gentility of the place somehow.  Those rooms with soft moss-green carpets, bookcases filled with interesting illustrated books, 'The Yellow Book' with it's racy drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, poetry books galore and all of the Wainwright books, watercolours of the lake-district and mountains, always a copy of The Telegraph folded to an unfinished crossword puzzle on the coffee table or on the arm of Nanny's chair.  I'm trying to think of how to describe the atmosphere that I can still call to mind after almost fifty years.  A shushed quiet, a feeling of time slowed down, even though there were clocks that ticked and hummed,  kettles that boiled, tea that was served in tinkling china teacups brought to the table on a silver-tray, voices that were lowered, movements that were slower, books that were read instead of television watched, good manners and respectability.  A teacher's sanctuary.