Jacey Bedford's Journal

I have a theory, and it’s only a theory, so accept it or not as you wish. My granddad, Lance Corporal Tommy Bennett of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry took part in the Christmas Truce in 1914. It wasn’t one isolated incident, meetings took place up and down the lines where English and German troops faced each other across No Man’s Land.

Some years ago I was talking to my German friend, Gunnar Wiegand, about this and he told me that the unofficial truce on Christmas Eve 1914 wasn’t something that was known about in Germany, however there were stories of troops in earlier wars (Napoleonic times) meeting up at Christmas to share festivities. Indeed in the days when wars were fought hand-to-hand the troops would sometimes trade across the lines when battles were not raging – without permission from their officers, of course.

My theory is that the 1914 Christmas truce was not a one-off, but it is very probably notable for being the last Christmas truce between opposing armies. As wars became less personal, and more reliant on artillery and air raids to kill from a distance, common soldiers lost the opportunity and the wish, to meet their opposite number in peace.

Grandpa didn’t talk much about his time in the trenches, except in very general terms, but Mum told me the story some years later, after he’d died. I wish I’d been able to question him about it, but I was too late. The story always resonated with me, and some years later, as part of Artisan, I recorded Mike Harding’s song about Christmas Eve 1914. Here it is: http://artisan-harmony.com/Soundfiles%20fullsongs/artisan-christmaseve1914.mp3

Reblogged from my Wordpress blog

I'd forgotten this until I stumbled across again it this evening. It's the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts graduation video 2002, with my daughter G appearing briefly at 3.14 min  to 3.17 min. I told you it was brief. But what a talented lot, eh? She got her degree certificate handed to her by Paul McCartney.

For anghara . A few years ago my daughter and son in law took a year off from their day jobs to make some mountain biking DVDs that went into worldwide distribution. This was the trailer for their third one, Anti Gravity Unhinged, filmed in South Africa, Europe and the UK. Most of the trailer is South African footage (Ian was born and brought up in Durban).

This week's been a riot of being dragged in various different directions

* Meeting about 5 x 400 ft windmills that some idiot wants to erect within half a km of the village

* Chasing up possible quarrying plans that have been stealthily included in the council's planning framework for which consultations ended before anybody knew about it. (In a cabinet marked 'Beware of the Leopard' in the planning ofice, I suspect.)

* Starting alterations to the magic-pirate-adventure-quest novel as requested by new agent-lady. (No elves; some backstory; more sex; change of main character from a pirate to a privateer etc.)

* Meeting to plan the Mighty Zulu Nation's upcoming showcase at the festival organiser's conference

* Hair appointment.

* Three trips to the gym. One to the cinema (Don't go see The Men Who Stair at Goats. All the best bits are in the trailer.)

* Trip to an amzing little textile museum in Skelmanthorpe - a cottage owned and run by one very elderly but knowledgeable man who is a resource all by himself. The cottage is as-was

* Supplying sympathy to BB who has something suspiciously pig-fluey but might just be a lousy cold and cough (which he almost never gets).

So I missed armistice day completely. I was (unexpectedly) in the hairdressers at 11.00 on 11/11 having expected to be out before then.

So here are mine:
Grandpa: Tommy Bennett, Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Served 1914-1917. Invalided out at Passchendale


Leeman Poulter: Mum's first fiancee, navigator. Shot down over Germany 1942 approx. MIA He might have been my dad...except i wouldn't be me, would I... Weird thought.


Mum: Joan Lockyer, NAAFI (How come the landgirls all got medals recently and the Naafi conscripts didn't?)


Dad: Tony Lockyer 9th Queens Royal Lancers (tank regiment) Drove a tank across the Western Desert (El Alamein) and was a 'D-Day dodger' fighting in Italy. Met Mum in 1948


Lest we forget.

Number One Daughter and new husband came up at the weekend on their way up to and down from Newcastle where son-in-law, I, completed the Great North Run.

Well done!

I'm just starting to upload some of the photos I took on our trip to Henley for Number One Daughter's wedding at the end of August. We hired a cottage - well actually it was half a boathouse in the middle of town with its toes in the Thames. Not cheap, but very well appointed and well worth the price just to be able to step out of the patio doors and sit on the edge of the private dock. It was a lovely place for the bride to get ready and to 'leave' from - though I missed that because I was doing the buffet at the hall all morning. Anyhow here are some photos of the place. More soon.

The Bedford Boys on the Dock


Peaceful Evening on the Thames at Henley from the Private Dock


Living Area


View from the Living Area

Number One Son is home safe from Rome and here all summer until he heads for the US and Princeton at the beginning of September. So now we are three again. (Actually, if you count Tanglefoot - the Canadian band staying with us, we are - strictly speaking - eight tonight.)

I spent a very frustrating three hours of drive-time (plus an hour wait time for flight delays) trying to negotiate traffic to the Leeds/Bradford airport and back again in the middle of the afternoon. Whichever way you go you just can't avoid nose to tail traffic even before three p.m.. The Leeds ring road was stop-go for half an hour so on the way back I cut off on the M621 to the M62, aiming to wend my way via the Brighouse exit... and then I still crawled bumper to bumper from the motorway sliproad all the way to the outskirts of Huddersfield where a short but necessary trip to the supermarket delayed us until the worst of the traffic had begin to melt away.

This week has been somewhat unusual because Number One Son, J, is home from Rome for the week. It seems almost strange to have him in his room again as he's been away for huge chunks of the last eight or nine years and usually when he does come home he's dashing up and down seeing people. This week, however he's in residence and it's been lovely to have him just hanging around. He's busy doing all sorts of administrative bits and pieces prior to starting a five year PhD at Princeton in September, so there's been all the choosing of accommodation options and the sorting out of childhood vaccination records for the medical forms. It's like sending him off to university all over again - for the fourth time, as there have already been departures for Cambridge, Cooper Union (Manhattan) and the British School (Rome).

BB and I took him and my mum to Castle Howard for the day, yesterday. We made sandwiches and ate them in the car sheltering from the not-as-warm-as-it-might-have-been breeze, but considering it's still April the weather wan't too bad. White cloudy skies, light breeze and if the promised sunny spells didn't present themselves at least it didn't rain until we were almost home. How very English.


Number One Son wanted to ogle the house because it was designed by Vanbrugh three hundred or so years ago and Vanbrugh was James Sterling's favourite architect and N1S is making a film about Sterling's architecture. We just wanted to ogle the rooms and the pretties and have a mooch around the grounds, taking photographs. Not incompatible objectives.

So we ogled house, pretties and grounds, walking back through Roy Wood with numerous varieties of flowering cherries and delightful clumps of primroses, then had conversations with a noisy peacock, ate a clotted cream tea and came home through only a modest traffic jam. Very pleasant.

It's my mum's 84th birthday today. I took this pic on New Year's Day.

Number one daughter and her partner are flat hunting in London. Does anyone have any contacts or ideas? Their budget is £300 per week max. Daughter works in Hammersmith. Partner in Canary Wharf.

Now that my office is more or less in good order it's time to tackle the two trays of real life stuff that got sidelined in favour of all the writing I did during April and May.

Today I managed to get eleven contracts posted off (music buisiness stuff); complete my cash flow forecast (yeah there are times when it's trickling rather than flowing but we look like we'll survive until Christmas); check the gig lists against the diary enties for anomalies (=cock-ups) found a few and corrected them.

I've managed to put all the remaining stuff into one tray.

And I made roast chicken dinner for three and set a soup going for tomorrow,

Tomorrow I have to chase up a few more contracts and work my way a little further down the tray. Plus I've promised Number One Son a trip to the supermarket for supplies. He's obviously been living in NY for too long, he was expecting to be able to buy seaweed from the supermarket in Huddersfield.  Yeah, right!

BTW do any of the North Americans out there know what he might be referring to as 'greens' which his local vegan reastaurant in NY served up lightly stir-fried? He says they look a bit like cabbage but are much more sweet and tender. That pretty well eliminates collard greens, I think, as the only time I've had them in the USA they've been dark, bitter and stringy. (I looked up collard greens and they seem to equate to 'spring greens' in the UK or what I would know as 'spring cabbage'.)

So I slept through until 10.20 a.m. this morning (luxury!) and had just plumped up the pillows, made a nest and settled back to have a lazy morning in bed reading my new Karen Traviss book when the phone rang. I guess my son had forgotten there were thirty one days in May. Instead of arriving at the airport tomorrow morning at ten, there he was this morning, and wondering why no one was waiting to meet him.

Departure from New York on the evening of 30th May does not bring you into Manchester on the morning of 1st June (unless you fly west perhaps).

Anyhow, all is well. He had to hang around the airport for a couple of hours and I didn't get to read my book, but Number One Son is now safely home from NYC and we are a family of three again until September, unless, of course, he decides to go and stay with Number One Daughter in London or gets the 'opportunity of a  lifetime' to go to Russia, China, Africa, The Moon in which case... who knows. He generally has very itchy feet.
:-)

Just got an email from N1S in Brooklyn. Sometime in the early hours of the morning someone let themselves into their shared  flat while they were all sleeping and stole two wallets a camera and a laptop. The laptop unfortunately belonged to N1S. Though it was 2.5 years old it was a top of the range Dell with a 17" screen and all the extra perks to handle large graphics files for architecture projects.

This coming just after the brilliant news that he's been awarded the Rome Scholarship in Landscape Architecture at the British School at Rome for 2008 - 2009 for which he will, of course need a laptop. Well, let's face it, you need a laptop for just about anything academic these days.

Insurance? What is this foreign word insurance of which you speak?

At least the files were backed up!

(Slinks away to back up own files...)

Just had a phone call from N1S. He's on his way to the airport soon to catch his 4.00 flight back to New York. No dramas this time, just some incredibly good news.

He was over here for a few days from New York to attend for an interview for the Rome Scholarship and... he got it! He applied for both the Architecture one and the Landscape Architecture one... actually using the same project for both applications and he just heard he's been awarded the Landscape Architecture one.

Whoo-hoo!

For nine months form October to June he'll be living at the British School in Rome with his room and board all paid for and a monthly grant on top while he does a study on walls within and without - including making a film and writing a paper.

I am, of course, planning to visit!

As I posted in response to mevennen's weather bulletin, up here on the Pennines it's calm, if wet and we're wondering what all the fuss is about down in the south.

Number One Son, however is stranded in Schipol airport on his way from Copenhagen to New York via Schipol and Heathrow. KLM have cancelled their flights into Heathrow because of bad weather; Virgin Atlantic, however, have not cancelled their flights out of Heathrow, so he's basically missed his connecting flight onward to Newark and it's going to cost him at least $200 to change his ticket.

I discovered a loophole in his travel insurance. He can only claim if he's delayed for more than six hours. If he misses his connection by five hours and fifty nine minutes he's not covered. As it turns out it's been a delay of more than 6 hours (and counting), but take note, folks, read your travel insurance policies carefully. You may think you're covered...

bluehairsue, in particular, take note. You're next up in the air, I think.

I'm just wondering how No.1 Son going on in Schipol since the last time he called me he'd maxed out on the credit card he had with him and had no cash...

We await the next installment in this exciting saga with keen interest.

Lack of posts from me this weekend because Number One Son flew over from New York for an interview for the Rome Scholarship (fingers crossed) and came up from London (where he is dossing with Number One Daughter and her Best Beloved) just for the weekend. Despite being in the UK for ten days and despite saying he was going to spend all of it (except for the interview day) at home, he's managed to make appointments in London which mean he arrived late Saturday and left Monday afternoon via the MegaBus.

However he did announce that he plans to come home sometime later in the spring and spend a possible five or six months at home before either starting on the Rome Scholarship (if he gets it) or an MA at the Bartlet (UCL) - which is the other application that he's made. Home... for five months. He's twenty six. With his globe-trotting and serial university degree habits he's not been at home for more than a week since he was 18. Can I cope?

Yes of course I can.

I can.

No... really...
Number One Daughter and Number One Son

I'm impressed, mevennen has been gardening. In January.

Here in Birdsedge (yes it's the place I live not just my LJ name) it is snowing. Heavy snow and winds are forecast for this weekend which means pull up the drawbridge and put the kettle on. It doesn't get too bad up here now, but it used to be interesting in winter when we first moved here in 1980.

Winters in recent years have been relatively mild, but we should always remmeber that we are a thousand feet above sea level. it can still get tricky. It's not just the cold or the snow or the wind, it's the combination that gives us most problems.

This is Birdsedge winter as it used to be. Number One Son is shovelling a path from the front door to the road.

Have the weather forecasters got it right this time? This morning we had thunder, hail and snow, leaving a thin white coating on the ground, which is sticking obstinately... A portent of things to come, maybe. I actually miss having occasional bouts of heavy snow. Of course, Best beloved and I both work from home so we don't have to dig out the car to get to work like some of our neighbours do.

As I said yesterday we went to see Snow White - a local am-dram pantomime which our friend Phil was in. I am loyal to my friends and Phil was lovely as one of the Seven Dwarfs, one of the best things in it, in fact, but the rest of the panto... Oh boy... and I like pantomime.

To add insult to injury one of the girlies along the row pushed her way past during the performance and managed to tread on Best Beloved's sore toe - the one he lost the nail from a couple of nights ago. He went white. I thought he was going to scream. When the lights came up in the interval I spotted she was wearing stilletto heels.

OWWWWW!

Anyhow, much as we felt we owed it to Phil, we crept out before the end. I've never done that in a live performance before because I do appreciate the effort that goes into staging something like that... but...

So I didn't manage to get the binding done before going to the panto. Instead I got up early (for me) and I trailed all the way into Wakefield this morning to get Joe's architecture portfolio bound. Having spent the best part of five hours, yesterday, printing it perfectly... you guessed it... the binder-lady screwed up and ruined the first two sheets with a cut that went off the edge of the sheet. With no time to do anything else we photocopied the damages pages on to glossy paper. Not quite the same weight, but the best we could manage. i hurtled home again, arriving twenty minutes before the earliest time I'd booked the courier to find the DHL van sitting at my gate. Apparently the website is wrong and you can't get a pickup in our area after 1.00 and in all innocence I'd booked the collection between 2.00 and 4.30.

Luckily it's a courier service I've used before and - bless him - the driver waited. Then he stood around while I packed up the portfolio and with any luck it's already winging its way to the University of London, Department of the Built Environment. (The Bartlett.)

DHL get my vote every time. Great service.