Clucking Around a Petrol Station!

This gadzookingly cool postcard was sent to me by Kate McKinnon during the Postcardian Quest. I'm so lucky to have this FABULOUS resource at my fingertips, as do you if you follow the link. It's a collection of the coolest images sent to me by some of the most beautiful people on Planet Earth. My original idea was to incorporate them into an altered book, but the words & names need to be preserved too, so they reside in an immensely grand postcard collector's album along with letters & paper titbits which relate to the Quest & Ovarian Cancer Action. It's an heirloom - maybe one day my heirs will donate it to an auction in aid of ovarian cancer. The Quest will go on...

Don't forget - this is what every woman should know!

It's poetry time again! Dear Reader, don't go sloping off. I try not to run a school room here.

I'm relying upon a commentary by the writer Molly Peacock for help in describing 'Filling Station' by one of my favourite poets, Elizabeth Bishop. They both say things so much more succinctly than I.

Elizabeth Bishop is often described as the painter's poet - she also has a lovely sense of humour. In this poem, she's finding solace in a petrol station!

I'll let Miss Molly take over for a while: 'When you can't make sense of the world in any other way, merely to describe what you see before you leads to understanding.....After all, when you are at a complete loss as to how you came to be where you are, to describe what is before you is the beginning of restoration....The unexpected result of training your eye on detail is that the world becomes beautiful simply because it is noticed & therefore appreciated.'

Miss Ditzey's back and what does she have to say? Somewhere there's a Mother Hen clucking around this filling station. Even the oil cans are fussed over by her unseen hand.

Though not always present, 'Somebody loves us all.'

To tweak or not to tweak - that is the question!

By rights this postcard should be lingering in the art of curiosity's postcard competition blog but this particular pillow needs plumping up so I'm going to post it here instead.

This house is not Italian - Osbourne House is in England. This wannabe Mediterranean 'holiday home' belonged to Queen Victoria and can be found on the Isle of Wight.

This postcard has been in the make-up department. In fact the reason why I love it is because it's had a humdinger of a make-over. In the UK, we occasionally have blue skies, but electric blue?

The water in the pool is a beautiful colour, but either it's suffering from an overdose of Miracle Gro or it's been tweaked.

I love playing 'tweak the black & white photo' almost as much as I like Technicolor films & the fifties' colour palette. If I'm having a wobble and I can't face reading a 'Battle Book' ( there are times when concentrating on one sentence is a challenge), I've found that my form of colour therapy helps and in my particular case, the more saturated a colour is, the better I like it.

My colour exercise is a simple game. Open up your photo editing suite and tweak a photograph. On those deep dark days when you have no choice, but to stay in bed because the world has become a brick wall, try to fire up your lap top & play the tweak game. What colours lift you? Which palette of colours makes sense?

If you find yourself lost in this game for a minute or more, congratulations! You have experienced mindfulness & this is an invaluable tool when dealing with depression. Patches of mindfulness heal. Trust me. I know.