Art Deco Butterfly Freebie

It looks as if Spring is on its way at last. The days are getting longer, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the daffodils are blooming all over the garden. All that´s missing are the butterflies.

Sorry. My mistake. Here they come fluttering by.

If you´d like this little celebration of Spring, you´ll find the link HERE.

All Souls´ Night

The origins of Halloween, also known as All Souls´Night, lie in the Celtic festival of Samhain, (a Gaelic word meaning summer´s end) which marked the end of summer and the harvest. Bonfires were lit, often to provide light for those bringing in livestock from the fields or mountains to be slaughtered for winter. On this day, the Celts believed that the door to the underworld was opened, letting in spirits. They would hold a feast, setting a place for any deceased relatives, as they were believed to visit home on this day. Malevolent spirits entered the earthly realm as well and people would dress in costume in order to confuse these spirits. This evolved into the custom of visiting houses to collect food for the feast while in costume, a precursor to trick-or-treating.

I don´t know exactly when Halloween became sanitized, commercialized and family friendly but a poem written by the American Edith Wharton in 1903 seems to indicate that it still retained its most sinister connotations around that time. Read the first verse and judge for yourself.

All Souls

by

Edith Wharton

A thin moon faints in the sky o’erhead,

And dumb in the churchyard lie the dead.

Walk we not, Sweet, by garden ways,

Where the late rose hangs and the phlox delays,

But forth of the gate and down the road,

Past the church and the yews, to their dim abode.

For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night,

When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

I wonder if she had something like this in mind.

By the way, if you´re a beginner and would like to know how relatively easy it was to create the above collage, watch this space and I´ll show you.... 

Advice From A Cow

I´ve been missing in action, or rather in inaction, since July when I was struck down and brought to a standstill, or rather a lie still, by a particularly vicious bout of sciatica. At first I resigned myself to lying around on the lawn alternating between reading and enjoying the garden but after a while reading began to pall, the garden and the house began to look neglected, the laundry remained unironed and I began to fret. It was around that time that I came upon this poem...

 

ODE TO A COW

When life seems one too many for

you,

Go and look at a cow.

When the future’s black and the

outlook blue,

Go and look at a cow.

For she does nothing but eat her

food,

And sleep in the meadows entirely

nood,

Refusing to fret or worry or

brood

Because she doesn’t know how.

Whenever you’re feeling bothered

and sore,

Go and look at a cow.

When everything else is a fearful

bore,

Go and look at a cow.

Observe her gentle and placid air,

Her nonchalance and savoir faire,

Her absolute freedom from every

care,

Her imperturbable brow.

So when you’re at the end of your

wits,

Go and look at a cow.

Or when your nerves are frayed

to bits,

And wrinkles furrow your brow;

She’ll merely moo in her gentle

way,

Switching her rudder as if to say:

“Bother tomorrow! Let’s live

today!

Take the advice of a cow.”

Not only did I find this advice a-moo-sing but I started thinking about it and realised that I was worrying needlessly and spoiling a lovely peaceful summer by feeling guilty about neglecting my chores. I don´t mean that I took the advice literally and just lay there chewing the cud and staring placidly into the distance but I finally started to enjoy my enforced inactivity rather than brooding on it. I´ve since had the first appointment with my osteopath and feel a little better already. I´ve even managed to sit rather than recline for long enough to swap my book for needle and thread.

So this page is my tribute to the wise old cow and also my thank you to Diane who gave me her permission to use a photo of her beautiful Lilly with her first calf, the equally beautiful Gabby. Hope she´ll forgive me for altering that perfect photo ever so slightly to give it a painted look to go with the background. 

Try to take that advice to heart. Enjoy what´s left of the summer and leave the chores for a rainy day.

Sitting Pretty

I love and treasure all my old sepia photos. I find it incredible that they´ve survived for so long and how amazingly detailed they are when you consider how relatively primitive old cameras were. Of course they´ve faded somewhat over time but Photoshop can bring them back to radiant life with just a few mouse clicks and any little imperfections can be just as easily camouflaged. Something else I like about them is that it´s such fun to imagine what they´d look like in colour...and then just go ahead and use any colour I want. When I colour sepia tinted clothes it reminds me of the dressing dolls I used to play with as a child and it´s so enjoyable that it goes some way to making up for the fact that in many cases I´ve no idea where and when the photo was taken. In the one below all I know is that it´s one of many I have of my Aunt Lucas – in case you don´t already know, that´s the elegant lady sitting at the top of this blog – but I have no idea who her friend is, when or where the photo was taken or by whom. I think that she´s wearing the same coat as above, but as I haven´t a clue what colour it really was, I´ve made it green this time though I suppose I could have used purple or brown or anything else that took my fancy.

(And, before you ask, yes my aunt was really called Lucas. All I know is that it´s an old family name and I can only assume it was originally Lucasta which apparently dates from the 17^th century and means pure light.)

So here she is, my elegant aunt and her friend, sitting pretty and trapped in a brief moment in time (can it really be?) over 3/4 of a century ago.

You Were Right, Joyce

Joyce Grenfell, 10 February 1910 - 30 November 1979, is known and loved mainly for her comic monologues. Her most famous catch phrase, “George, don´t do that!” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXhHFgDRNBQ ) is instantly recognisable to all her fans. What I didn´t know until today is the fact that she wrote some of the most beautifully evocative nature poetry I´ve ever heard. I say “heard” because the following poem was never published and I´ve only just heard it on BBC radio. Luckily, it was on the Listen Again feature so I was able to write it down. I´m sure you´ll agree that it captures the very spirit of Spring.

Taut as a tent the heavenly dome is blue,

Uncrossed by cloud or tossing twig or plane,

A measureless span infinitely new,

To fill the eye and lift the heart again.

Deep in the wintered earth the shock is felt.

Glossy sweet aconite has shown her gold,

And strong straight crocus spears where late we knelt,

To lodge their bulbs are waiting to unfold.

The ragged rooks like tea leaves in the sky,

Straggle towards the earth with awkward grace.

A robin in a silver birch nearby,

Thrusts up his carol through the naked lace.

I´ve known this day for thirty years and more.

It will go on as it has done before.

You were right, Joyce. It has.

Sadly Glittering

I´ll admit I´m a magpie. I love anything sparkly. Well, practically anything...

 Click on image to enlarge

Journalling: “I bought this plant recently in a supermarket, mostly because I felt sorry for it. I find succulents beautiful just as nature intended. They don´t need – or deserve – to be “embellished” with turquoise glitter.”

Having got my poor sparkling succulent home I put it among my small collection of unadorned succulents where it stuck out like..well maybe not like a sore thumb, more like a glitzy gewgaw. The sight of it bothered me so much that I wrote to my favourite specialist website and was relieved to get the following advice HERE

So this is my thank you to Jacki, the green-fingered lady who knows all the answers!

 

Distance Lends Enchantment

As soon as my mother was old enough she joined the Women´s Land Army which was a British civilian organisation created during the First and Second World Wars which enlisted young women of 18 and over to work in agriculture to replace men called up to the military. She was sent to Argyllshire in the Highlands of Scotland to work on the estate of the Duke of Argyll, chief of the clan Campbell. For a city girl this must have been quite an adventure though I suspect that it didn´t entirely live up to her expectations. Knowing my mother and her love of animals, I imagine she´d pictured herself tending to cuddly lambs and petting sheepdogs. However, the closest she ever came to an animal was too close for comfort when she had to lead a large and very bad tempered bull from a field to a barn during a thunderstorm. I remember her recalling this episode with a shudder when she described how he tossed his head so wildly that he managed to get one of his horns into a sleeve of her plastic raincoat and would have shaken her about like a puppet if the sleeve hadn´t ripped from elbow to wrist and released her. As for lambs and sheepdogs, the former were far too skittish to allow themselves to be cuddled and the latter were mainly vicious and untrustworthy. Even so, she always looked back to that time in her life with great nostalgia. As the poet said, “Distance lends enchantment...” 

This photo shows her with one of her colleagues. I sincerely hope that the implement she´s holding is a hoe or a spade and not a pitchfork. Apparently, on days when working in the fields was not a priority the girls were sent into the barns to kill rats and the weapon of choice was invariably a pitchfork. According to my mother, she always shut her eyes tightly before thrusting the pitchfork randomly into the straw. She said this was the most effective way of not killing anything!

 

Of the 2 smaller photos, one is of Inverary Castle, the seat of the clan chief and the other is the original photo of my mother which is, as you can see, not in particularly bad condition, just a little faded with some slight damage at the bottom edge. I thought I might have to experiment quite a lot to both brighten and darken it but actually “Auto Contrast” worked like a charm and the damaged edges were easily repaired using the clone tool and the healing brush tool. Having done that, I sampled an off white shade from the photo and used it in creating a new border.

Off now to tackle something more challenging.

Digital Christmas Tree

I´ve just about finished my Christmas preparations. I´ve posted all my cards and wrapped all my presents and either sent them off or put them under the tree. I´ve also hung all my baubles and beads on the Christmas tree although that´s always an ongoing project due to Dora. Unlike one of her naughty predecessors, she doesn´t wait till I´m in bed and then start to demolish it. In fact she always pointedly ignores it. It´s just that several times every day with one swipe of her joyfully wagging tail she manages to dislodge and scatter at least one bauble and, worse, cause the carefully draped gold bead garland to rat-a-tat onto the floor. Since I can´t tell her to take herself and her tail away and go off and be happy elsewhere, this is something I´ve had to accept. All the more reason to create this digital Christmas tree well out of reach of Dora and her wagging tail.

 

If you´d like to have this festive gift, everything you can see on the above tree is available for download here. 

 

As you can see from the preview, this is a DIY project as you have to assemble your own baubles. I thought it would be more fun and also more versatile to create separate layers so that you can choose which bow to add to your bauble - you could also alter the baubles´ transparency - or just use the bows themselves as deco.

Have fun!

Seventy Years Ago

My mother survived my father by 19 years. It´s sad to think that neither of them lived to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of their marriage this year. I only have 2 photos of the occasion, one of which I´ve had for many years and another which I found at the bottom of a drawer after my mother´s death last Christmas. Mine is framed and in pristine condition. My mother´s is dog-eared, faded and worn looking like many of the old family photos. I´ve often wondered why this should be and have decided that it´s probably partly due to the fact that my mother, like her mother before her, lived for the present and didn´t dwell on the past. Also, although I often told her that she was remarkably attractive in all her photos, she always laughed and denied it. The only framed photos in her house were of her mother, her husband and her children, so being the selfless person she undoubtedly was, perhaps that reflects what was most important to her. 

The following page is a memorial to both of my parents. It may look at first glance as if I had quite a few photos but in reality there really are only the two plus a couple of little sketches created using an action I made a while ago.

 

I created the above page using the kit I´m presently working on, unnamed as yet though suggestions would be gratefully received.  

An Exuberance Of Lilies

I don´t know what the collective noun for lilies is but for my so-called black - though in reality dark purple – calla I feel it ought to be “an exuberance”. After it´s spent the entire dreary winter dormant and invisible in a sunless sub-basement, as soon as the first tiny green shoots force their way out of the dry earth and I carry it upstairs, water it and place it on a sunny window ledge there´s simply no holding it. It seems as if suddenly overnight its little shoots magically transform themselves into rampant foliage followed rapidly by an amazing number of flower buds which can hardly wait to burst open to greet the sun. No other temporary resident on my patio exudes such vitality.

I´ll be off to Domburg with Dora shortly and I only wish I could take my calla with me because its flowers are already beginning to fade and will probably be entirely gone by the time I return in mid-July and it´ll soon be time to carry it back down to the basement again for its winter hibernation.

Still, I won´t dwell on that but rather on my preparations for my holiday and the anticipation of a few weeks of sun, sea and sand. I know for sure that I´ll get the last two but the Zeeland peninsula juts into the North Sea so it isn´t exactly what you´d call tropical so just wish me lots of the first!

Easter Bunny Freebie

I´d like to give you this little gift early because bunnies aren´t just for Easter. In my Easter Bunny Freebie you´ll find bunnies for many other occasions too. There are 9 sets of the little rascals including a bunny in love for Valentine´s Day, a gardening bunny digging up – guess what - right, carrots of course. There´s a cute little ballerina bunny and a bunny snuggled up in bed with his teddy bear, sorry, I mean his stuffed bunny and, oh what´s the point of describing what you can see for yourself.

 

If you´d like to have these bunnies in good time for your Easter layouts or cards, you can catch them HERE, that is if you can run faster than the average bunny...

Changing Rooms

Recently my cousin Neville emailed me asking if I could make a picture for his wife Margaret from the header on my blog. As some of you may know, the elegant lady sitting on the couch is Neville´s mother, my Aunt Lucas. I have many photos of her, mostly studio portraits from the 1930s in which she´s immaculately groomed and stylishly dressed. You´re probably thinking that the photo on the above header is one of them. Not at all!

 

As you can see, the photo was actually just a snapshot. According to the writing on the back, it was taken in March 1932 in the small Scottish town of Balloch on – to quote our national poet, Robert Burns - “the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond” - and shows that Lucas didn´t only dress in her best for her many studio photos but also for a day trip to the country. You could say that she looks just as immaculate sitting on a rock as sitting on the sofa in my header.

Anyway, that´s just the history of the photo. Back to Margaret´s request...I was wondering how I could possibly transform my blog header into a picture for her to frame when I suddenly remembered that I already had one. Years ago long before I started this blog I´d created a series of fantasy rooms one of which had been the inspiration for my header. I dug around in my folders and finally unearthed it.

It included the table, the vase of roses, the oval picture and Lucas seated on the sofa which are all in the header too. And if you look directly to your left, you´ll even see the china ornament which I´d placed on the table. I was tremendously relieved to think I´d found the perfect picture and wouldn´t have to start from scratch. That is until Neville sent me a photo of the frame...

 ...and I realised with dismay that 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm into 19 cm x 24 cm won´t go. I tried cutting the image down to size but that resulted in chopping the large oval picture on the wall right down the middle. It looked as if I might have to start from scratch after all. Then I had a thought that sent me scurrying back to the folder where I´d found the jpg and there, amazingly, was the original layout in psd format with all its layers intact! With some resizing and a little manipulation I finally ended up with this.

I was about to send it off when the thought occurred to me that since Margaret and Neville live in far distant South Africa the chances are I´d never get to see my work framed and hanging on the wall. On the other hand, since I´d already extracted the frame, there was no reason why I couldn´t have a preview of the finished picture on my computer screen.

Looking from the frame to the picture and back again I was just thinking that Margaret couldn´t have chosen a more beautiful frame when an idea occurred to me that made me smile. 

 

Maybe I should have called this post “Spot The Difference”.

Can you?

Will Margaret...

...and which one will she choose?

Faster, Easier Downloads!

As many of you will know, for years I´ve been storing my kits and freebies at 4shared. It wasn´t the ideal solution as it was pretty slow but it worked well enough and I never had any complaints...until just a few months ago when 4shared altered my settings without informing me and then things started to get difficult. First of all I discovered that if someone wanted to download any of my recent freebies she had to ask my permission so I had to keep checking to make sure that my settings remained as I´d set them and not as 4shared would have them. Then things got out of hand when suddenly 4shared refused to allow anyone to download anything, including kits, without opening a free account. That´s when I started to look elsewhere for alternative storage ...and by that I mean free storage. As I´m sure most of you know, I don´t have a large commercial store. I only sell my own kits and don´t invite other designers to contribute. Designing digital scrapbook kits is, and always will be, just a hobby and not a money making concern. By that I don´t mean that it isn´t thrilling when someone likes my kits enough to take the trouble to purchase and download them. However, if I had to pay for storage there would then be the worry that the store wouldn´t earn enough to make it worthwhile, and anxiety and creativity don´t mix well. I spent hours searching for a suitable website and came up with absolutely nothing. It began to look as if I´d have to close my store. Then I did what I should have done right at the start and told Lajuana who had set up my store in the first place and is still very much involved with it. She immediately offered enough storage space on her own website to accommodate my entire collection including any future kits. I shouldn´t have been amazed by her generosity as she´s always been a good friend but I thought – and still think – that this kind offer went well beyond the bounds of friendship. To cut a long story short we decided to start with the freebies so for the past week I´ve been hard at work uploading all the zip files to the FTP for Lajuana to retrieve and create download links. In other words I just did the easy donkey work and Lajuana all the difficult stuff and I must say she made it really difficult for herself by creating not just simple links but the most beautiful and original download pages. Here are a few screen shots so that you can see for yourselves how creatively she designed them.

Don´t they look great?

By doing all this work on my behalf Lajuana has had to neglect her other duties so while she catches up on her other work we´ll be leaving the kit links for later. For the time being all my kits are still at 4shared and still available but sometime in the near future we´ll also be making these downloads faster and easier.

In the meantime, I hope you´ll enjoy downloading my freebies and taking a little time in the process to enjoy Lajuana´s unique download pages.

Thank you, Lajuana!

Ten Minutes To Spring

One unusually warm day recently I was out in my garden for the first time this year admiring all the spring flowers. The snowdrops looked like silent bells as they swayed in the breeze or maybe they were nodding their heads in approval of the weather. The first daffodils had sprung up in such large clumps I could understand how William Wordsworth must have felt when he wrote:

“ I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

Well, it was a stretch of the imagination to picture the lake because our garden doesn´t include one but you know what I mean. There´s something so joyful about suddenly coming upon these harbingers of spring and realising that the long dreary winter is almost over. The tulips won´t be far behind either. I could spot their leaves in every flower bed interspersed with the first few forget-me-nots. I´m particularly looking forward to seeing the frilly ones which we planted a couple of years ago under one of the trees. However, on my way back I was distracted from anticipation of flowers yet to appear by the sight of my quirky “white” rose bush which had already produced a perfect little flower, all white but for one single red petal. I´m so glad that the Red Queen´s little gardeners have survived the winter unscathed! I was also thrilled to see the first new lupins sprouting, a sure sign that summer will eventually come around again.

Then as I left the garden and was walking along the path to the house something stopped me dead in my tracks in amazement and wiped all thoughts of showy spring flowers right out of my head. There, tiny, humble and insignificant growing against all odds in the moss and winter debris between the paving stones, was a bright yellow pansy. The flower was only about an inch in size but I thought it the most beautiful thing I´d seen all day.

Maybe we all occasionally need to be reminded that we should cherish the simple things in life.

From Time To Time Freebie Alpha

Here´s a rusty alpha which coordinates with From Time To Time and also with many other kits in my store.

You´ll find it HERE. Hope you´ll like it.

A Scottish Soldier

With so many Campbells, MacDonalds and Armstrongs in my family tree it´s paradoxical that the the only photo I have of a family member in Highland dress is of my cousin, Brian Roberts, whose surname is not Scottish but originated in England and is very common in Wales where his father came from. However, if he shook his mother´s family tree, enough Scots would fall out to form several Scottish regiments.

Brian joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – an infantry regiment - at the age of 20 when this photo was taken. Unfortunately, it´s in black and white so I´ve shown the regimental tartan he´s wearing underneath an enlargement of the silver badge on his hat. I´ve also shown a photo of the regimental museum which is in Stirling Castle in the “King´s Old Building” so-called because it was originally built in the 1490s as a residence for King James IV of Scotland, the last monarch to be killed in battle. The second photo shows a soldier with the regiment´s mascot, a Shetland Pony called Cruachan. By coincidence, or perhaps not, “Cruachan” was the traditional Gaelic war cry of the Campbells....something worth remembering the next time somebody nips into a parking place I´ve been waiting for or pushes in front of me at the baker´s. Incidentally, a mountain called Ben Cruachan – at 3689 feet - is the highest point in Argyllshire. The bottom photo shows a drum major and a piper dressed in regimental attire.

I find it rather sad that the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders no longer exists. In 2006, along with several other Scottish regiments, it was amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. However, each battalion maintains its former regimental Pipes & Drums to carry on the traditions of their antecedent regiments.

I created this page using my latest kit, From Time To Time. If you´d like a freebie QP, you´ll find it HERE. Also, if you´d care to have an alpha which coordinates with the rusty spatters in the kit, watch this space...

From Time To Time

My most recent kit is called From Time To Time because, although it´s an art nouveau influenced kit and therefore suitable for vintage layouts, it also reflects the passing of time by including modern frames and elements along with the more traditional swirls and flourishes. Also, as the name suggests, there are many timepieces in a variety of styles including some unusual steampunk clocks. The colour scheme is mainly various shades of brown and sepia with copper and teal accents which makes it ideally suited for use in combination with Vintage Whimsy and/or Nostalgic Scrapbook which you will also find in the store. As is the case with all my kits, there are no recoloured duplicates included.

If you´d like to have the freebie QP which I created using From Time To Time, you´ll find it HERE.

Missing Photos, Finding Relatives

There are two photos of my father which I treasure simply because they are the only ones I have of him as a young man. In the first one he´s 16 and in the second one, which isn´t dated, I think he´s probably about 18. I know that both were taken in Ireland where he sometimes spent the summer with relatives who had a farm there. Judging by the Border Collie in that photo I can only assume that they were sheep farmers though I can´t be sure about that. There are a lot of things about my father that are a mystery to me. In the first photo he´s carrying a camera and yet none of the photos he took have survived. Also, there isn´t a single photo of him as a baby. However, the greatest mystery has always been his mother, Helen Campbell, for whom I was named. My father himself knew only that she died very young and that on her deathbed she pleaded with her mother-in-law to look after her child and made her promise not give him up to her own mother. I find this horrifying as it would appear that my paternal great grandmother, must have been unpleasant to say the very least if her own daughter couldn´t entrust her child to her. Until very recently these were the only facts I knew about Helen Campbell until Linda, a cousin of our mutual cousin, Neville, did some research into my father´s antecedents. I now know that poor Helen was only 23 when she died and my father only 4 which explains why he had no recollection of her. Linda has traced Helen´s family tree back to my great great grandparents who came from Reay in Caithness. I wish my late father had known this because sometime during the 1960s he went north to work at the nuclear power station in Dounreay near the town of Thurso and only returned when he found it impossible to find a suitable house there for the family.

As the name Dounreay suggests, it´s very close to where his maternal great grandparents, Robert Campbell and Betsey Isabella MacDonald came from. Of course, considering how small a country Scotland is, this is no great coincidence but if he had known this he may have been able to find relatives still living there. However, one thing I find particularly interesting about Robert and Betsey is that they, perhaps unwittingly, joined two warring clans together. Throughout Scotland´s turbulent history the Highlanders didn´t just wage war on the English but also on each other and the clans MacDonald and Campbell have a particularly bloody history. I won´t go into that in detail but I have to say that I find it comforting that now that I can lay claim to both clans in my family tree I no longer have to defend my middle name to any of my countrymen named MacDonald! Yes, clan memories die hard in Scotland and the massacre of MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692 has - unfairly - gone down in history as proof of the bloodthirsty nature of the clan Campbell. I say "unfairly" because, according to what I´ve read about this ancient family feud, the MacDonalds weren´t averse to slaughtering the Campbells either!

With all this recent knowledge I created this page in memory of my dear dad who passed away in 1995.

The tartan on the left is the clan Campbell, on the right the clan MacDonald and in the middle the clan Armstrong to which our family belongs. Thank you, Linda, for making this possible.

Getting Started Again

It´s been a while since I designed a new kit, so long in fact that I was beginning to think that Nostalgic Scrapbook was my swansong. Being in constant pain isn´t exactly conducive to creativity and the sudden death of a family member lowered my spirits even further. However, just recently I´ve been having osteopathic treatment, mostly for the persistent headaches I´ve suffered for over a year and I´m feeling a lot more optimistic. The headaches haven´t gone completely but at least they´re not as frequent as they were and I´m not constantly reaching for painkillers.

Getting started on a new project wasn´t really a conscious decision. As you may have noticed, I´ve restored several old photos over the past year. I thought it was about time that I gave them a suitable setting and that´s really what started me off again.

You may remember this photo of my grandmother and my aunt. It´s a particular favourite of mine and I thought it deserved a layout all its own so instead of using an existing kit I started to design something around it.

 

In a way it´s strange that I´ve gone back to shades of brown again. You probably know I really don´t like brown, mostly because it´s a colour I absolutely can´t wear, but I do like teal a lot and I can´t think of any other colour which brings out the beauty of my favourite colour better than brown. What do you think?

Heart Of Gold

I have the small diary which my mother bought shortly before she passed away. The only entries in it are the 24^th of December, my sister Carole´s birthday, and the 13^th of January, my own. As these are two dates which no mother could possibly forget or need to be reminded of, I think this says a lot about her and what was important to her. Since she was, and always will be, important to me too I feel it fitting that on my birthday I should pay tribute to her with this page in her memory. It´s also appropriate and no coincidence that I should have used one of my favourite kits, Heart Of Gold.