Tag Archives: Mother’s Day

Butterflies and Simnel Cake

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Peacock – our first butterfly of 2015

Another good night’s sleep. This seems to be a side effect of sorting my health out properly, but it’s early days so far so I won’t get too cheerful just yet.

I have a big day of article writing planned, but after the last few days I am not feeling confident. I’ve slipped back into my old procrastinating ways during the last week or two, and have also been taking it easy because I’ve been ill. The two combined have led to a drop in productivity for articles and a struggle to finish any poetry properly.

Despite that I still think I’m being more productive than I was at the end of last year, so this is good.

Mint Moth

I am, once more, struggling to find any fluidity in the blog. As I spend most of the day doing boring things this isn’t surprising. I also write in the morning, by which time I have usually forgotten anything exciting. I may have to start writing in the evening, but experience with that suggests I will end up forgetting to post, or will end up writing after midnight, which is not good.

We had a Brimstone in the garden yesterday. This is three or four we have spotted this spring, which feels optimistic. Julia bought some seeds yesterday (she was out at the Garden Centre with my sister) which are a mix to provide food for butterflies and insects. We will be planning more sunflowers this year too. Small plans, but at least we are still planning.

She also bought simnel cake. It was very good but regrettably small. However, it is a proper seasonal treat, unlike mince pies which now stretch from September to December and Hot Cross Buns, which are almost available all year.

Red Admiral

There is, it seems a move afoot to change the date of Mothering Sunday (commonly known as Mother’s Day) in the UK to match up with Mother’s Day in the USA. Just another bit of cultural colonialism from the USA.

Mother’s Day in the USA dates from just before the Great War and was meant to celebrate motherhood, though it quickly became criticised for being overly commercial. Mothering Sunday in the UK is a religious festival going back to around the 8th Century, though it is now generally known as Mother’s Day these days and is also very commercial. The date is set as the fourth Sunday in Lent rather than a fixed date. The two days are basically the same, but I don’t see why they need to be on the same date.

Comma

 

 

Day 29

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Has the year really passed so quickly? There are now only 336 days left until Christmas. The cynic in me is tempted to suggest that it will only be a couple of weeks before we start seeing the first Christmas displays in the shops. However, first we have Valentine’s Day (14th February). Then we have Mother’s Day (27th March) and Easter (17th April). Then there are all those summer holidays that people have been looking forward to, because modern people can’t function without their holidays. When I started work we used to get by on two weeks a year, and knew people who had been at work when there was no such thing as annual holiday. The whole country is getting soft. You can’t imagine the Spartans taking two weeks off in summer. Anyway, enough about the good old days. We probably won’t start Christmas until September.

American readers may have noticed that we have Mother’s Day on a different day. That’s because ours is linked to Mothering Sunday, which is a church festival and it takes its date from Easter, which is a notably moveable feast. Yours is linked to a woman called Anna Jarvis, who wanted to honour the memory of her mother.

I must apologise to Americans here, because I had always assumed that your Mother’s Day was just another commercial orgy driven by greetings card manufacturers. Seems I’m wrong – not only was it not started for that reason, but it inspired an English woman – Adelaide Smith – to reinvigorate the festival in the UK. She lived and worked in Nottingham and is buried nearby, but until today I knew nothing about her.

However, the greetings card manufacturers did take over, and Anna Jarvis actually tried to put a stop to Mother’s Day. To be fair to the card manufacturers, when she needed care at the end of her life, they paid for it, but it just goes to show how commercial interests take things over.

That’s probably a good place to stop. Otherwise I might get onto the subject of Father’s Day, a completely unnecessary blot on the calendar, and an idea, I suspect, that is supported behind the scenes  by an international  cartel of sock manufacturers.