Beautiful Blogger Award – Seven Things About Me

My second post meeting the obligations of the Beautiful Blogger award – here are Seven Things About Me.

I bellydance for fun – Yes, really. I did ballet as a child, ballroom dancing as a student and now I’ve taken up bellydancing. It keeps my spine supple and gives me a weekly chance to dance – what could be better?

I lived in Paris for nearly a year – Now you know why Paris Breakfasts strikes such a chord with me! And in Paris, by the way, I danced Rock’n’Roll, which was astonishingly popular. Nightclubs had “rock’n’roll nights” where nothing else was played at all, and the standard of some of the dancing was really astonishing!

I read as much as I embroider – Possibly more. This might not be a great surprise since so much of the embroidery that I am blogging about has a vaguely literary background. My tastes range from biographies (a good Christmas present a couple of years ago was a very academic book about John of Gaunt!) and similarly factual stuff to fiction of pretty much all sorts (Tolkien to Georgette Heyer, via Margery Allingham and Terry Pratchett), except horror stories. I see no good reason for giving myself nightmares…

I used to play the violin – Not very well, but I got a lot of fun out of playing in orchestras. Frequently, something heard on the radio will result in a pause, head a-tilt and a thoughtful “I’m sure I played that in Youth Orchestra”. Fortunately my husband has chosen to find this amusing. My musical tastes run from medieval up to the present day, although I can’t get to grips with Wagner, and I get very picky after about 1860!

This I Know – when I was a teenager I found this saying of Dame Julian of Norwich in my studies of T.S. Elliot :
“Our dearworthy Lord said not thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, but thou shalt not be overcome”.
It is much less immediately appealing than “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”, but I have clung to it in bad times and found, indeed, that I have not been overcome. Don’t underestimate the uses of perseverance!

I have very long chestnut hair – length subject to radical change without notice!

I draw and paint in watercolours – not very well, but my husband insists that I tell you that I do better than  I think I do (if you follow me..)