Did they didlum?

When my grandfather Bill was alive, I remember he collected cash from his 3 daughters every week, and gave it back to them before each Christmas. This informal savings club was called a Didlum, as was the money itself, i.e Aunt Mary would ask my mother if she had paid her didlum this week.

I have always been intrigued by this word, and wondered if other families used it. My mother says it goes back a long way: she remembers it from her Luton childhood in the 1940s when it was collected by a neighbour - Mrs Chamberlain. I decided to research the origin and usage of Didlum as part of my List.

I looked in many dictionaries, including the big ones in the library, but it was not there.
I tried emailing a variety of language professors at local universities - not one reply (perhaps if I had enclosed a cheque...)
I asked several family members for information, since I did not know if it was a family word or a local word, or more widely used.

I googled Didlum and found a few references - one was on a discussion board from Nottingham, another was in Cork, and the third was in Birmingham.
The first was a dictionary of Cork Slang by Sean Beecher, and defines didlum as DIDLUM

Construct:	Noun
Definition:	A savings scheme. A group of people contribute an agreed amount over a fixed period of time. The money was not distributed until all of it was collected a the end of the period. Contrast with Manage.
Use:
Derivation:	Unknown

In Nottingham it was used in the same sense, with evidence given of it being used in clothing factories amongst the women.

The Birmingham History Forum has details of a didlum  club, so again, the same meaning.
I struck gold when I found a reference in a history book: They Worked All Their Lives, Women of the urban poor, 1880-1939 by Carl Chinn
 I borrowed the book from Bedford Central Library
On page 71 is this passage:

They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880-1939

 By Carl Chinn

When discussing means of credit, it is important to be aware

that, in spite of their impoverishment, wives of the urban poor

could and did attempt to insure themselves against hard times

through saving. This form of protection was not with a friendly

society or an insurance company; rather it was achieved

through small, highly localised groups of lower-working-class

women. A group of wives would bond together and form a club,

known as a ‘didly club’ in Lambeth and a ‘didlum’ club in

Birmingham. Out of their number, one who was trusted by all

would be chosen to hold the cash and to distribute it at the

appointed time, uually Christmas. Properly known as ‘rotating

credit associations’, the payments increased by the sum paid

in the first week. Thus if a figure of a halfpenny was decided

on - usually the case by the 1920s - then in the first week a

halfpenny was saved, in the next a penny, and so on. If a member

paid up for the full fifty weeks in which the club ran, then a um

of £2 13s lid was saved. For most women it was a struggle to

keep up these payments throughout the full term, but even those

who dropped out before the allotted term still received a not

insignificant sum to help them out.

The colloquial names of these clubs are probably derived from

the belief that those entrusted with clubs’ funds ‘diddled’ or

cheated their members out of their money. This belief arose

because of the disappearance of some trustees with the col-

lection and also because some clubs were in the habit of paying

the collectors with the final week's fee. Yet such clubs were -

and still are - very popular and if swindles had been common

place then they would soon have ceased to exist.

In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, one of the villains is called Mr Diddlum, as I found out when we read it recently for my Book Club.

So a great success! I found out that it is not just a family name, but used more widely, and it can be spelled with a single or double D.

Grow a Pumpkin

I wanted to grow a large pumpkin, and being an inexperienced gardener, I was not expecting to produce a giant prize-winning champion, just the best I could do.

I planted 3 seeds in small pots - one grew 4 leaves then died. The other two seemed healthy enough, so when they got big enough, I set them in a grow-bag. They were different varieties, to hedge my bets.

I looked after them every day, carefully checking their condition, watering and feeding them regularly, and was rewarded by the plants growing and growing. I put out sticks for them to attach themselves on, and cleared enough room for them to spread along the garden. One plant gave a yellow fruit, the other gave green fruit during the growing stage. Yellow was smooth and shiny, green was more ridged and mottled.
Yellow gave about 8 pumpkins, but I picked some off in order to let the plant focus in growing fewer fruit to a bigger size, a decision I was to regret, since eventually I ended up with just one surviving yellow pumpkin.
Green only produced the one fruit from the beginning.

I used pizza polystyrene bases to keep the pumpkins off the soil. I suffered a lot of anxiety about my plants being trodden on, especially as my boys and their friends frequently rushed past them on their way to the shed hang-out place at the bottom of the garden. I have a very long but narrow garden, with a footpath towards the left hand side, and I had needed to place the growbag on that side as there was no room anywhere else. Luckily, the boys had taken notice of my concerns and the plants came to no harm.
I weighed and measured them as they grew, the final scores being as follows:
Round Yellow - 4lb or 1.8kg
Oblong Green - 7lb 10oz or 3.46kg

This is me tending my beloved plants:

It was very difficult to know when to harvest them, especially Yellow, and in the end I am unsure if I should have waited a little longer.

This is the final day of Yellow.

and cut in half, I think it looks unready, such a disappointment after all that care and attention over months.
With Green, I decided to wait until just before Halloween before harvesting, giving it time to ripen into a lovely orange colour. 

My son requested a Pokemon themed carving for Halloween, so I found a photo of one to copy, and it turned out ok.

I used the flesh to make a pumpkin cake, and that was rather nice too, I shared it with all my family and it was quite a hit.

You might say it was a lot of work for a small result, but I enjoyed nurturing the pumpkin plants, perhaps I will try again this year!

Massaging the Figures

On my original 50 List was 'colonic irrigation', also known as colon hydrotherapy, which I have been told is an effective treatment for removing toxins from the body, and makes you feel empty and cleansed.

But there are other opinions as to the claims for this treatment, and since it is expensive, I decided to swap this for 'Full Body Massage'.

Bannatyne gym was doing a half-price offer in the spa for my birthday, so on Tuesday 12th November 2013 I went in for a full body Swedish Massage.

I was taken into the spa rooms, and then a lovely calm room with a trolley bed. This room had low lighting, soft music playing, and fairy lights in a vase.

 The therapist was a lovely lady who put me at my ease immediately, when I explained that I had never had a massage, and did not know what to expect. She left the room after asking me to strip down to my underpants, and I lay face-down on the bed. There was a hole for my face to peek through on the bed, making it easy to breathe, and ensuring that I did not feel claustrophobic.

The therapist used aromatherapy oils with a gorgeous smell, and massaged my back, arms, legs, neck and  shoulders. She was gentle but strong, and she discovered huge knots in my shoulders that needed a lot of work - I was not at all surprised about this, I had been feeling pain and discomfort there for a while. She used powerful strokes and I knew this was working for me, my muscles relaxed and unwound. She explained what she was doing at appropriate times, and I asked questions, but mostly I wanted silence, without unnecessary chit-chat.

The whole experience was wonderful, at no time did I feel awkward or embarrassed since she was careful to keep me covered by the towels or bedding, apart from the area being worked upon. Afterwards I walked taller, smiled longer, held myself more upright instead of my usual slouch, and walked up stairs easier. I would love to be able to afford this therapy every month! The experience was well worth doing, a most pleasant time and I recommend it highly.

Mum Went to Iceland

I have always wanted to go to Iceland, and I was particularly anxious to go when it came to October 2013, as I was thoroughly sick of the weather being too warm in England, for so long. It would be a relief to go somewhere cooler. I had an image in my head of a country of waterfalls, mountains, the Northern Lights, people in fisherman's knits, and geysers. Less romantically, of crashed banking systems and huge clouds of ash from a volcano.

I went to Iceland with my sister Sue, her husband Ian, and their twins Jenna and Sam. We took the 7.05am Easyjet plane from my local airport, Luton, and in three hours time we were in a hire car, a big 4wd Ford. We went to Reykjavik to have a look round, my first impression was of a very modern town of flats, there were no rows of old terrace brick houses to be seen at all. A clean town, fresh and colourful with an attractive waterfront area. We went to a big modern cathedral, Hallsgrimkirkja, and up to the 8th floor to see the town from above.

 View from the cathedral in Reykjavik

Me outside the cathedral


After lunch we were ready to drive out to our cottage, a 1.5 hour journey from here. We drove past lovely mountains and lakes, and there was very little traffic about. Uthlid Cottage was massive, with 4 en-suite bedrooms and a jacuzzi , but the most surprising thing was the stag head on the wall!

Uthlid is not far from Geysir, so we went to have a look at the World famous site. There were lots of tourists here, taking photos, waiting around the hot, muddy, bubbling pools for the gushers to activate. And they did activate, about every 8 minutes or so, one was impressive.Such an eerie landscape, with steam coming out of the ground, and pools of boiling water.

this video was not too great, because I missed the actual eruption!
 It was a fascinating place to visit.
Then back to the cottage, and a meal in the local bar.

We had a hot tub in the back room of the cottage, so we heated it up and had a nice sit in it. All the hot water and heating was from natural geothermal sources, as it is everywhere is Iceland. The hot tub was a nice idea, but it was rather smelly, sort of sulphurous, and when I got out, I realised that it had tarnished my lovely silver bracelet. Ian suggested we soak it in vinegar, and when that didn't work, I soaked it in salt water, but no luck. (in the end I used silver polish at home - that worked)
The showers smelled of sulphur too.

On Saturday we headed for Skaefellsnes Peninsular, towards the North West. We went to the lake Dingvallavatn, right through the mountains on route 550 Kaldiddur as far as the road allowed, because at this point, the internal roads were closed for winter. Incredible views, the lakes were calm and cold-looking, with perfect reflections of the sky and mountains.

I spotted what looked like a hobbit house from the road, so we stopped to have a closer look...

I wonder what it was? There were several of these to be seen.

Turning off west onto the route 52 to Borgarnes, where we stopped to eat lunch, then north on the 5 and 55, the roads turned bumpy and winding, long routes through the mountains, where we enjoyed stopping to explore the local terrain. Eventually we arrived at Stykkisholmur where there was a harbour and fabulous views.

After having a walk about, we needed some shopping for dinner, and discovered that you cannot buy alcohol at supermarkets! You have to purchase it at designated liquor stores, and there were none about, or at least none open on a Sunday.
The light faded very slowly, almost imperceptibly, but it was dark by 7pm. A very long car journey home. Very long.

On Sunday morning, I watched the sky over the mountains from our cottage, all pink and orange and blue. There was a chapel down the hill with a glass bell-tower, very pretty when the sun shone through it.

This is Uthlid cottage, where we stayed - the whole building was ours.
A few miles away was Gullfoss, a wide waterfall, well a series of waterfalls in fact. I managed to fall down on my bottom on the icy slope, so didn't quite make it down to the lower viewing platform, but I did get fantastic views from the higher platforms.

 See the ice on the platform? It got me down!

The spectacular Gullfoss

 Onto the next waterfall - this time Seljalandsfoss, and it was very special because we walked behind it! What an amazing experience this was, totally exhilarating, as well as very wet! In the absence of the Northern Lights on this trip, I decided to make this experience on of my 50 List things - a fair substitution.

One part was particularly steep and slippery, but a woman held out her hand to me, supporting my ascent.

Seljalandsfoss Waterfall, from behind

Nearby was a third waterfall, called Skogafoss,with a powerful 64m drop. As we walked towards it, we realised that actually, you can't get anywhere near it, because it creates such a strong wind and big waves in the pool below it. You get soaking wet and frozen, and the wind blows you backwards.

Skogafoss Waterfall blowing us backwards

After these 3, we had had enough of waterfalls, and went to visit a glacier. The route took us off the road and onto a very bumpy track - good thing we had the 4wd, or it would have been impossible. We parked up and walked down the track to the front of the glacier, which was dirty with ash, but close up we could see the ice was blue in places.
We also drove over to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano that had erupted in 2010, creating an ash cloud that disrupted flights for weeks.

On Monday, we went back to Reykjavik to take a longer walk round, taking in the opera house, that reminded me of the Millennium Music Hall in Cardiff, that square frontage that looks as if it is learning forward.

Next we drove out of Reykjavik, towards the Blue Lagoon. The landscape was volcanic and rocky, a weird and eerie moonscape.We visited a crater filled with water, I am told that Icelandic singer Bjork once played a gig on a platform that had been lowered into the lake. What an event that must have been! We took a walk round the perimeter.

Next stop was the famous Blue Lagoon, an outdoor swimming pool that is heated geothermally. It has a spa where you can get skin treatments, and is reckoned to be good for your skin. The landscape all around it is a lava field, rocky and strange. Then when you get inside the complex, the next strange thing is being made to get totally naked before having a shower - there are strict Icelandic ice maidens enforcing this rule, demanding that you remove the swimsuit you have just put on, before walking to the showers!
Once I got to the pool,  I found the water warm, verging on hot in parts - 37 to 39 degrees in fact. There is a temperature display sign. The Blue Lagoon was the oddest place I have ever seen, heads bobbing about in a hot pool with steam coming off the surface the whole time.

There were buckets of silica to rub onto our faces, so we had a go, and you get the extraordinary sight of half the heads bobbing about in the water are covered in a white coating, which is cracking up like glazing on an old pot. I kept laughing aloud at the sheer weirdness of the whole experience. The air temperature was around 5 degrees, yet here we were, swimming in a hot outdoor pool, steam and mist blocking our view of the surrounding mountains, and of other people bobbing about in the water.

An extraordinary place.
When you read about the Blue Lagoon, it loses some of its romance - 'The lagoon is a man-made lagoon which is fed by the water output of the nearby geothermal power plant Svartsengi and is renewed every two days. Superheated water is vented from the ground near a lava flow and used to run turbines that generate electricity. After going through the turbines, the steam and hot water passes through a heat exchanger to provide heat for a municipal water heating system. Then the water is fed into the lagoon for recreational and medicinal users to bathe in.'

I am very pleased that I went to the Blue Lagoon, and would recommend it to visitors, but if I go back to Iceland, I would not visit it again - after all, it is just a swimming pool.

Iceland is a fascinating and extraordinary place, the landscape is beautiful, extreme, and often simply strange. I enjoyed my visit, and would love to go back some day. Thank you to Sue and Ian for taking me with them and making all the arrangements, I really do appreciate it.

 Oh and speaking of strangeness, there is a penis museum in Reykjavik.

Several of the places we visited were featured on the music video for Birthday, by The Sugar Cubes from 1987. A wonderful song, albeit with rather disturbing lyrics, and a weird video.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFQPNApwJGU

Cubed

Solve a Rubik's Cube was on The List - I have watched my son John do this many times, he can do it in well under 2 minutes. He told me that he learned to do it by following a video on Youtube, so I had a go.

I watched a video all the way through first, to see what I was up against, and found it difficult to keep up, especially when the instructor talked about algorithms - the very word sent a shiver of fear down my spine, somehow!

Finally, it got to 2 days before my official deadline for completion, so I decided to lose the fear, and to get on with it.

I chose a video that seemed to have the clearest instructions, but it took me a while to understand the concepts even so, I am not a natural! But I took it step by step, making the white side first with  all the middle colours in the right place.

Cool, eh? I was relieved to complete this first step.
I left it for a couple of hours, then went back to it, and had to concentrate hard to get the next steps done. I was tearing my hair out with frustration until.......I got it! I found that I could understand the video instructions, and simply followed them exactly. Once it was complete, I felt a massive surge of satisfaction and achievement, and couldn't wait to show the cube to my boys - it was 5th November 2013, and I ticked this off The List with a big smile!

NB I haven't tried it again, but it is nice to know that I can, following instructions.

Doctor Who Tattoo

I bet having a tattoo is on most bucket lists, and particularly on 50 type lists.

Who said I had to be original anyway? It was a hard job to come up with 50 things I had never done, achievable within a year and on a minimal budget.

I had several vague ideas about what I wanted for a tattoo - oh the usual stuff, a butterfly? Flower? Perhaps a line of Latin script, or a quotation from Shakespeare?

In the end, it had to be from Doctor Who, since I am such a fan, and it being the 50th anniversary of the programme too. I contemplated a Tardis for a while, but eventually went for a design in Circular Gallifreyan.

Link to the webpage where I found the design:

https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=gallifreyan


I think it says 'Hello Sweetie', i.e. a quote from the lovely River Song, but I have not checked it out for myself.

On 12th September 2013 I went with my good friend Sam to Red Inc tattoo studio opposite where I work. I was the last customer of the day, so there was nobody about, only the tattoo artist. He was scrupulous about cleanliness, wiping down all surfaces and covering things with rolls of clingfilm. He took a copy of my printed design, and transferred it to my arm, then tattooed it on, simple as that!

I think circles must be difficult to get right, but he did a grand job.
I didn't watch it being done, I chatted with Sam - oh, the tattooist was also called Sam! It helped to be distracted from the pain, it didn't hurt too much, and I am delighted with the result.

People - actually, just about everyone who has seen it - ask me the same two questions: 1. did it hurt? 2. will you be getting more tattoos?
My answer to 2. is - probably not, I am happy with my Gallifreyan symbol, it was part of my 50 challenges for the year, and I do not feel the need to have more.

Goodbye Sweetie!

Badly Drawn Boys

Item 41 on my List was to draw portraits of my 2 sons, John and Carl.
I haven't done much drawing lately - 3 years ago I took a Life Drawing class at a local college, but had not picked up a pencil since then.

They did not want to sit still while I drew them, so it was decided I would draw from photographs. Carl gave me a black and white photo of himself, which, unfortunately, I have now mislaid, but I did use it for the portrait. I find it useful to draw from black and white photos, as they show the contrasts and tones better than colour. I had John's photo printed out in both colour and B&W.

I used pencil and soft pastels for the portraits, as I find pastels are easy to use and blend. The colours I chose were not necessarily accurate and realistic, but that didn't matter as much as getting a pair of pictures which reflect my own as well as the boys personalities.

Strangely, they both chose a non-smiling pose, which I think is a pity, since they both have dazzling smiles that light up a room.

Here are the finished drawings, framed and on my wall. I am quite pleased with them, and they have received some praise.
This was a lovely challenge, one of my favourites, and I would like to do some more drawing.
So if anyone wants a drawing done, just send me some photos in colour and B&W and perhaps I will have a go!