Cards: Playing, Tarot and Greeting

Playing Cards have always fascinated me. They have a long and interesting history, which I am not going to detail here, but if you are interested here is a resource. The development and evolution of the imagery used on playing cards is another interesting topic. Early playing cards often depicted images of animals, plants, birds and flowers. This clearly shows how humans are drawn to some universal imagery used not only on cards, but other forms of expression including photography, arts, crafts and even home decor.

Playing cards also proved to have other uses, due in part to their size and their relative cost when other paper sources were more expensive. In past times when a mother was left with little choice during difficult times she would sometimes abandon her baby outside a church or orphanage. Some babies were left with a playing card which might include their name and sometimes a few basic details like date of birth. It is believed that when the card was torn in half that would signify the mothers’ intention to return and collect her baby by matching up the torn cards when times improved for her. A romantic yet very tragic notion of a reunited family. I think this took place in European countries more than elsewhere. Playing cards were also used to help stiffen and reinforce covers of books in past times and this appears to be one the main reasons that many older examples of playing cards and their designs have survived. Everyone also knows how they have enhanced the magicians’ repertoire.

Playing cards are not without their controversy. There are numerous songs written and performed which include dire warnings about playing cards in churches, on Sundays, with the Devil or just playing certain card games in general. Even handling playing cards are considered by some to be dangerous, a belief which has been handed down through the ages. Then of course there are certain cards or suits which have acquired their own symbolism or meanings like the Ace of Spades (listen to Motorhead’s song about that one if you want to know more). Playing cards were also sometimes referred to as “The Devil's Bible or the The Devil's Picture Book”.

Tarot cards are thought to have derived from playing cards. They were originally intended to be used to play another type of card game, but they evolved and soon become embroiled with mysticism and fortune telling. This has led to a very jaded history. However, Tarot cards like playing cards have a wonderful history of how the imagery developed and there are some decks which have exquisite art depicted on them.

That brings me to one of my other passions. Greeting cards. They also have a long and varied history, but slightly less jaded than that of playing or Tarot Cards. Supposedly they date back to the ancient Chinese and Egyptian cultures and their popularity has grown.

Greeting cards express so much about humanity. Our need to communicate, reach out to people in time of need. Sending wishes to people when they are ill, as condolences, for birthdays, anniversaries or other special events. Recently there has been a surge in sending cards just to stay in touch or share a sentiment with someone. Then of course there is the explosion of e-card sites. I love some of the funny interactive ones.

However, as I have said before I love paper. I love the tactile feel of it. I love its’ relative permanence. I love that is can be manipulated and enhanced. I love that you can use it to create and record memories and visions of life. I do love the resurgence in hand made crafting of greeting cards and I am well pleased that the web has provided crafters and artists a resource to share their creations. It is inspiring and pleasing to see so much beautiful handiwork.

I don’t send many greeting cards personally, but I do create a few. Mostly I send them in parcels to my Mom and sister (Judith), who either use them for scrapbooking or to send to family and friends. Judith has sold a few in aid of charity at her school for various fund raising and has told me that she has a raised a few pennies to go to their various causes. I am including a few examples of recent cards I have made.

Miniatures

Have you ever noticed how time seems to whizz by as you get older? I wonder what Einstein would have to say about that. I am sure his theories will probably shed some light. Maybe I should do some research on it one day. It seems though that the older you get the more time speeds up. If you live a fairly modern capitalist lifestyle in the 21st century you pretty much know the routine. You spend way too many hours at work (notice how mostly overtime payments don’t exist in companies these days?), or you spend hours looking for a job. You take care of the family and do the run around: shopping, cleaning, cooking, organising and try to find some time for socialising. Mostly you get left with very little time for yourself. What do I mean about time for oneself? Well time when you get to relax, pursue hobbies and interests that appeal to you. Time to be alone, contemplate, think, pause and wonder at life and the world. The “de-stressors” of modern life. You have to work at making this time.

Now if you are like me then you probably would love to be paid for your hobby. Very few of us are that lucky. You have to be really good at your hobby to get paid well enough from it to make a decent living and then you have to be prepared to compromise so that it is marketable. I would like to be paid to read! Here is the catch though. I don’t want to read what is prescribed to me, I want to choose. I don’t want to edit it or critique it. I don’t want deadlines or pressures around reading. So there is the rub. No-one is going to pay you to read and then do nothing with it. It is solely and totally for your own enjoyment. It is completely selfish. It is pure pleasure. There are few pure pleasures in life that you can pursue without some strings attached. There is always a cost. So I will rather continue paying the cost of books than loose my freedom of choice. Yes I still love the printed media versions rather than the new digital versions. There is a romance about paper that is not replicated in the digital world. There is also a permanence that comes with printed books and to have a copy of beautiful artworks and images to look at and inspect on paper is a real pleasure that cannot be replicated on digital media (yet!).

In those moments when you want to contemplate and wonder at the world you also sometimes want to feel that you are in control. There is no real control. You merely find spaces and times where you feel more at peace with the out of control nature of life. It is in that space and time that I escape when I want to de-stress. For me that includes arts and crafts. One of my interests involves miniatures. I have a Dolls House, but as my home is a continuous state of being renovated there is no space for it. It currently lives safely boxed up in the loft. There are moments when I have sheer panic about what state it will be in when I am finally able to bring it out and play with it. Build it, decorate it, furnish it & alter it. It will be an on-going “Altered Art” project.
I do however have other projects to keep me busy. One of them that took my fancy was to create some miniature dance skirts.

Now the thing to know is that I cannot sew. In fact I am not really great at most domestic skills. I am probably pretty good at cleaning as it is pretty basic and doesn’t involve much skill. I still hate it though. I do it when I have to. I don’t know if that means I am lazy, but actually I am easily distracted from the household tasks. One minute I can be doing the dishes or washing and then I suddenly have a thought about something I want to try, like painting, card making or a planting scheme for my garden I want to research or try out. Even without the aforementioned sewing skills I still had this urge to create these skirts and they were burning in my mind. I had to get them created. In fact I am pretty pleased with how they turned out, so here they are.

Monkey business

My Mom has the strangest things happen to her. She lives in South Africa and I live in England. I phone every week to catch up with all the news and gossip. It is amazing that even when I call every second or third day she always has a story to tell.

My Mom is a great story-teller. Some of my fondest and earliest memories of childhood are about my Mom and stories. She loves books and reading and instilled the same love in my sister (Judith) and me. When we were younger and movies came on later on telly and they were age restricted she would always tell us the story-line of the good ones the next morning whilst driving us to school. It is amazing how she captured some of the nuances of the characters and atmosphere of those movies. They were often murder mysteries and I remembered her description of one so vividly that years later when I had forgotten the movie name and finally saw the film myself I was completely surprised to realise that I hadn’t seen the movie before even though it came with a sense of déjà vu! The movie was Gaslight. It is a powerful story of a young woman psychologically dominated by her husband. The story follows the wife who is alone in the house each evening, believing she's losing her mind: she can't explain the disappearance of familiar objects, the mysterious footsteps overhead or the ghostly flickering of living room gaslights.

The story for this week involves a monkey. My Mom lives at the beach and is currently in the process of selling her apartment. My Mom and sister share the apartment and they have decided mostly for health reasons to relocate closer to the rest of the family, which also happens to be a drier area and further away from the city and airports. As I said before my Mom is a “doer”. As soon as the decision was made she put the apartment on the market and contacted the estate agents to get the ball rolling the very next day. No time wasted. That was last week. Open house followed on Wednesday and now the estate agents have started bringing some prospective buyers around. In these challenging times my Mom realises that it may take a while to get her apartment sold, but she is doing all the things agents normally advise to help sell your home. Windows open so that there is a nice cool ocean breeze. No washing or laundry around (luckily she has a Laundromat facility in the apartment complex; otherwise she would never manage this one, her love of washing being previously noted!).

Yesterday a prospective buyer came to view the apartment and after viewing the apartment, my Mom took him downstairs to show him the garage and parking arrangements. Upon coming back upstairs she went into my sister’s bedroom and was confronted by a big grey monkey sitting in my sister’s window. She screamed in fight and tried to chase it from the room which scared the monkey too. The monkey leapt from the window onto my sister’s desk, knocked her papers and laptop flying. Then it jumped onto the TV and against the wall before heading out the front door. My Mom is not sure who was the most afraid her or the monkey. She did say that she was screaming! We did laugh when she was telling me, but she is very cross with the monkey and worried that children are feeding the monkeys which will encourage them to keep coming into homes. This is the second incident this week with cheeky monkeys coming into her apartment and it had never previously happened in the 8 years she has lived there.

Earlier this week she was shocked when her micro-chips (she only ever eats half of everything, Judith orders a plate of food and Mom eats half, actually probably a good way to diet!) left in the kitchen were stolen by a monkey and the empty box was left outside her front door. Evidence of the crime but no perpetrator in site that time.

It is Birthday morning in our house!

I have to start by clarifying that when I started this blog at 4:20am this morning it was the 27th of February in the UK. I notice however that my blog appears to have been on US time (I was still tweaking about with it and learning how to set it up!). So inevitably now Goblin appears to have had a birthday on the 26th. Well to set the record straight his birthday is the 27th of February (whatever time zone we are in).

Now strangely enough this is not the first unintended double birthday we have in our circle of family and friends. Mostly they occur because of errors. Antoinette my cousin/adopted sister has two birthdays 20th and 21st May. She was born on one day but her birth mother registered her birth on the other. YAY for Antoinette. Surprisingly she is now expecting twins, so another double birthday but in a different way for her to celebrate. Two birthdays are never a bad thing. Dave one of our friends has the honour of being born in a leap year on the 29th of February he celebrates his birthday on the 1st of March when it is not a leap year. I always celebrate his birthday on the 28th of February. I love that fact that there is so much debate and it winds Dave up about which is the correct day to celebrate his special day on. Gemma another friend loves birthdays and she takes the celebration of her birthday to the extreme. She starts in September when her birthday occurs and then insists that it goes on until December. Her reasoning is that it is her birthday and then Christmas – there are no other important events in between for her. I choose to tell her nearly every day that it is MY birthday just to make her laugh. I now even have an “It Is My Birthday” pin on my notice board. I love that pin. Gemma gave it to me.

Goblin has now been fortunate enough to get a double birthday albeit only in the virtual world of blogging. He won’t mind though as he will probably think he can have double the chocolate birthday cake. That brings me to chocolate and birthday cards. Goblin loves chocolate. He is a complete and total choc-a-holic! He is currently struggling to bring this demon under control. But to celebrate and appeal to his chocolate nature I made him this birthday card. It is from Maya and Rosco to their Daddy and inside the inscription reads: “Thank you for all the lap sleeps”. Yes it is one of their favourite spots.

I am surprised by how many birthdays I have actually remembered here. As most people who know me (including my mother) know I am rubbish at remembering birthdays. One year when I had forgotten her birthday she called me to say “I am having a nice day” to which I replied “Oh really why?” “Because it is my birthday she replied”. I had to roar with laughter and apologise for forgetting. Well done Mom for reminding me and keeping me in my place! I now have the 25th of November firmly etched in my mind.

Back to the importance of today. Here’s to you my darling Goblin, hope you have an awesome day and get well soon. I love you madly. Going into London is really not good for your health! Every time you get a cold and pass it on to the whole family. I am now off to get the birthday breakfast and then start baking your chocolate cake. If it comes out well it may get a picture on my blog as a reminder I can do it.

So why do I love Yorkies?

Well firstly let's just start by saying I know Maya and Rosco have the "evil eye" syndrome in that blog photo! But in my defence it is the most recent photo I took of them and I don't have any photo software editing packages. So that is it - the raw untouched photo. You get what you get sometimes in life and that includes "evil eye" photos!


When I lived in Africa I had two adorable Staffordshire Terriers. I don't have a photo of them here, but here is one I found on Wiki (yes I know, I know Wiki is not the best knowledge base!, but it was copyright free). However, I must add that this pic looks very similar to Rogue our bitch. She has a brother (different litters and two years apart in age), his name is Teddy. When we moved to the UK, Rogue and Teddy were given up for adoption to a lovely family who lived on a farm. We didn't know what kind of life we were coming to and decided if we couldn't afford to live somewhere with a nice big garden like they were used to it wouldn't be fair. Good thing too. We ended up living in flats for nearly 6 years without any gardens.

So when we decided it was time to add to our family again we did some research. We were looking to find a breed of dog that would fit in with our lifestyle and our home. The Yorkshire Terrier rated about 3rd highest in all the categories we identified as important to us. I can't even remember what the other two breeds were because every time I saw a picture of a Yorkie my heart melted.

We read all the negative info about adopting two dogs at the same time. We read all the horror stories about having two puppies together. We still went ahead and did it. We agonised over the decision and researched and read everything we could about how to make it work. We were determined to give them the best possible life, but we really wanted two. We decided to put in some serious hard work to make it a reality for us. I am so happy we did.

I couldn't imagine life without Maya and Rosco now. They are my pride and joy. We got them when they were 8 weeks old. They were such tiny lovely little bundles of joy. Their first day at home they were shy and timid. How heart-rendering that first night was when we put them to sleep in their crates (we decided to separate them and crate train them). They cried for ages. We persevered and I am so happy we did. They soon settled down and we continued to crate train them and we separated them in the house. One day my husband would have Maya and I would have Rosco, then we would swap the next day. Playing, training and teaching separately and limited time together. It was hard work! We did that for over 8 months and it really paid off. They developed individual personalities. They bonded with us and they are both pretty well behaved and love pleasing.

Why do I start these things?

Today Goblin turns 40. For some strange reason I think that affects me more than it affects him. I wanted to create something where I could record some thoughts and pictures of all the things that amuse and interest me (not many - so you won't really be that entertained here). Hence I decided to try "blogging" and see how I got on with it.

I suppose as Goblin and I get older I realise more and more how one's life can just rush past and suddenly you realise that you forget to take the time to keep diaries and all those endless photo's you took are not printed off or even in albums. That is what actually started it all off. Photos. Let me explain how they came back into importance in our life.

My Mom actually started it off after my Dad died. His death was sudden, traumatic and shocked our family to the core deeply. I think it took about a year before we even started mourning because we were in shock first. My Mom got angry! She started doing washing (it has always been one of her passions - don't ask me why). That was followed by the reclusive stage which lasted about 2 years. That was followed by the scrapbooking. My Mom is one of the "doers" in life. She always comes up with a plan or solution for any problem. She is the rock of the family. Everyone turns to her and in a country where phones are expensive and poverty levels high she is the queen of "Please call me" text messages. She always phones everyone in the family back when they send one of those! Usually it is followed by a request and she will spring into action and make a plan to solve a problem for someone or sort something out. So when my Dad died it was really hard to know that my Mom was shutting down and cutting herself off. She needed the time to start healing. She started scrapbooking. Till the wee hours of the morning. I think it helped her work through some of her anger. She created a "Death" album and started keeping a journal in it about life, pain, suffering and death. It doesn't have too many moments of joy in it, but it is a brilliant record of how challenging and hard life can be. Maybe one day she will start a "Life" album.

She has done numerous albums now. They are wonderful memories of the family which include all the newspaper clippings she has collected over the years of celebrations and moments we are proud of as a family. Of course there are the death notices too. She does have a wicked sense of humour though, because she included Elvis and Lady Di in her "Death" album. She told me this was because "Those are the only two celebrities I really liked and it was like they were part of our family. I don't like any of the others (celebrities) that much".

I realise this is now starting to sound a bit morbid and appears that we are trapped in the depths of despair, but that is not what it is like. We are like any normal family. We have happy and sad times. Good and bad things happen to us. We laugh and cry like everyone else. We are not unique or special, just as unique and special as every other person and family out there. We are complicated and simple like every other family.

I suppose it is just the challenging times that make you take stock and think about your life. Those moments are the ones that you look back on and see a point where you make decisions about how you want to live. You decide how you want to remember. That is what lies at the core of my blogging – life and how we live it. That is why I am going to start this online journal. My handwriting is awful and I know I will keep forgetting where I saved the file on my computer if I keep it private, so I decided to “blog”. If I forget where it is I am sure I can search Google and it will help me find it again ;)