Robbing, thieving **&$@&*s!!

Well the big news for this week is that I had my purse stolen on Friday. It has £60 in it, £25 worth of taxi receipts that I hadn't yet claimed back on expenses, a book of first class stamps and a Cafe Nero loyalty card. I'm gutted to have lost the money, but I'm really disturbed that someone has been into my handbag. Well, at least it wasn't my credit cards, or else I would have had to spend the whole of Friday evening cancelling them. I hope whoever stole the purse doesn't get any pleasure from that money.

One thing that was bugging me earlier in the week was half a verse of a song I'd heard a long, long time ago kept going through my head. I'd heard it sung at a demo in the mid 1980s, and finally managed to track it down. I knew it was about The Diggers - a mid-17th century band of people who occupied waste and common ground and tried to grow food on it. Their egalitarian movement was unsuccessful and was suppressed quite quickly, but remains as one of the new occasions on which agrarian socialism was tried in Britain. I found a whole web page devoted to the song (isn't the internet marvellous?), including the lyrics and links to the many different versions that have been sung since it was written 35 years ago.
http://www.seedstar.net/undeep/diggers.html

Where I went
I went to The Vitality Show on Sunday. It is apparently the 10th anniversary of this health and well-being show and I remember it from the relatively early days when it was held in the Business Design Centre at Islington. It grew bigger and bigger over the years, and eventually took over the Grand Hall at Olympia, with thousands of visitors every year. This year's show seemed rather smaller, with less free samples to be had - perhaps due to the recession? And there were less people about too, which is perhaps something of a blessing. Emma and I had a foot massage, a back massage, examined our breasts with a special light and looked at some vibrators. We came away with some free samples, and made a couple of purchases, including some body cream from Brown Earth, which for my money makes the best body creams I've ever come across. Brown Earth's website is
http://www.brownearth.co.uk/

What I made
I finally made a start on the picture of the beaded butterfly I'm doing for my mother's birthday - and which has to be finished by next Saturday. I'd done two rows when I decided that the colour scheme I'd chosen wasn't working and so took it all out. I decided to rework it as a tropical butterfly. I hope she doesn't want any more of these bead embroidery pictures - it's just not something I really want to do at the moment and it's taking time away from stuff I do want to do - like the beaded floral filigree scarf. In metal clay class I made a pair of textured silver flower earrings and also a paid of earrings with little spirals stamped into the clay. I fired the first one and then clumsily knocked something over onto the second one just before firing - and it broke into four pieces. I have stuck them together with metal clay paste, but I don't know if they'll stay stuck during the firing process. More of this later.

What I read
I'm ploughing my way through Frank Harris's biography of Oscar Wilde. There was outrage at the time it was published because so much of it was a pack of lies, and because it was upfront about why Oscar had been convicted and sent to prison. I don't know enough about the fine details of the lives of the main protagonists to catch Mr Harris out in a lie, and even for the time I don't think that he is particularly clear about the nature of Oscar's "crime" -he just keeps talking about rumours of Oscar's unsavoury reputation for "sexual viciousness" and that some men would not speak to him or go to parties etc where they knew he would be. But what does come across very strongly is that Frank Harris was an extremely spiteful man.

What I learned this week
Always, always keep you handbag properly fastened shut, particularly in crowded public places.