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I am a NLP Master Practitioner and always encourage greater confidence and motivation in students, helping with focus, writing skills and creativity. I use anchoring techniques to improve the quality of learning enjoyed by students and encourage greater independence of thinking and expression.
My skills as an English Tutor with over twenty years experience teamed with my NLP training have increased my awareness of highly effective methods of improving spellling, revision techniques and writing.

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Tea For Two (L'Artisan Parfumeur Type)

Warm fragrance of lapsang souchoung tea vapours with its smoky, woody aroma. A blend of spiciness, smokiness of slowly brewed tea. Notes of aniseed, gentian, bergamot, ginger, cinnamon, honey and vanilla

 

 

One of my favourites at the moment. Sumptious and arresting! Goes wonderfully well with her mexican vanilla which leaves an rich exotic trail wherever you may chose to go! Even supermarkets are transfromed!

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grand-father clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.

 

I was lucky enough to be introduced to this Eudora Welty story whilst enjoying an excellent Get Into Reading ( GIR) day hosted by the University of Bolton.  The story held everyone and looking at it again today, the brilliance  of the tale remains undiminished. It reads as both an allegorical and 'local' narrative, and Welty's representation of the solitary Phoenix, is intimate and tender. Our eyes and ears alight cinematically on the figure as she comes into view and hearing, treading through a landscape respected for its natural familiarity and challenges. For dialogue is everywhere in the story. Phoenix is listening to her own voice within as well as hearing all the voices without.

The story seems to have a physical affect upon the reader too as we move with Phoenix along the 'worn path' towards a destination undisclosed until the final stages of the narrative. So the story has  its own 'pulse'..it is alive with the wonder of Phoenix's ongoing 'dialogue' with a journey she has carried out before, but which for me seems final on this occasion as there appears a 'lastness' which is palpably present here.

Perhaps the  idea of a journey at Christmas time may seem a little forced, but the story transcends any cliche. We identify strongly with this feisty, focussed woman and her trials matter to us; we care. The story celebrates determination and life!

I admire the ambiguity of the tale as well. Why does her hair smell like 'copper' and how near to Phoenix would we have to be to know this? Colour proliferates in the story. It is acknowledged everywhere which is why the overall impression seemed one of wonder and communion. The journey is a metaphor perhaps but primarily it is a neccessay gift for the sick grandson, living or dead. Phoenix is respecting something within and without herslelf which is literally bigger than anything else. And that is love. the journey is a demonstration of unconditional altruistic love and as the woman nears her goal( the city with the hospital) every obstcale is overcome and swept aside.

Even the 'blue' eyes seem positive in the story. For whilst they are most likely blue with the untreated damage of cataracts, Welty's representation of her heroine seems more transcendent. Everything can be reconciled or redeemed, because Phoenix is a 'beyond' character. Even the white hunter who tries to intimidate Phoenix evaporates as a threat. She has seen more than he can ever threaten her with.

Pathos can become transmuted alchemically into something larger. Perhaps what I am trying to get at is the way that the story moved beyond pity or charm ( or mourning?) and manages to find something else, more enduring and irresistible. When her stick taps out her progress 'like a solitary bird' we are aware of her improvisation and ability to survive and negotiate her winding path through the trauma of American history.  For everything is something else too, and this metamorphosis and slippage between being one thing and another anticipates the visionary techniques of Toni Morrison in her Pulitzer prize winning novel Beloved. When the 'as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead'..suffering and age are not fixed and irredeemable. Fpr the gaze which alights on Phoenix is filled with loving possibility..or perhaps it is love that creates such possibilities, such wonderful 'as if' reframes and similes.

And it doesn't matter if the images are elusive to our understanding for they communicate the wonder of another human being who is in turn suffused by wonder at nature and her own relationship with nature and her own kin.

A gift of a story! Remarkable  and the You tube interview with Eudora Welty and warm and inspiring too.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, Our deepest fear is that we are poweful beyond measure. It's our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the universe. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking, so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of the universe that is within us. It's not just in some of us: it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. And as we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Almodovar gave us a Russian doll of a film: Here Mateo Blanco's cine-biography showcased the making of his 'Cruz masterpiece;' a clear homage to Hepburn and Monroe, an entire genre even. As the plot unfolds the embryonic masterpiece is apparently stillborn through the expose of a highly charged, investigative and destructive docu-film. The rationale behind this 'embedded' film simply a failed attempt at exercising sexual power (Ernesto). What this subterfuge did forge was the emergence of Blanco's alter-ego, the ironically 'sightless' Harry Caine, Blanco's apparently doomed self. Finally, we share the restorative freedoms, new sight of the phoenix-like " Girls and Suitcases," a film having all the power of re-making old embraces and building new ones in Blanco's seemingly broken life. This tongue-in-cheek film encapsulated the power to revive hope and joy through its re-mastering; Blanco embraces the new vision of his ear to remaster the film, in a sense shaping something somehow more fresh than the creative vision of the eye.  It is here that the vengeful ex-lover gifts son to father and father to son as the most central and restorative creative embrace.

 

By a very happy accident I found this wonderful Ebay shop where lots of Jo Malone perfumes ( and others)are reproduced for a fraction of the original price. The scents are superb and this one is Mrs Timberlake's favourite along with her China Blossom which echoes Bond No 9's China Town which retails in Selfridge's for £120!

Try them...I wore this Japanese Blossom the other day and walked around a shop chasing my own scent..so delicious and hypnotic it proved. Narcissism perhaps - but a WOW in a bottle and such good value that you can have a whole layering range without breaking into a £20...

Fabulous!

Mrs Timberlake's on Ebay can brighten even the most sombre day!

"Fleurs Sanguines" with Japanese Ume Plum Blossom
3ml Glass Attar Bottle

'Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field - I'll meet you there.'

A fabulous feast for the eyes and heart. Del Toro's creature feature surprises at every turn. Visually it is a romp through the so many 'what ifs' of cultural references that the audience are dizzy with the fizzy imagination of the director of Pan's Labyrinth. 

Never will the apparently innocuous 'tooth fairy' remain neutral. These creatures are animated denture vultures. The early scene which is suggestive of New York's Sotheboy's is 'hellish' in the extreme and had my kids and I writhing in our seats...

The discovery of the Troll Market beneath Brooklyn Bridge is like something from Bosch and Carmina Burana!! The assembled team accompanying Hellboy on his mission to save the human world from the revenge of the elves combines an aquatic telepathic empathic guy called Abe and a Coco Chanel-look-alike pyrotechic heroine pregnant by Hellboy himself...and a robotic 'German' creature who has a few telekinetic surprises! Lovely moments including Abe and Hellboy's beery singalong to Barry Manilow's 'can't smile without you' which chases away the melancholy of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto...

The vengeful Prince and his good twin sister reminded me of Poe's unfortunate siblings the crypt-contaminated Ushers and this I am sure was intended being representative of the range and daring of Del Toro's imagination.

We loved it!! Now to dig out Hellboy..never seen...

No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much energy in your country
Is spent developing the mind
Instead of the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
But to everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
In your heart and in the world
Work for peace
And I say again
Never give up
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up