Private view

My getting-big-littlies

When I was in Budpaest, nearly two weeks ago now, my getting-big-littlies went to a private view!

All dressed up to the nines they went off after school to a local bank ,for the opening of an exhibition of their, and others’, works of art.

I was so disappointed to miss this occasion, now the third exhibition of my clients’ artworks. It was the first that had press coverage and a proper flyer! And I missed it!

Take a look here and pick out a Christmas present for someone:

http://www.behinderte-nuernberg.de/sonstiges/bilderpraesentation.html

In the photographs above you can see on the title page of the flyer a painting by the eleven-year-old autistic child who draws and paints, bakes and plays with me and more,  every Tuesday afternoon. 

We are getting on so well these days that I will be soon writing a whole blog dedicated to our lovely sessions.

A trip down a book-lined memory lane

   Lanterns in Hong Kong, last year

A few of my books from years-gone-by

Making lanterns with Grandma!

I was Google Imaging Andy Pandy. I wanted to know if his blue and white all-in-one suit had a bit of red bric-a-brac trim on the hat. I questioned, while googling, how I actually knew at all that his suit was blue and white because I only ever saw him on Watch with Mother in different tones of grey on a black-and-white TV!

I expect that he featured in a comic book at some time, or that there was an Andy Pandy Christmas Annual. We always got a heap of annuals for Christmas, perhaps we had that one too.

I found an Andy Pandy picture and discovered that there was no red to be seen, and at the same time I discovered lots of other Watch with Mother You Tube clips to watch.

A while back I watched Tales of the River Bank and The Wooden Tops, but today I discovered another, Picture Book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE9dsOu3oE8&feature=related

I have the Picture Book book that is shown at the very end of this clip but I had not realized before that it accompanied this programme.

As I watched this show with the proper BBC lady, with her sausage-dog, showing us so precisely how to make paper lanterns, I was suddenly six years old again. I realized that I had watched this very programme with my grandmother at her house. The only place where my sister and I were able to watch Watch with Mother was in the private living-room of my Grandparent’s public house, the Pineapple Hotel.

I also realized that it was because of this programme that garlands of pretty wallpaper-paper lanterns were brought out annually to decorate the front and the back smoke-rooms of the pub.

Not only did my sister and I watch the lovely BBC Picture Book lady with Grandma but went on to produce strings of paper lanterns to decorate her home and ours. I found one of said lanterns lurking in the box-room at my Dad’s house the last time I was home!

Guess what we will be making at work next week!

More bits -in-between for conductors

A favourite "bits-in-between" at the Petö Institute, Türö Rúdi and cappuccino

Despite my never-ending list of conductive posting that are floating around in my head or in note-form in my notebooks, I just have to write a bits-in-between-for-conductors piece.

I love recording first-time experiences. I actually have a book where I try to remember to write them all down.

Sometimes I make a point of actually doing something that I have never done before just because I have never done it before and that is now I got to be at a Tupperware Party on Saturday night.

Such parties were a part of my growing up. I think that there was even one at my house once when I was very little. Although I cannot imagine my Mum’s doing it more than just the once! Even so Tupperware for mixing Yorkshire pudding has long been the most used item in the family kitchen in Norwich.

The joke’s on me

For me and my art student friends in the 1970s, Tupper-parties were a standing joke, but really, deep down, we would have loved to have given one, or even just attended one, only because of the anachronistic qualities we saw in it.

They did not fit into our life-styles any more than the huge art school that we attended fitted to the small Surrey town where it was situated.

A week ago I received an email from a friend that said:

“On 3.12 I will give a Tupperware Party at mine. Sounds odd, it is too, somehow, but I am curious about it!

Do you want to come? It will be a pure ladies-evening and certainly has the potential for being very funny!”

It appeared that she found the Tupperware Party phenomenon slightly peculiar too so I thought this is probably the opportunity to try it out.

So I went

And while I was there I did an awful lot of observation!

A brand new world opened up before my eyes, a world of plastic boxes.

I was amazed at the amount that some people knew about Tupperware and how much interest they can have in containers for storing food.

It is an interest that has been sustained for fifty years in Germany and since 1946 in America. I questioned how the business can survive when most items have a thirty-year guarantee. I am still using the metal cheese-grater that my grandmother bought when she set up home in the 1920s. It is metal not Tupperware, it had no need for a guarantee, it is not vivid purple or bright green and I have no intention of replacing it with another.

I remember from my childhood, a Tupperware salad bowl for picnics and a salt and pepper set. They were in pastel greens and yellow. At Saturday’s party the kaleidoscope of colours was something out of this world, so gaudy, enough to put me off my food. Apart from this it was all incredibly expensive.

Another first

I have never owned a piece of Tupperware in my life but that will change soon, as each guest will receive a small, very small, fluorescent-pink lunch-box.  Perfect for keeping pins, beads or wobbly eyes in!

I still do not understand the attraction of Tupperware but if I was a mother with a family of six I might think otherwise.

I went with the purpose of finding out about the attraction of plastic boxes and also to purchase a Spätzle-maker for the children at work so we can make our own Bavarian cheese noodles/dumplings.

Attending Tupper-party is an absolutely brilliant thing to put on the Firsts list. I had such great fun watching people get excited over a plastic box.

There was of course more than just plastic boxes, there was a man, yes a man, there to demonstrate how to use some of the tools. Our male demonstrator was also a professional cook and had a good sales pitch because he not only knew how to use the tools he also knew how to cook. He really could tell us which items were good for what purpose.

We tried out the Spätzle-maker and tasted the products and we tried out an odd roller used for making lattice pasty.

These are the gadgets that caught my attention, rather than a lime-green, multifunctional lunch-box or a cerise set of tableware dishes!

Better things to party over

Thinking about all that oil being pumped out of the earth, to produce millions of plastic containers in the most poisonous-looking colours imaginable, convinced me that I am better off keeping my grandmothers cheese-grater until the end of its or my life.

However, my friend had been right, it had been quite good fun discovering together what I Tupperware Party really is and it was in reality not much different to the pictures from the 1960s that I looked at online. In the end we decided however, that next time an underwear party might be even more fun!

Notes

Tupperware -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware

CE books in China

"The Big Buddha"

One year to the day and still enjoying the excitement

One year ago today I was in Hong Kong for the 7th World Congress on Conductive Education.

During the months before the congress I worked very hard to prepare my first book so that it could be launched there. It was launched and was well received. You can read about it here:

http://www.susie-mallett-booksandmore.com/

I have been working on books Two, Three and Four all this year but none of these had reached the printing press, until today.

It was just a nice coincidence that this morning, on the anniversary of Hong Kong 2010, I had a meeting with the designer of that first book to discuss the second in the series. This will be a joint project with one of my clients and we hope it will be in print ready to be launched at a conference in Germany, in March 2012.

I just arrived back home from that meeting to discover, amongst my emails, that yet another book story. 

Another book is about to be launched!

Last year when I was in Hong Kong I was approached by SAHK (formerly the Spastic Society of Hong Kong) in regards to translating my first book into Chinese. We made plans.

I heard today that the translation is finished, a preface has been written and the book is in print, ready to be launched and distributed at a conference in Shanghai that begins on 26th December.

As I said the excitement of my trip to Hong Kong just goes on and on and on!

I wish I could be in Shanghai to see the launch of that Chinese version of Book One. I am relying on others to send me a photograph or two for my blog!

With many thanks to Ivan for making my day today!

In the Mária Hári Library at the PAI

“Look who's sneaked in!”

I was in the library at the PAI last Monday really enjoying being with András Petö’s books.

At first I was working in a meeting room, working at a desk beside the book case full of writings by, and books that were owned by, Dr Andras Petö.

I had to relocate when a group of people involved in conduction from all over Europe, wanted to use the room.

I moved with all my reading material to another part of the lovely Mária Hári library and got buried in the books again. Imagine my surprise when I looked up for a moment to take a deep breath before starting again and saw that I was sharing the space with Mickey Mouse!

Of course I captured the moment on camera. He is a very old Mickey Mouse, who stands beside  Tom and Jerry, next to the television in the children’s corner of the library.

Lots of big, old books

Frans van Mieris, Der Ältere Trinkende Paar

Jan Steen, Der Violinspieler in der Schenke

There have been two sets of books added to the AP book shelf since I was last in the library:

Volumes 1-15, Nagler‘s Neues allgemeines Kunstler Lexikon, Schwarzenber and Schuman Varlag, Berlin

and

Nine volumes on European art, from the Kurt Wollf Verlag, Berlin.

These books that were discovered in an antique-book shop in London last year, 2010, when the owner of the shop, who purchases stock from Germany and Austria, contacted the Petö Institute after finding the Ex Libris of András Petö inside the front cover of some of the volumes.

It was lovely to handle these volumes knowing that they had adorned AP’s shelves in Vienna. I could not help wondering whether the backs of some of them were broken in several places because these were AP’s favourite works of art or whether it was wear and tear from other owners or from travelling here and there over the last 70 years.

Who knows?

As with many things associated with András Petö, we can only speculate and create even more myths about him.

I heard many stories while I was in Budapest last weekend told by people who knew AP, I also read poems about him and writings by him. 

We can do nothing but guess

Do I get a deeper understanding of this man as I hear and read all of this? 

Or do I just form my own image of him, just as many other people have done in the past?

I will keep on reading and asking questions and my own personal ideas will develop on who the man was who developed a method of conductive upbringing, who appears to have been interested in human nature and its development.  I will read about the man who was influenced by the arts and philosophies of many countries, a man who wrote about the works of numerous doctors, scientists and therapists. I hope that I will continue to hear about the man who shouted till he was red in the face, who was so kind to the children, in a brusque sort of way, but often impatient with adults. I  hope to hear more stories of  his kindness, his generosity and wide ranging interests and  hear about his abrupt no nonsense manner.

As I try to piece it all together the image that I form will still only be the myth of what I think AP was like. I will never really know. I will form an image that will no doubt also be influenced by my  personal understanding of conductive upbringing, by what I learnt from Maria Hári that in its turn  had been influenced by AP and others, and by how my work has developed over the past thrity years,

Is there anyone out there still alive who really knows who AP was, what he thought or believed in?

Does anyone apart from ourselves really know who we are?

Second Advent Sunday

It is time that I at least have an idea as to what I shall be sending this year with my Christmas greetings.

Yesterday I was wondering when the inspiration would come.

Today when a friend phoned I did a bit of market research. This particular friend must have received at least thirty Susie-Christmas-greetings, so I asked him about his favourites.

He told me: “The decorations are nice” but added “They take you so long to make though”.

I know that many friends save these decorations that I have made to hang year-after-year on the ir Christmas tree. That is just what I do too with all the handmade greetings that I have received , while hanging them up I enjoy thinking about these special people. I put things on my tree that I received as a four-year-old and still remember with affection, fifty years on, the people who gave them to me. Many of the presents came from friends of my Grandmother.

So a decoration it will be

I think it will have to be a painted decoration as this is the quickest method for me.  I have already made a prototype and prepared for a few more to experiment with before I hit on the one for the production line.

I hope that I come up to scratch again this year!

I remember meeting an Auntie a many years ago, who has sadly since died. She told me that she always waited in anticipation for the arrival of my letter at Christmas time. The family would discuss what I would come up with next!

The joy that this Auntie showed in "my works of art" still motivates me to keep on creating, even though sometimes I would love to be one of those who chooses from tthe many lovely, but expensive,  greetings cards on sale in the shops.

I always hope to be inspired during my summer or autumn holiday, then I would have time to paint to my heart’s content. It never happens that way and often my last minute cards arrive long after Christmas. Last year many got delayed on route from Hong Kong!

This year I endeavour to get them in the post so that they arrive before the end of 2011, with time left to be hung on the tree!