Saturday 16 March 2024

Sunday morning early (ish)

I switched on during my first tour of the bungalow to look at my e mails.    I had some lovely photographs of their new house from friends who have moved from Devon countryside into Sussex and I was so pleased to see that they are surrounded by trees and open countryside.  How good that they are still in such a lovely area.

After twenty odd years of living in quite a lonely spot I had to move when the Farmer died.   And being alone meant living near to other people.   My back garden looks over the fields and I can't see another building - just one very large ash tree which the rooks who flew over the farm each morning have chosen for their late afternoon roost before flying over one more field, then the farm and then finally to  the very large rookery which I suppose one can say they call 'home'.

I am on the road into the  estate and luckily the 'plot' opposite my bungalow is at present 'wild land'.  I expect it will be built on eventually but at present it has a silver birch and a row of hazel 'trees' along the back edge and a few ash saplings here and there (cut back every year to head height) and plenty of 'hillocks' covered in grass.   Here and there are clumps of daffodils just coming into bloom.

Now that I can no longer go out,  this bit of 'open country' presided over by a little red mail box on a black stalk, is a great asset.   Doesn't make up for the swallows who nest every year in the barns around the farm or the house martins who nest under the eaves of the house or the little owl who is diurnal and usually watched us from the same gate  post on our morning walk, or the one song thrush who at this time of the year sang my favourite song.

I have spoken before about the neighbourhood cats and how they stalk among the hillocks on the waste ground - on the look-out for mice, voles - who knows what lives on the plot.   Don't know whether they ever catch anything but they do a lot of sitting very still in one spot and then doing a 'balletic' pounce.

But - surprise surprise - what  did I see this morning at around 6am?   The sky was blue (a rarity at the moment), the air was still, the sun was up and as I drew back the sitting room curtains guess what I saw???

Hovering over the grassy hillocks opposite was a BARN OWL!   And as I watched he pounced and came up with a tiny rodent in his beak and then he was away swooping behind the bungalows on the other side of the road.   Was he the barn owl who used to check the paddock hedge late each evening (we could watch him from our kitchen window)?  Maybe not - it is seven years since I left.   But he has certainly started my Saturday morning off on the right foot.

Oh and just as an afterthought = yesterday, March 15th=  was the 72nd anniversary of my first marriage and the beginning of 39 very happy years with Malcolm.  And Malcolm would have been 100 in late April this year.

Nothing is forever - make the most of every day.






Thursday 14 March 2024

Spring sweet spring.......

......is the year's pleasant thing - well it goes something like that anyway.

Well friends, however you look at it, next Wednesday is the Vernal Equinox, the day when the day and night are both approximately the same length.   Of course this will be all 'mucked up' shortly when we get British Summer Time and have to get used to getting up in the semi dark again for a week or two.

You, like me, may well still be wearing two sweaters, your room thermostat like mine, may well be set at 21  and the radiator may be  hot so that you can keep putting your cold hands on it (pause in writing while I do just that).

The North Yorkshire Community Policeman is still warning us about where there is floodwater and reminding those who drive not to risk driving through it.

We are supposed to be top in the Species Chain but really I do sometimes question it.   We need the calendar on the wall to tell us it is Spring. And unless there is a sudden dramatic change our behaviour will not change on the first (or second) day of Spring.  We will still be well-wrapped up in our winter jackets.

Gardeners may be out there 'topping' the grass on their lawns with a first gentle mow but they may well be nipping out between showers (and leaving ruts in the grass with their mower wheels).

But my flowers in the garden know Spring is coming - primroses, tete a tetes, hellebores, mauve striped crocus, dark purple crocus and a very pretty pink flower which creeps about my garden as it will every year popping up in different places - all going ahead as per usual.

And Mrs Blackbird is sitting - us girls aren't daft you know - a snug nest in mid hedge is probably the warmest place to be in this wind (from the East and  blowing across a North Sea before it reaches here).

The sky is full of heavy black clouds, the East wind is cutting cross the top of all the flowers, the sun is unlikely to show its face today around here and everyone passing has the hood up on their anorak and every dog passing is still wearing its fashionable winter coat.

And I am signing off and going to make a cup of hot chocolate to drink with my kit kat.   So I'll sign off with what I usually say at this time of year (especially for you Tom)

"Loveliest of trees the cherry now 

 is hung with bloom along the bough.

 and all along the woodland ride

 is wearing white for Eastertide"

                                        A E Housman

                                    'A Shropshire Lad'. 

****

My son bought me the collected poems of Roger McGough for Mothering Sunday.  Sifting through it after writing this I came across a poem called 'Trees cannot name the seasons'.   He says it so much better than my post above does.   Google it - it is beautiful.  Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                        

Monday 11 March 2024

Mountains out of molehills grow!!

 Yes I am afraid that tends to be the side effect of time on one's hands.   Here is the tale - laughable in the end and ridiculous.

Yesterday, Sunday, Mothering Sunday, a day when my usual Sunday visitors were otherwise engaged, dawned cold,dull and promising to never get 'properly' light.   My carer came and went, hot choc poured and two biscuits, false flames on my electric fire for comfort, table lamps on to make it look a bit warmer, central heating up a notch, I settled down with the Sunday papers ( three quarters of which always get put in recycling unread!)

My son was due to come round to move my Sim card into my new phone and to sit and chat for a while.  We had a lovely chat.   Changing the Sim failed - we need some sort of adaptor which he duly ordered and is coming today (good old Amazon Prime) - yes I know some of you will disapprove of using Amazon but believe me - when you are slowly dying off, are immobile more or less, never feeling quite 100% - it is wonderful to need/want something, press a button and know that that something will arrive within 24 hours.

All was lovely and peaceful - we had a lovely morning.   It was as I closed the door after his departure that I noticed it.   Slap bang outside my front door, on the edge of the lawn, there was a large dog 'turd'!!

I can't bend down to remove it.   It had to stay until either another visitor arrived or my evening carer came.

How had it got there?                                           

Had a stray dog wandered up my lawn?   I never see a dog wandering unattended.   Most of the dogs I see are expensive pedigree dogs (almost a compulsory attachment on my estate) so I doubt it.

Had one of the dog walkers taken umbrage at the way I sit up straight in my chair when a dog walks past, so that I can see it properly.   Ageing eyesight means I get a clearer view.  And I take such pleasure in seeing the dog, guessing its breed (not always easy as there is such variation).  Did the walker perhaps mistakenly think I was making sure any pooh on my patch was picked up and bagged?  Had he thought ' I'll show the nosey old baggage that it is nothing to do with her'?

And so dear reader I spent most of the afternoon (between TV Crufts) pondering and making the whole episode into a mountain of anxiety.   Was he going to keep doing it?   How did he get up to my front door unseen?

By the time J, my evening carer, came I had got quite 'hot under the collar' about the whole episode.  How long would the aggravation go on for?   How could I let he or she know that I meant them no harm but just loved looking at their dogs?

J looked at the offending turd in the gathering dusk and came up with the comment, "That's not a dog turd - its more like cat pooh!"

Had one of W's Bengal cats been around?  W is often my evening carer and they often follow her here - she only lives about six doors away.  On well that's a relief then - just a one off - can stop worrying.

As J went after helping me into my dressing gown she was armed with a pooh bag to pick up the offending object on her way out.   I was much relieved  and reassured that it was not after all the start of a 'hate campaign' against a nosy old bag who should find something better to do than be sitting there on permanent 'pooh watch'.   As I sat back in my chair much happier the sitting room door opened and J held up the offending 'turd'.

It was a brown curly leaf.

                                             

 


Wednesday 6 March 2024

Human Nature

Strange thing Human Nature.  As my father used to say 'Everyone's funny except me and thee and thee's a bit peculiar'.

Yes - in the main we have all got two arms, two legs, a head and a body and all the dangly bits that Nature added to make certain we don't die out as a species. But there the similarity ends.

Reading The Times this morning over my "after breakfast" coffee just endorsed this view.  Do you remember the (very good) 1995 TV adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice"?   If you watched it and you are a woman then I hardly think you need reminding of the moment when Mr Darcy walked out of the lake towards Elizabeth with his very wet fancy shirt sticking to his body.  (Pause here while I compose myself - I might be 91 but some things keep going to the bitter end).

But what endorses my view on Human Nature is that at a Sale in London this week that same shirt (dry and just an ordinary rather fancy shirt but without Colin Firth inside it)was bought by somebody (wait for it) for £25,000!

If you had £25,000 going spare what would you do with it?   Invest it?  Buy Premim Bonds?  Give it to a needy friend?  Give it to your child towards a deposit on his/her first home?  Buy a new car?

I could go on with that list for ever couldn't I?  Money buys THINGS.  Money doesn't stop wars.  Money doesn't stop young people dying.  Money doesn't stop Homelessness or people starving all over the world.   There is truth in the statement that 'the rich get rich and the poor get poorer'.

And would you believe that just because Victoria Beckham had to use 'Cool Crutches' when she went to the Paris Fashion show, same black 'Cool Crutches' searches  rose by 350 % and sales increased by  70%.

Try explaining that to a starving Palestinian, or a homeless young man sleeping under a leaking shelter on a pouring wet night, or a man or woman from Afghanistan who has struggled across half the world and is crossing the Channel as I write this, in a boat not much more seaworthy than a child's plastic paddling pool.

Human Nature has a lot to answer for.

 

Friday 1 March 2024

Love

 I apologise for the absence, not in any way anything to do with my illness but simply to do with not having time.   I cannot begin to tell you how busy I have been this week - some days having as many as seven or eight visitors; it would be so good to ration them but, sadly, life doesn't work like that.

Far back in the "innocent "days of my childhood and teenage years, as a country child in a county which might be the second largest (Lincolnshire) in the country but probably because of its isolation and its large amount of land reclaimed from the sea, was - in pre-War days - I guess rather lagging behind in its efforts to 'keep up' with the then 'modern' thinking, Leap Year to us just coming into the idea of "boys" as something interesting rather than something to avoid was important.

(I meant this post to be put on on the 29th February but I am a day late and apologise.)  I think we rather thought that a woman could actually 'propose marriage' to a man rather than the other way round on this one day every four years.

Was this common to the whole country in those far off days or was it just in our "backward" neck of the woods? (And please don't tell me we weren't  backward in coming forward.   Our total lack of sophistication when compared with teenagers in large towns and cities was no mean thing.)

I was lucky (well I consider I was) in that I married a well-travelled, sophisticated man ten years older than me.   He pulled me up by my shoelaces so to speak.   He taught me that Romance, Love, call it what you will, is something quite different from the images we were brought up with.   One should not get carried away by a bunch of red roses on St Valentine's Day, by a mental image of happy ever after once the knot is tied.  As I said in my "poem" of a few weeks ago in this blog - small everyday things add up to more than any "gaudy bunch of red roses".

Which brings me to today's title and to Matthew Parris's Notebook in this week's Times.  One paragraph "Poetry in Motion" in which he talks about 'love hearts and schmaltzy verses" being alright in their place but forget St Valentine, forget that extra Leap Year Day.   What really matters is a much more sensible way to see "Love" as expressed in the ordinary, everyday things.   As  he says -  "fixing a leaky cistern in the toilet" or "emptying the dishwasher" or in my poem bringing me the first golden marsh marigold from the beck, or a beautiful partridge feather picked up in the field.

LOVE is such a funny word isn't it?   We use the word so often:  "I love to see the rooks flying over a backdrop of a pink dawn"; "I love my dog so much - I can't imagine life without him by my side", "  I do love Seville Orange Marmalade on Sourdough Toast with my morning coffee".

The word has become too commonplace.   'Living together' I understand has now become  more popular than 'Getting married.'   'Easier' say the cynics - no great torment of divorce if it doesn't work out.   Very true and perhaps the way forward.   In my day many, many couples stayed together not because they  still loved one another but because a woman leaving her husband and taking their children with her was just not possible in those days before child benefits and suchlike.

The young seem to view life, having children, finding a partner, everything to do with the progress through life, in a totally different way from how it was viewed when I was young.   I am not for one moment suggesting this is a retrograde step.  Far from it.  I think the young in this respect have a far more realistic view of life than we did (if we thought about it long term at all - I am not sure we did).  I am reminded of the last verse of Robert Herrick's 'Gather ye Rosebuds' which is advice to a young lady:

So be not coy, but use your time

And while ye may, go marry.

For having once but lost your prime

Ye may for ever tarry!

May we never return to that kind of thinking.   Womens' Lib may still have some way to go but don't let's go backwards.

St Valentine's Day, Leap year, may now be viewed almost with amusement.   But 'real' love is more about cooking the dinner if you are first in, sticking the washer on when you see a pile of school football gear piled on the kitchen floor by an open washing machine door, putting the bins out.   Oh and the odd bunch of flowers/box of chocs/surprise meal of your partner's favourite food never comes amiss.   Let's keep things in proportion.


Monday 26 February 2024

Today's the day

 At least it is for those two tete-a-tete daffodils who, at the first hint of a sun-ray reaching them, decided to open their petals to greet it.   Sadly, by the time they really managed it the sun had gone behind a cloud as it crossed over on its way out to sea(I hope),  The weather man says there will be the 'odd bright spell' this afternoon so perhaps they won't live to regret it.

I am still quite well and enjoying a somewhat limited life - but as that situation has approached stealthily rather than happen overnight I have gradually adapted to it.

An hour's chat morning and evening as my Carers scurry around doing their allotted chores - lots of laughs and a good start and end to the day. (7am morning shift and 6pm evening).   I am still able to put myself to bed thank goodness and need only to remove my dressing gown and slippers.

The middle of the day passes quickly - various friends pop in (yesterday T and S came for the usual Sunday chat with tea and kit kats and as they went D and J, my gardeners and friends, arrived with a very large bunch of roses.   Red ones, yellow ones and apricot ones.   This morning they  have all opened out and the apricot ones in particular are an absolutely luscious colour.)

Already this morning soon after J, my morning carer, had gone, friend and carer K arrived on her way back from Tesco with some bananas to top up my fruit bowl.   She arrived in windy weather, cold with bright sunshine, and stayed a quarter of an hour for a quick chat before going home to put her frozen stuff in the freezer before it began to defrost.  Now it is cloudy and light rain is falling.

When I read Rachel and Derek I feel I shouldn't complain about a little rain shower - really poor old East Anglia has suffered greatly throughout February  (and I rather think most of the winter) with awful rain.   I suppose it is the price they pay for sticking out into the North Sea and catching the worst of the cruel East Wind.   I don't know about them but I always feel rather smug up here in the North of the country when the weather map shows horrible weather in the South and sunshine up here (a somewhat rare occurrence though).

Nothing much to tell you today.   Last evening, after two lovely visits from friends, I was very tired indeed.  I made myself a milky drink and dozed until time for Channel 4's 'Great Pottery Throwdown' - last night was a real cliff-hanger with tears never far away from the contestants left in the competition (and I suspect many of the viewers too).

Today is quiet so far.   Mondays usually are these days but thinking back to my young days when Dad lit the copper before going off to work and Mum slaved away in the wash-house washing heavy twill sheets (no non-iron fabrics in those days) and lugging them in the clothes basket down to the line across the lawn to peg them out after first putting them through the big old mangle with wooden rollers (keeping a close eye on the weather) - Lincolnshire, the second largest county in England, carries on North from East Anglia and is not noted for blissful weather on Mondays - in those far off days the obligatory 'wash day'.

Saturday 24 February 2024

B.B.B.*

 It is a glorious "Spring" February day here - bit chilly with it (sharp frost this morning) but a beautiful, unblemished blue sky.   All the birds in the area are singing their beaks off and every single flower out in my garden is singing.

I couldn't resist a walk round the garden so I put on a topcoat and walked out onto the patio (in my slippers!).   All the golden crocus were out - and the snowdrops, the winter primroses in all  their bright finery and two tete-a-tete daffodil buds, sitting next to one another, are having a discussion about whether to open or not.

One clump of very large purple crocus had been decimated by the frost.   Three of the flowers were laid flat on the soil, cut down by it.   They were close to the edge and I could reach them - each had a long white 'stalk'- almost inviting me to pick them.   My farmer loved purple crocus so I brought them in and put them in a specimen vase by his photograph in the sitting room and lo and behold within five minutes the flowers had opened wide - their bushy stamens are thick with golden pollen and they look superb.  I don't expect they will last long.  That is three that my solitary bumble bee will miss if he calls again today.

On a wider front I am reading again -dibbing into here and there - a book my son bought me years ago - 'BETTER THAN FICTION ' edited by Don George.   It is 32 true travel tales from great fiction writers (Isabel Allende, Joyce Carol Oates, Jan Morris and many more).   Over breakfast this morning I read 'A visit to San Quentin' by Joyce Carol Oates.   Not jolly reading by any means but her standard of writing was so brilliant that I was there with her.  If you like travel writing give it a whirl - I'm sure you'll enjoy it.  

As I look out of the window nothing much is moving.   A couple of hedge sparrows are hopping along the top of the wall and - as usual - Mr Blackbird is showing off in the hawthorn.   Incidentally I asked about Hazel catkins and Derek kindly let me know that on the Reserve they are full out.   If you are reading this Derek, the sun is really bright on the hazels I can see from my sitting room window and here too the catkins are waving in the breeze.

Yes - Spring is winning the battle.  Enjoy your day.

*In case you are wondering B.B.B. in the title stands for "Big, Bright and Blowsy" - a good description of my three purple crocus.

Friday 23 February 2024

Transitoriness

Chatting with Derek on e mail this morning about sleeping - how long we sleep   Thinking about things after reading his e mail, I got into another 'stream of consciousness'(see yesterday's blog about such things) which has gone on all morning more or less.

I did the Mind Games, read my e mails, cursorily read bits of the Times which were not depressing, but all the time I was thinking on and off about the transitory nature of life. .

Last night I watched 'Dynasties' on BBC 2.   It was about Macaque monkeys and their way of life.   About who was the boss of the troop (always a male of course but then they are bigger and stronger and that is what matters in the animal world).  About how you really had to fight to be the boss and when you got there it was a constant strain to keep there.   You needed eyes not only in the back of your head but on each side too.  And when a male who was bigger/stronger/more wily picked the right moment it was very easy to be toppled off your perch.

Then this morning I read how the writer moved to the country almost 'on the spur of the moment' during Covid (time to really 'think about things'  for so many who were isolated) and I thought of Robert Frosts's 'The Road not Taken' (yes I have a 'Butterfly Mind') - how when we come to a metaphorical fork in the road we have to decide which fork to take - often having to make a quick decision rather than pondering on it for days.   And how such decisions can in an instant alter the whole course of our lives.

And as Priscilla and I did our 'fineweather' circuit of my garden in chilly sunshine I stood and watched my first bumble bee of this year as he investigated every flower then moved on.   Hopefully he would find pollen,    enough work to keep him going to get back 'home' before he ran out of steam - otherwise at this time of the year it would mean the end for him.

And I thought about what a short time we are here in the giant scheme of things.   How the tiniest of decisions - pondered on for days or made in an instant - moves us on to the next stage in our lives.

Here we all differ don't we.    Some of us think hard at a fork - shall I do this or shall I do that?   Others go headlong into a new adventure - go to the Antarctic,  climb Everest, go to Glasto, move house, decide to marry (or these days 'shack up with), change careers, row the Atlantic.   the list of possibilities is endless and often we make the wrong choice.   But it all builds up to a life lived.

We are transitory beings - flitting from flower to flower, deciding where to settle and I suppose hoping for the best of outcomes.  And then  one day we are gone.   And in a couple of generations we are forgotten - that is unless we have written a book or won Wimbledon, or fashioned a beautiful garden or a fine building, or 'ruled' a country or some such.

Or to quote Macbeth we are mostly poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more'.

I suppose the moral of all this rambling is - don't look back and regret - move on and enjoy every minute.

 

Thursday 22 February 2024

Stream of consciousness

 Good morning on a dull, wet and typical February day - and commiserations to anyone down the Eastern side of the country as we are under dull, dour February skies.   But Spring is beginning to shout out all over  knowing it will win in the end, so let's square our shoulders and get on with the day.

When the 'solitudes' begin to close in - as they inevitably do  when one is on 'end of life' care - suddenly memory becomes incredibly important.  I usually wake around 5am - as I go to bed around 9pm (apart from the odd evening when there is something tempting on television) and I rather look forward to that hour when I can lie warm and relaxed and let my mind wander wherever it chooses to go.

This morning I woke up playing music.   For almost twenty years my first husband,Malcolm,  and I played with a group of musicians regularly each week and managed to get quite a lot of pieces up to performance standard.  We also played with another husband a wife friends and really enjoyed just playing rather than 'working' to improve our performance.   And this morning I woke to Bach's Brandenburg 4 playing in my head.   And I thought of F and K - we loved having a go at this in the privacy of their music room where nobody was listening or criticising. 

Now long retired and in their eighties F, who was a highly intelligent man in a top job in a hospital - a rambler, a musician, a committed Christian, friend and helper to many - a really lovely man, has dementia and can no longer remember the music he used to play - or the friends he used to play with.

And I thought of our playing, of our walks together in the Clee Hills of Shropshire, and on the Long Mynd and of visits to Scotland to stay in a cottage in Kincraig and our wanders in the surrounding countryside (nothing too strenuous).

All these ordinary, everyday things which we did - and took forgranted in a way.   Now I can no longer walk unaided I can do them in my memory as I lay snug and warm in the early morning (and I never make mistakes when I am reliving them - no wrong notes, no groaning when I lag behind on a too long walk, no stumbling on stony ground.)  How kind our selective memory is at this time of life.

F can do none of this and I grieve for him and his solitude - so different from mine.   And for K who looks after him with a mixture of love (they have been married a very long time) and sadness.   As she says in her letter 'he can no longer remember the Brandenburg 4'.

Tomorrow I shall have my float down memory lane - a personal journey, many of those with me are no longer around.  Those who are will have a totally different memory of the same events.   The memory is so selective (and sometimes so inaccurate).   But my   ' stream of consciousness' spurs me on to get up when the clock shows 6 and then I can potter around with my wheeled trolley getting my breakfast and my morning cuppa.

Have a good day - oh and if you live in the UK and have to go out  - take your brolly.

Monday 19 February 2024

Perky today!

Feeling my old self today - long may the feeling last.

I am in no doubt that my garden keeps me cheerful.  I suppose non-gardeners might not feel the same, but having been a gardener since I was a child I just can't imagine life without growing plants just outside my window.

A friend called on Friday to show me some of her exquisite handwork - neat and precise (two strengths I never really achieved with my handwork apart from beading, a craft I enjoyed until trying to get the beading needle and thread through the tiny hole in the bead (having already spent a long time actually threading the needle) became impossible)).  If you are reading this G then I hope you realise just how much I admire your craft work.  And in case you think you are too precise you then let yourself go entirely with your highly colourful, hand-dyed material using wax-resist so that the colour and pattern burst out and dazzle.  I do wish you had a blog so that we could all enjoy that colour.

As one's end of life becomes visible even if on a fairly distant horizon (and yes I do realise I might fall on the garage floor on my way to the freezer at lunch time today) it concentrates the mind beautifully.   So many things one worried about suddenly become unimportant and tiny things which were hidden in secret corners of one's mind pop out and loom large.

Marvel at the way the blackbirds suddenly seem to know St Valentine has woken up  their 'flirting songs'.   As I write this a male blackbird is singing his beak off in the hawthorn in next door's garden.  I have no idea whether Mrs B is impressed because I am sure she has heard it all before.  But I do know that come hell or highwater it won't be long before the pair of them will be wearing themselves out flying back and forth to my hedge with beakfuls of twiggy bits - I just hope they build far enough down in the hedge so that they are safe from bigger beaks.

It's hot choc time (11.30) and an added Kit Kat but before I go I wonder if anyone out there can help me.   Some time ago I read a verse on line somewhere which I thought was very beautiful.   Now that it so appropriate for me I would like to find it again - but it seems to have disappeared.   I write it here.   Does anyone know where it comes from please?

At this time I would ask three things

as the Solitudes round me close.

Spare me the sensitive nerve that sings,

the storm cock*

and the rose.

*the storm cock is the Mistle Thrush

Enjoy your day if it is warm (16 degreesC) and very sunny - unseasonable but welcome.  As the doom-mongers will say - it won't last!

PS.    If you have access to The Times do please read Melissa Harrison's Nature Notes on   Page 23. The uncompromising first sentence "Badger droppings are fascinating" might be a bit off-putting but the paragraph is well-worth the read.