We met up with our son and daughter about 45 mins drive away. That meant going over the top of the South Downs, which meant seeing the beautiful view across the valley towards Amberley. Sadly I don't have any photographs...
But I do have a sketch of a very similar view, from Ditchingly Beacon as opposed to Bury Hill (Summer 2021)
Do you know this version of the popular hymn 'All things bright and beautiful' composed by John Rutter?
(I've pinched the blog title from Ang!)
I remember visiting Porthcurno in Cornwall, on the beach below the Minack open-air theatre and seeing the curiously small and insignificant hut where the huge, vital trans-world undersea cables came in;
Oh my, this brought back memories of watching a play as the sun set into the sea, a fishing boat slowly making it's way across the horizon...
The sea really was this colour, the sand really is golden....
The hut is at the head of the beach. We trudged up the sand to see the massive tarry cables emerge up through the floor, and continue to the office (now a museum) at the top.
But I digress. It wasn't that sort of cable...
I was momentarily baffled that she had only sent one photograph of the squares in the write-up, but she had created two the same. I love tracing the paths of the different strands in cable knitting.
It's a nice shade of green, very soft wool with good stitch definition so the cable really stands out.
The flat gift is an interesting guide to a textile exhibition she went to at Blickling Hall with fascinating pictures and information.
I sent her a square from one of my favourite patterns for knitted squares;
but I used self-striping yarn and let it do its thing. Two ends to sew in instead of many.
I've kept the pale square and sent Ang the darker one; it looked a little neater.
Finally, another flashmob. Clearly a setup, but still brilliant. The 'flute' player, Michel Tirabosco, is amazing.
Yesterday we did a quick round trip - Aldi, to leave a box of books that I'm selling back to World of Books in the in-post lockers, and the British Heart Foundation to leave four bags of bric-a-brac and other stuff - some books WoB wouldn't take, a couple of school bags (when did I stop teaching? when did my daughter leave school?) and oddments of china. Gone, gone, gone!
I've another box of books ready to go to WoB now. That will make six boxes and bags to charity by the end of June, so I'm back on track for the 'two boxes a month' New Year Resolution.
It occurred to me that the money I get back on the books could go some way to feeding my own book-buying...
....
Today was a cardiology appointment (all's well, no changes) and I had found out that there was a Little Free Library near the clinic premises. So we detoured there as it was on my list of places to visit, with a couple more Wob rejects and a Judi Dench biography to leave as a swap. Or just leave.
But we were out of luck;
It had been taken down on 9th June for repairs. Ah well, I'll put the books in the next charity shop bag.
In view if the possibility of building work starting perhaps maybe at the end of the month, we're getting a bit more focused on clearing the garden, moving plants and pots and ornaments down to a place of safety at the bottom of the garden.
Today Vicky-the-gardener came, and as she is bound and determined to rescue a rose, we cleared the space around it so she could try and extract it from its spot in the patio.
BB went out to help... I joined just in time to see him do a sudden backwards roll down off the patio steps, waving the main stem of the rose in both hands and scattering earth from the rootball. Judging by the 'ow' it wasn't a soft landing... fingers crossed he won't be too sore tomorrow.
Vicky has replanted the rose. We'll just have to see if it survives.
Meanwhile I've quite a few of the flowers and buds in a vase to enjoy.
We were trying to fathom out how to arrange the steps down from what will be the new patio, without encroaching on the garden. Tricky, as the patio is only 2m deep from house to garden, and because of the slope of the ground the garden edge of the patio will be about 45 cm above ground level.
This is one of the hymns used today at zoom church. The words are st Richard's. He was a 13th century bishop of Chichester, and is celebrated on 16th June, Sussex Day.
The prayer seems quite modern today...
In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item. A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry. The word is a portmanteau of list and article.
(Here I started down a rabbit hole... there are novels written entirely in the form of letters, could one write one in the form of listicles?)
Back to the here and now, I reckon my blogs are nearly all listicles; a variety of topic headings and then a few sentences to expand further.
Like this paragraph!
...
My father's flat isn't selling (yet, always add 'yet', to imply that any day now there will be a queue of people aged 55 or over and needing assistance to maintain their independence, all desperateto buy it). We've started to notice flyers from other estate agents appearing on the doormat when we go to check. They make me think of vultures.
I don't know any estate agents socially. It's rather hard to work out what they are doing for the fee... like spiders, spinning a Web and then just waiting to see if anything turns up...
I'm pretty certain that none of these companies are my friends!
The whole 'how can we sell the flat' issue nakes me want to hide... like Archimedes the owl meeting Wart, the boy who will become King Arthur in T H White's 'The Once and Future King'
I shut my eyes and say 'There is no flat'. Of course that doesn't work, and sadly neither does 'There is no me'. Life just isn't the same as fiction!
...
Eating noodles is always a messy business. We gad noodles with teriyaki salmon and various bits of vegetable; the last of the broccoli, the remains of the asparagus, the dregs of the packet of frozen green beans, a few rather dessicated spring onions... tasted a lot better than I've made it sound! We sat opposite each other forking up noodles and slurping the straggly ends, or chomping them off with our teeth. Not a meal for invited guests!
It reminded me of this passage in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, written in 1850, about how their rigidly correct ladies ate their oranges;
Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.
Maybe we should have taken our dishes to eat our noodles in separate rooms?
This looks like being my vegetable harvest for 2026. Because of the impeding house extension work I haven't sewn, planted, or grown anything this year apart from three stunted broad bean plants.
Yesterday I noticed a few pods had filled out. I picked them this morning and we had them at lunchtime. Delicious!
There won't be any more produce until the apples are ripe.
....
Knitting the squares is a very pleasant way of filling in a few minutes here and there in the day. I've got a wooden knitting bowl which is perfect for a couple of small balls of wool and my needles
I've photographed it with the current square wrong side up in order not to give away the pattern, and I've added a few extra balls of wool for further camouflage.
The square I've chosen has an easy repeated pattern over a couple of rows so it is really simple to work out what comes next when I pick it up to add some rows.
I've also cracked continental combination purl knitting, a game changer for me.
Somewhere else I read that this method twists the stitches - true - and the work around if you want to knit these stitches in the next row is to knit through the back of the stitch - yes! Easy peasy too.
I think I must have spent nearly the whole day reading Kate Morton's 'Homecoming'. I had to pause a couple of times; a piano lesson to teach in the morning, a long detailed telephone conversation with our architect about the extension, and making supper. (BB cooked lunch; we had steak, his speciality, yum yum very yum yum!).
I also had to pause and brace myself a few times; there were moments when characters did things that were so breathtakingly awful that I needed time to think about what I had read before I could continue, and instances characters who where pillars of rectitude were concealing such terrible wrongs - but one could understand why, what had tipped them over the edge.
Finally, I needed to keep reading in great chunks as the book switches between 1959, 1979, 1989 and 1999, and even though the chapters and context were clear in the chapter headings it was still a bit of a jolt to time travel back and forth.
It's a meatier read than I was expecting, and although I had several ideas as to what the plot twists might be, I was still caught by surprise by the several revelations.
It's set in Australia, and I realise I have no idea of where the cities and provinces are. I should think my ignorance is not unusual for British people, judging by the woeful answers whenever Australia is the continent for the 'where is Kazakhstan' game comes up on 'Richard Osman's House of Games', where you have to mark where various cities and landmarks are in answer to the questions.
Maybe tomorrow something will get done!
Meanwhile it is nearly bedtime and my step count is a measly 1700 - I'll get a couple of hundred in before I go to bed, and will try and make them up over the next three days (or I could just play Relampago a few times on the piano...)
.......
Or I could try a bit of this... (in my dreams!)
Electro Swing by ShuffleDance.pl Parov Stelar Booty Swing, Em Delacrem choreography
There isn't any...
I knit, I write up my diary, I add a few bits to the ever-growing pile to go to the charity shop, I cook lunch, I read, I might tackle a housework chore (or I might not)...
Wednesday and Thursday are a piano lesson days, so I taught a piano lesson.
I played suduko,
and soon it will be bed time.
I'm happy enough with this... slow steady days are a blessing.
The New List; BB and I are compiling a list of places to visit, things to do, in the area. His 70th birthday, some years ago, was massively overshadowed by othe family events, and mine is later this year. So we're thinking of slightly celebrating both of them. At the moment we're concentrating on places within an hour or so of where we live;
Pallant House gallery in Chichester
Bignor Roman Villa
Wings Aviation Museum
Tangmere Aviation Museum
a Little Local Library box in Hove just because it is there
I'd love to set up a little free library outside our house!
That's as far as we got with the list today.
Which means 'lightning'.
Here's the first page; as I hoped it's not that difficult, but sounds very impressive. You have to remember to play it 2 octaves lower than written.
After I'd spent about half an hour on it, I discovered my fitness watch had added about 400 steps to the counter! That felt too much like cheating, even for me, so I took the watch off and added 400 real steps to balance things out.
I'm trying to achieve a total step count of 100,000 by then end of June. Not as a target, I don't like targets because I feel pressured by them. It's just a notion...
The first week is looking promising.
......
This looks a promising new book: Phillipa Perry well known psychiatrist and agony aunt, and also wife of artist Grayson Perry, has written a cosy mystery.
It's out in hardback, audio and rather expensive kindle editions at the moment, so I will have to practice patience and wait for the price to come down.
I'm thinking of the verse
'Peverse and foolish oft I strayed,
But yet in love he sought me,
And on his shoulder gently laid
And home rejoicing brought me.'
Today it came to mind when we saw this bizarre little scene through the window.
It's not very clear, but you should be able to make out the geese which nested by the pond. For some reason they have arrived in our road along with three goslings, and a neighbour is trying to persuade them to walk to the corner (about three houses along on the right) and then up to the pond. That road has about 14 semi-detached bungalows. Then there's quite a busy road to cross.. It's going to be a tricky bit of shepherding.
Next-door's cat it watching with great interest, but is keeping a safe distance away.
...
I vividly remember my class being made to sing that verse on our own in school hymn practice as a punishment for being too chatty. We were so embarrassed. We were a perverse lot, and often strayed from the rules.
Ang has written all about her square here;
She's called the colourway 'syrup and cream'
You can see the difference between having a yellow background with a cream stripe (left) and a cream background with a yellow stripe. She sentbme the left hand square.
There was also a little Lyles Golden Syrup recipe book to go with it. There are some delicious looking recipes in it.
I went on woolwarehouse just to snip the picture to show what I ment by yarn cakes, but I should really have stayed away... the colours are so tempting! These are lion brand... as they say on TV 'other brands are available '! I did manage to resist... (repeat three times at four hourly intervals NO MORE YARN.... NO MORE YARN.... NO MORE YARN....)
I was thinking that maybe this collaboration could as count as a slow decluttering project, except for every square that goes out of the house, one comes in...
We had thunder and lightning and heavy rain yesterday. This might even have been our first thunderstorm of the year; they seem to skirt round our town, kept off by the surrounding hills maybe.
My little Hazel tree that I'm following this year has perked up. We've been keeping it going with a proper watering every few days through the hot dry period, but there's nothing like Real Rain to freshen up the shrubs and trees;
Although the flowers took a bit of a battering.
I posted off my square to Ang on Monday; the first one of the new collaboration. Ang chose the very appropriate name 'Double Knitting', as that's what we're using. It's supposed to ge a bit of a stash buster. I shall have to be very strict with myself about that and not buy any yarn!
The pattern is called Horizontal Ridges. I've used one of those 'cakes' of yarn, where the colours change quite slowly. The lower square is the one I've kept, the colours were changing from sludge to quite a decent fawn. The top square is a lovely blue, from the same cake. I did block them, but as soon as they were unpinned they sprang back to how they were! It's the ridge pattern, which has a similar effect to ribbing, making them slightly stretchy.
I'm busy with the next one now.
Here's Nigel Kennedy playing the slow movement from Summer, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, complete with lots of extra twiddly bits and thunderstorms.
Basil cuttings; Sue (but which Sue? Suffolk Sue, I think) wrote in her blog about taking cuttings from her supermarket plant. She made it sound simple, so I had a go.
I took a good long length from several bits of my basil, trimmed off the lower leaves and stuck them in a jar of water on the kitchen windowsill.
113It didn't take long for the first roots to appear. I let them grow some more, and now I have potted them up. I hope they like their new home.
,,,,,
Last month wIas a spectacular success for increasing my step count, which translates as being generally a lot more active.
Just look at the height of that last entry! And an amazing total of nearly 102,000 steps for the month. That's a lot more than the previous maximum steps counts of approximately 80,000 steps.
I wonder if I can manage something similar for June? It would mean trying to average about 3,500 steps a day.
....
There's a passage in the novel 'A Small Bomb at Dimperly' by Lissa Evans, where Valentine, recently demobbed from the army at the end of the WW2, returns home because he is the heir to the family title and crumbling country house. His brother, Felix, had been reported as missing in action, and it has just been confirmed that he died, and so Valentine has become the new head of the family.
He is given the task of reading the lesson at his brother's funeral, a tricky task as he is severely dyslexic. Back then, dyslexia wasn't recognised, and so he was labelled by his family as rather stupid and useless. However he has memorised several useful passages, one of them being the Ecclesiastes chapter I quoted yesterday... here's the bit in the book;
All was going well, until he spotted an old friend in the congregation...
He’d no sooner spotted her than, with solemn deliberation, she stuck out her tongue at him and then the next word didn’t arrive. ‘… a time to … to …’
A dreadful nothing. A silence that reminded him of the moment when a doodlebug engine cut out and the world below sat waiting for the smash.
He looked down at the page, at the impenetrable thicket of lines, and spotted the word ‘dance’ tangled in the undergrowth, but surely he’d already said ‘dance’? And hadn’t he also said ‘weep’ and ‘rend’ and ‘sew’ and ‘cast away stones’? Which left … what?
His thoughts thrashed around and lighted on Felix. ‘… a time to … to hunt and a time to … to shoot; a time to spend and a time to … refrain from spending; a time to … turn left and a time to turn right; a time to fly and a time to … to …’ – he’d got himself into a mess with this one – ‘… to … to perch.’
There was an uneasy stirring at the edges of his vision, but just as he thought he would have to cut and run, possibly as far as Watford, the real words came surging back again (‘… a time to keep silence and a time to speak …’), and he rattled through the last few phrases at panicked speed and then flipped the Bible shut as if it were a hated text-book.
Looking up, he saw the congregation staring at him with the expression of spectators at a fairground Wall of Death. Apart from his mother, who had her eyes shut.
I hugely enjoyed this book, so much so that I've read it several times and even listened to the audio version.
It is hard to think back as far as January, the unrelenting grip of cold dreich weather, the greyness,
how I was hunched against the unforgiving wind when we ventured out,
the way I reached for an extra fleece beneath my coat, and my scarf, and gloves,
wore padded winter trousers, thick socks, layered on a poncho, wrapped myself up in a blanket in the evenings,
added an extra quilt to the bed at night...
It's not like that now!
Ecclesiastes Chapter 3;
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Things change; and not only the weather or the time of day or the seasons.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I received was from a much, much older lady when we were side by side in the recovery ward in hospital after our minor ops. I'd had a very, very minor repair to my nether regions under local anaesthetic after the birth of my first baby a few days previously, and was feeling tender and tearful and very, very tired. She was sweet, encouraging, congratulating me on being a new mother, and very understanding.
'You know,' she said. 'You might get to the point where it is all to much and you can't bear it for another day, but it will change. Maybe not exactly for the better, but it will be different, and that will be enough.'
That advice carried through many a gritty time - teething and potty training come to mind, but not just the trials of motherhood, but also grim days of teaching recalcitrant school children, and difficult times when I hated my job so much I would sit on the stairs and cry on Sunday nights, and days when I was unwell...
To everything there is a season. I've learned to hang in there... it was too cold in January, and it's too hot at the moment, but things are already changing; who knows but it might even rain soon?!
Here's Joshua Bell playing 'Winter' from The Four Seasons by Vivaldi
there's someone on Substack who posts things like this...
I wrote Wednesday's post on Tuesday evening, scheduling it for Wednesday as I knew I wouldn't get around to writing anything that day.
We had friends round for lunch - they live miles and miles and miles away in the West Country, but came up to their old haunts to cat-sit for their daughter and son-in-law. She and I were at school together, and then I went North and she stayed in the South, but eventually, ten years later we came South and resumed our friendship. Luckily our husbands also get on well...
I used to ring her up and ask if I could come over - a long hour's drive - because of that thing when you are being driven to your wit's end by your two tiny children and if you don't have some adult company soon, like now, well, there's no knowing....
So she and I and my two and her two or three plus any child-minded babies and toddlers and the friend she co-child-minded with would entirely fill her compact house, and we would move cautiously across the floor without ever lifting our feet from the carpet to avoid sticklebricks and duplo bricks and tiny fingers and toes, and in spite of the chaos it was all so much more bearable with three adults looking out for a zillion small children than one adult and two small children...
Then our children grew up, and they moved to the West Country, so our rare meet-ups are very special.
Lunch? Oh, it was so hot. So, so hot. We sat in the shade under the apple tree, and I served various Marks and Spencers cold meats, and various Marks and Spencers fancy mixed salads, and boiled a bag of Marks and Spencers miniature potatoes and tossed them in a little butter...
I did cut up a fruit salad; strawberries, grapes, some tinned peaches, (top tip; my mother told me to always include some tinned fruit because of the juice) and served that with Greek Yoghurt.
BB and I ate left overs for three meals straight. The remnants of the mixed salads and the meats in soft rolls for supper, and even more salad and the potatoes for the following day's lunch.
Then came Thursday. Rain was promised, and so it came - lasted five minutes.
Yesterday was Friday, in spite of me being certain-sure all day that it was Saturday. The bins standing in sentinel rows lining the streets like a strange guard of honour should have been a clue... and the milk delivery...
We still have a milkman, I know it's more expensive, but I think it is important to support hi if you can, for the sake of his job, and for the sake of all the much, much older people in our road who could be relying on him for their eggs, bacon, and everything else the dairy supplies as well. I read in one of the 'Number One Detective Agency' books by Alexander McCall small something that Ma Ramotse said, about it being your duty to employ a maid if you could, as it provided work and money to someone who needed it. That has stuck with me...
Sudden flashback memory triggered by the silent rows of bins; Do you remember how the people in Wootton Bassett, now Royal Wootton Bassett, used to line the pavements to honour fallen soldiers from the war in Afghanistan as they were conveyed through the town on their journey from RAF Lyneham to Oxford Infirmary?
 |
| https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/contemporary-conflict/afghanistan/honouring-the-fallen |
Back to the present... it's Saturday. I start my mornings with breakfast (muesli), a drink of water and the last of the morning meds which has to be taken with food or else there are consequences, and a time catching up on emails and blogs.
Today 'Rustic Pumpkin' posted for the first time in a few days. Her 'walking to raise money for Parkinsons UK' had to be constrained because of the high temperatures, but she's still going strong, sticking at it. And she's close, so close to her revised target... if you wanted to sponsor her, here's the link.
I have been inspired by her to up my daily step count - my original plan was to walk to the post box and send a postcard every day, but I was scuppered first by cold weather and then by hot weather. So I focused on daily step count instead. At the beginning of the month I was pleased with a total of 2000 steps; now I am vaguely dissatisfied with anything less than 3000, and my daily average is hovering around 3500. Yesterday I got to 4600, thanks to Antiques Road Trip, Masterchef and Have I got news for You on television. Here are some earlier figures for May;
I'm reaping the benefit too; my recovery time after a low oxygen saturation incident, when that drops briefly to below 83% for all sorts or reasons, is massively reduced. My levels have always been quick to plunge, but also relatively quick recovery which is why this isn't not too concerning in the eyes of the specialists (although they do rather freak out the respiratory nurses), but recovery from 80% to 90% is now only a couple of minutes. So thank you, 'Rustic Pumpkin'. I hope I can keep these new step counts going!
Right. I'm off on a little outing to visit a favourite art and stationery shop. I've a few things in mind that I'd like to look at... it should help my step count going up and down every single aisle...
I promised you roses;
at the front of our house - this rose will carry on flowering until at least October, sometimes even December
The geese at the duck pond a few streets away from us have built their nest in the silliest place, on the grass at the edge of the pond closest to the bench and the bus stop and the road, and in the full glare of the sun. Some kind person has stuck a garden parasol into the ground by the nest to provide a little patch of shade. How they managed to achieve this without being marmelised by the swans is a mystery! I would have like a photograph, but couldn't manage it this time. Maybe next time we go past.
....
For a couple of days now the coloured glass globes of the Galileo thermometer have been fighting for space at the bottom of the column... the temperature must be well over 26C then (!)
And we're off, on a new collaboration!
This feels the least pre-planned and and pre-organised one yet.
When do we swap? I'm not exactly sure...
How many are we swapping? That's not clear in my mind...
What is this collaboration called? I think it's 'Double Knitting', so presumably 'DK' for short...
The details I am clear about are...
4mm knitting needles, and dk from stash, and 6" squares.
We've each got a copy of this book
The roses have all come out when I was looking the other way! It was too hot to take photographs earlier, and I'm too hot to go out now. Maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's my May subscription posy;
.......
Mouse update... it won't be around any more. Nuff said...
I struggle to reconcile the Brambly Hedge mice
and Johnny Townmouse the with the reality. Their mice appear to be house trained, and beautifully dressed. The real ones leave a trail of poo pellets and urine behind them.
Ah well. That's what fiction is all about. After all. I've never heard of real wolf saying 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!'.
A favourite hymn; we sang it at my Confirmation over 50 years ago. It was also sung at the Coronations of Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III.
In capital letters! BB saw it zoom across the dining room yesterday afternoon and excavated behind the curtains to no avail.
At breakfast time today he saw it whoosh across the dining room again...
This morning he walked into town and came back (look away now if you are a sensitive soul) catching contraptions, all right, traps and also a sonic device which is supposed to prevent it from going into the hall and upstairs.
This afternoon I have just, now, seen it, from the corner of my eye, whizz across the dining room and into the kitchen... did it go left or right? Into the kitchen or turn into the hall? It went so fast, as though it was attached to some stretched elastic and someone had just let go!
OH, how we wish we still had cats... although they would have probably brought it in themselves. This one must be an intrepip adventurer. BB has set one contraption under the dining room table, and tonight I expect there will be more in the hall and the kitchen.
.....
I really don't care for the phrase 'Mother Nature'. I see precious little of the 'Mother Love' side of Nature in the raw, more like 'Tough Love'. Some animal parents do spend time and energy in gentle and diligent nurturing, to be sure, but there are plenty of the darker sides too. It's why I won't watch wildlife programmes, not even our wonderful David Attenborough. Sooner or later something will attack and eat something else and I have to leave the room.
I have at last cleared my work table (at the expense of the dining room table - not so good) so this morning I was able to sit by the open patio door and look out over the garden as I wrote up my daily page-a-day review of the day before. You can see this beautiful postcard of a watercolour picture of wild flowers that I received yesterday. I'm keeping it handy as I thought I would try and copy it, to see how the artist, Honor Budden, created it.
Do any of you use an app to identify plants on your phones? If so, which one? I recognise many of the plants in the postcard, but not all.
.....
It's SO HOT! Here's some suitably languorous music; Joshua Bell, soloist and conductor with the Academy of St Martin's in the Fields playing the slow movement from Spring; Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
The wind has moved from the northerly chills to softer, kinder, and more importantly as far as I am concerned, a warmer direction.
Somewhere I saw a cartoon of a woman, announcing that she was solar-powered. I get that, and I'd add temperature sensitive. Like the flying ants that suddenly appear after a couple of warm days in the summer, I tend to prefer lying low until sun, wind and temperature all combine to the right kind of weather.
It's ages since I reached for my pen and paints, but I saw a demo on the Internet a while back and thought it looked pretty straightforward...
I can always see what I could have done differently, but I'm still pleased with this very quick effort.
We were out on Tuesday taking a bundle of books to sell back to World of Books. It was a bit of a mission trying to find the tiny and well-disguised Morrisons Daily shop where the parcel had to be dropped off.
It was in a nearby overgrown village with the most labyrinthine mess and muddle of interlocking car parks and one-way systems that could possibly have been crammed into such a small space. After many dead ends, much reversing, and literally going round in circles we found it - job done.
I'm so behind on my New Year Resolution of '2 bags of stuff out of the house every month'. Two bags of shredding, three bags waiting for a charity shop run, and these books brings the total to six. For the year. So four more to go then to catch up!
(Don't tell BB but I'll only get the princely sum of £5.37 back, minus 90p for the parking, and fuel to drive there... next time I might just as well give the books to charity!)
However the ox-eye daisies were everywhere, brightening up what was otherwise a dull and damp afternoon, which reminded me to the daisy tutorial.
Time flies at different speeds...
I'm sure that when I woke up there was almost no yellow to be seen in these rose buds, and I know they were still green yesterday.
But just look at them after this morning's rain followed by a little sunshine! They will be flowering tomorrow for sure.
But where has the last half century gone?
My son went to a Steeleye Span concert recently...
I remember going see them back in about 1976, around fifty years ago when Iwas a student. Their song 'All around my hat' burst onto the music scene like a shooting star, an unmistakable and entirely different sound to everything else on the radio at the time. Even us classical music students sat up and took notice.
I wonder how it sounds fifty years later. my son said they did play it, 'but only if you all sing too', and everyone joined in with great enthusiasm.
.....
Music buffs will know of J S Bach's groundbreaking work, 'The Well-tempered Keyboard'. At the time there was no fixed system for tuning your harpsichord that would make it sound acceptable in every key. He wrote this set of Preludes and fugues in every major and minor key to popularise a system of tuning the instruments which has now been the standard for around 300 years. Back then, the word 'temper' meant 'tuning' in this context.
A Prelude can have any sort of structure, but composing a Fugue is trickier to manage, as it involves having a little melody that pops up at a higher or lower pitch throughout the piece.
Here's a spoof Prelude and Fugue by PDQBach (a pseudonym) called 'The Bad-tempered Prelude and Fugue)
the Eurovision Song Contest last night? We didn't... too loud, too flashy, too much! So we watched Britain's Got Talent instead... which was also frequently loud, frequently flashy, frequently OTT.
But, to my astonishment, an1 excellent and spectacular dance group performed to... the Lachrimosa from Mozart's beautiful Requiem Mass. Complete with terrifying stunt moves and acrobatics. That was unexpected.
One doesn't often hear religious classical music on Britain's Got Talent.
But then, Sonny Green performed his poem 'A letter from your Dad'.
Like a still, small voice (where have we heard that phrase before?) this young man wearing a simple jacket and jeans held the entire auditorium in silence, as he delivered his words of love to his children with the refrain 'you're never too old to have a cuddle from your Dad'.
Buried in the lines was a statement of his own Christian faith,
'The Lord is my refuge and my strength', a verse from Psalm 46, which continues 'a very present help in time of trouble'
Here's the complete poem;
All four judges were visibly moved, and Sonny Green was given 'the golden buzzer', over many more likely acts.
Well. You hear God's words in all kinds of unexpected situations.
Oh wait! That wasn't the end of the shocks... the entertainment while we waited for the result of the public's votes to come through we were treated to a powerful performance by Sam Ryder, singing 'Gethsemene' from the upcoming West End revival of 'Jesus Christ Superstar'.
As Sonny said 'a little can go a long long way'...
This is my new toy vital craft tool; I used it to create this little line of mini-pictures, cut from a Wentworth jigsaw catalogue and stuck into my diary.
A punch that cuts out old-fashioned postage stamp shapes. Like this;
.....
I'm sure I've shared this Internet recipe for scrambled eggs;
Beat together one egg and one small teaspoon of mayonnaise in a microwave proof mug or dish, using a fork or little whisk, until thoroughly mixed.
Microwave in 30 second bursts, stirring well each time, until done to your liking. It's the best method I've found yet. It will double; one teaspoon mayonnaise and two eggs works well. I haven't tried three eggs.
I've been making the simplest of dips with a tablespoon spoon of mayonnaise and a teaspoon of French dressing to dip my salad i ; carrot sticks, little gem lettuce leaves etc which I had to accompany my sandwich at supper.
.....
I've been immersed in The Lord of the Rings most of today;
I remembered this illustration and the riddle for gaining entry into the Mountain 'Speak, friend, and enter'
and some of the many poems scattered throughout the story, like this
I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
It suited my mood today.
Today was similar to yesterday, weather wise, cold, showers, raining, grey, sunny by turns.
So no walking. I'll walk an extra 'distance' by walking on the spot to make up.
Vicky came and did some work in the garden; she comes fortnightly which is only just often enough at this time of year. The goose-grass is on a mission to take over, and I'm on a mission (via Vicky) to prevent it. It's a hopeless task to root it out, so I work on a policy of 'discouragement', where everything shoot gets pulled out preferably to ground level before it can drop its bobbly little seeds everywhere. This seems to work; over the years it is much reduced. She managed to pick two hours between rain showers, packing up just as the first drops fell.
Sencoesue said in the comments that she uses a stand for her tablet - of course! BB doesn't use the one I gave him, so I retrieved it and set it up;
I've been using the stand off and on since yesterday with caution, and so far I've had no ill effects with my neck.
My neck isn't fully better, but it is steadily improving. I just have to be careful. And patient...
Here's the stand in use again;
This is our book club choice for this month.
How could your name affect the trajectory of your life? The author has imagined three different ways the boy could grow, depending on whether he takes his horrible father's name, Gordon, or the the name his sister his suggests, Bear, or the name his mother chooses, Julian.
While I find the courage to dive in (Gordon sounds a nasty piece of work, will his son be like him?) I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings.
That's a blast from the past; it must be 30 or 40 years since I last read it, although I've listened to the dramatisation... on cassettes, so that wasn't much more recent either!
Springtime in Sussex is deceptive, tricksy. I wake up and look out of the window, which faces south-east and so catches the light and warmth of the morning sun.
Then I wander down to the kitchen which faces north-west, and search out a cardigan. Not so warm after all! If I open the back door for some fresh air I'll revise my opinion some more and do up the buttons on my cardigan, right up to the neck.
Cold wind not withstanding, we decide to go out; the sky clouds over in a instant and great cold drops of rain come pelting out of the sky... we go back inside, and the clouds disappear and the sun comes out... This pattern was repeated all through the day...
I did sneak out in the afternoon. BB had already set off into town to collect his wedding ring, now made smaller, and some prescriptions from the pharmacy. I just walked a short way up the road - there was plenty to see.
This rock rose is in our front garden. I love seeing how the sun shines through the petals
