Friday 25th August - slugs in love, joy of hospital gardens

 We took my father to the hospital for a day of various out patient treatments.

Before we set off I discovered this unlovely sight. I've left it as as amall picture because it is pretty ugh..

It is two ENORMOUS slugs twined around a great blob of goo.

If I were a naturalist I might be fascinated, but I am trying to grow vegetables. So I fetched the slugging tongs and dumped them in the garden refuse bin with the rest of their mates. I don't think they even noticed. 

Then we got into the lovely lovely new car, collected my father and set off on an unknown adventure, knowing very little more than we needed to find somewhere in the 'orange wing' for a series of checks and treatments arranged at very short notice by the GP. The day ward turned out to be right next to a charming courtyard garden where we could wait in between tests, treatments etc. Being able to sit outside in lovely sunshine made all the difference.

We took turns staying with my father throughout the day. When it was my turn the courtyard had become quite hot so I moved to the dappled shade of the little summerhouse and admired the shadows on the decking made by the trellis.

There are a number of gardens in between the various wings of the hospital, maintained by volunteers. They are so appreciated by staff and patients all through the day.

We got home at about 6 after a very, very long day. All's well that ends well.

Friday 14th July - so many reasons for feeling better

 Such as

getting started on the cross stitch! It doesn't look like much yet, and I'm still mulling over the colours but at least I can get on with something while I ponder.

Next, these miniature rose seeds arrived in the post today. I've read the sowing instructions several times over; they need a temperature of 18-22C to germinate, so, having looked at the weather forecast, I will have to start them off indoors. 

Just 15 seeds in the packet, but if they should all germinate then I will have more than enough!

These roses;

There are nine blooms on the one spindly stem, clamouring to be allowed indoors out of the rain!

And talking of rain - there will be no need to water the pots and tubs this evening.

My father nearly had a wardrobe malfunction; we had a plaintive telephone call asking if we had a thingy for making holes in his leather belt! The answer is no; but Himself took round his Dremel drill set when he delivered the shopping and drilled several holes as requested. Things should be easier now! That drill was a leaving present ('you want one a what?') when he retired from work. It has proved its value many and many a time.

I discovered a 'new to me' gardening magazine today (thanks to the pressreader app) called 'The English Garden'. There were only two issues available on pressreader; The older one was 'A Year in the Garden' and goes through month by month with luscious pictures. I am the other issue for tomorrow; it will be my reward for after the next stitching session!

Wednesday 12th October

 Hello! It is October - half way through October!

What happens is I forget to blog for a few days, and then there is so much to say that it all seems like too much, so I don't post anything, which doesn't really improve the situation. Ah well. I'm here now.

This is a the ruins of Nymans - a favourite National Trust place for us. We were there on Thursday; a lovely, bright sunny morning. You can go inside the ruins - there is a whole house in there, concealed behind the original walls. We didn't go in this time, though; I'm still 'not going in' (as opposed to 'not going out' - where does that phrase come from?). When I do go round, I always look out for the old television set, placed inside a puppet theatre, so that the curtains can be decently drawn across the the blank screen when it was not in use. Harking back to a time when television was regarded as rather 'modern', and 'not quite the thing for cultured people' no doubt.  

I was rather miffed to discover that I had missed the start of Inktober. Then I realised, of course, that I have been doing a drawing a day since April this year so Inktober wasn't so relevant to me this year.

At the moment I am knitting woolly hats to go into the Shoeboxes for Roumania collection that our church does every year. I've knitted two of these adult sized stripy patterned hats now and am part way through a slightly smaller one in a thicker yarn. I don't know how many more I will get finished before packing day on 6th November. 

The basic pattern is so easy, called 'simple is best', free from lovecrafts.com. It is just all in knit stitch, on a circular needle until you switch to dpns for the last rows of decreases. 

You might be a bit mystified by the 'her time has come' comment at the top of the drawing. There is a sketch to accompany it, but I didn't want to post it; it refers to one of our two cats, Leo (we thought she was male when we named her). We had to take her to the vet on Thursday 29th September; over a couple of days it became clear that her joints were giving her considerable pain, and she was very unsteady on her legs. It was a snap decision (although we had seen it coming for several weeks) that morning. This is how she was spending most of her days for the last month;   

Of course we (and the remaining cat) miss her, but I don't miss watching her moving around so stiffly and cautiously.

Lots of other stuff has happened over the month, fun stuff like meeting up with the 'children' at our favourite farm shop cafe for breakfast last week, and less fun stuff like having the latest Covid Booster - my word, this one is a bit of a shock after the previous versions. Bu we were more or less recovered after a day or so.

I hope you all managed to watch the Young Musician of the Year instrumental and concerto finals; I expect you can find them on BBC4 catchup/iplayer whatever. Well worth it. The pianists would have made this look and sound easy...

My Grade 8 student and I are both 'working towards' rather than 'at the expected level' - to use edu-speak trying to persuade 20 notes in the RH flow seamlessly against 6 in the LH. Brain-bending stuff.

From Chopin's Nocturne in Bflat minor. I seem to remember it featured in a Lewis (or was it Morse?) programme about a girls school being apparently haunted by a murderous ghost...

 Here's Rubenstein's performance - beautiful.

Saturday 11th June - A week? A whole week gone by?

 I did put 'update my blog' on my to-do list a couple of times, but.... time passes...

Luckily I can use my daily scribbles to work out what has been going on;

Ah, yes, Friday 3rd June - had morning coffee in their garden with nearby friends. That was lovely and peaceful, apart from when a tray of cups and cafetiere slowly slid off the little table. But we were outside - so no need to worry about carpets, and nothing broke. Although my husband, who tried to save the situation with his foot had to withdraw when his sock filled up with hot coffee.  

Saturday was a 'ziffit' day - they had a special offer for the jubilee weekend, I discovered. If we could find £10 worth of books they would add a whole £5. Of such small treats are many little happinesses born. We scoured the house and managed the minimum £10 to secure the bonus, and 5kg to have a courier collect the parcels. The ziffit rejects have all gone to the British Heart Foundation. That's 2 boxes and five bags of books OUT OF THE HOUSE!

Pentecost; someone posted this William Blake Poem on Twitter;

Unless the eye catch fire,
The God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire,
The God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire,
The God will not be named.
Unless the heart catch fire,
The God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire,
The God will not be known.

Monday; The herbs in my planter are looking decidedly tatty, so I added some herbs in pot to the grocery order and transferred them into these 'lead' (haha - some kind of ceramic/resin, I think) containers.

I reckon I need some practice at drawing people, so that's what I did. I also did a few more while I was waiting in the queue for a blood test. I try not to stare too hard. Faces are so much easier to draw when half is covered by a mask.

 Wednesday we did nothing. It rained on and off most of the day, the water coming down like stair rods (remember those), bouncing off the pavement and pooling in puddles everywhere in the garden.

Friday was the kind of day when everything you touch or decide to do, or any plans that have been made, change and shift as you go along. Not just for me, but for various friends as well. Very trying.

Ah well - it's the weekend, and a new day, we can all start again.

Wednesday 13th April - Tea, coffee, ginger biscuits, bread and wine

 This morning our vicar came to bring us 'Home Communion' - the first time we have taken part in a service of Holy Communion since March 2020.

He's a good friend of ours and we have known him and the family since the 1990s when we joined our church. It's strange, thinking back to when the children were young, and our hair was still brown, and none of us wore glasses. Ah memory, memory.

So we sat round the garden table as the sun slowly warmed through the clouds. We started with tea, or coffee, and ginger biscuits made yesterday, catching up on church and family news. Then we pushed the teapot and mugs to one side, and brushed the biscuit crumbs off the table and continued seamlessly in the church service, complete with Bible reading (John chapter 14) and even a 'sermon' - if you could call it that, a few comments on the words. 

In the spaces between the prayers the breeze fluttered the table cloth, the glowing colours of the tulips and daffodils and the birdsong added to the sense of peace. A special moment, worth waiting for. 

In the past I always felt that a Sunday morning church service was incomplete without Communion being a part of it. Now, having waited so long, the experience seemed fresh and new, like the very first time over fifty years ago.

I didn't take photographs. But you can see the biscuits;

My husband makes them, to the recipe his mother used. I asked if he could make small ones as well, for me to have with morning coffee. So he did.

Noah's Ark; Hen and chickens

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.

There are only a few windows left to open on the calendar.

We added hot cross buns and mini Easter eggs to this week's on-line order, and they arrived this morning. As did also an extra half-order due to a mix up. Our mix-up. We usually have next week's date booked and secured with a minimum order, and then go through adding and deleting as necessary, but if there are too many distraction during this process things can go wrong. So our fridge and freezer are overloaded with a week and a half's worth of food, and we sent our vicar on his way with our thanks, and some tomatoes, some lettuce and a pizza.

Monday 21st September - Summer again

 Sort of Summer. 

I have a selection of 'not yet ready for the wash, but not laundry-fresh' garments lying around, as I start the day dressed for Autumn, remove layers in tne middle of the day for Summer, and then replace said layers in the evenings. 

Long or short sleeves? Or three-quarter? One layer or two? Socks - to wear, or not to wear, that is the question. I'm sitting in the garden to concoct this post, wearing a jersey top which wasn't warm enough earlier, and I'm now rolling up the sleeves and removing the scarf that was keeping my neck warm. And I have just removed my socks - they were clean on this morning so don't worry, they don't 'niff'.

I got out my Summer nightdress again last week, wore it once, and it has gone into the laundry basket. But I was too warm last night in my new winter nightdress...

My new nightdresses are very pleasing. I bought them from Land's End, as my old Land's end ones (at least 7 years 'hard wear') are overdue for retirement. I refuse to pay full price; £40 for a plain nightdress seems to be extravagant, and for a while I thought I was going to have to settle for candy-floss pink - but I DO NOT WEAR PINK, even when I am asleep. 

Then I found these; (that's not me - my hair is growing, but not that long and, sadly, not quite so brown)

and I no longer worry about having to get dressed in time for the first zoom piano lesson in the morning at 8am. Who would ever know - unless they also shop at Land's End... it's tempting to buy some more as they make pretty nifty dresses and fit well.

It looks as though another 'lockdown' and more 'shielding' is on the horizon. Well, so be it. I'm getting myself accustomed to the idea that it is going to be six months and more before we start getting clear of this virus. That means March - or shall we just say Easter? We, for one, are not panic-buying a Christmas turkey and filling up valuable freezer space which could be used to store loo rolls and bread flour, even if that means we will have to make do with a papier mache turkey (constructed from defrosted loo rolls and served with bread sauce) - even if The Turkey is what Christmas Is All About. At least we will be going in to lockdown with our on-line shopping all sorted out - last time we were sourcing food from here there and everywhere, and at times it was a little anxiety-making.

I shall also place an order for garden seeds in the next few days - not being able to get hold of seeds for the garden was a bit of a downer. I managed to find a couple of sunflower seeds at the bottom of the seed tin, but I would have loved to grow more.

Pictures - I am two days behind at the moment - three if I don't do one for today after finishing this post. 

I titled this post 'Summer Again'. Too true - I have just moved to sit in the shade (and unrolled my sleeves and put my socks back on... it's all very confusing... and we will have to carry on watering the garden for a bit longer. Sitting here, I can see the length of the sunny border still flowering in full technicolour. Very pleasing. 

   

Wednesday 19th August - This is more like Summer

 As in it has been raining aaaaaaalllllllll day.

Eight days since my last post - what has been happening? Oh, well, this and that...

The Big Social Event was a friend's daughter's wedding. The 'rules' were changed just in time for her to have 'real musicians' at the wedding and for the reception to be a little less tightly constrained - so what was always (don't laugh, people who know exactly how many hitches and slips there nearly were along the day!) going to be a good day became a better one. We were able to join in via a livestream broadcast on youtube - wonderful. 

we have been on a few little outings - to the Henfield Prairie Gardens

It was rather a dull morning (we skipped zoooooom church) but I got to do sketching, sitting on a bench surrounded by flowers while Himself strolled around at a slightly faster pace than I do these days.

Our timing was superb - it started to rain just as I was more or less finished, was raining properly by the time we got home for a late lunch.

The next day was much brighter and we went to see the sea;

a brisk wind was blowing so painting has hampered by firstly forgetting to bring bulldog clips to hold the pages down, and secondly the paint drying within seconds of it hitting thenpaper (I'm still using the book with the 'thirsty paper - I will finish it, come what may, by the end of August and start a new book in September.

The tide was going out, so I managed to paddle in the sea, walking over brownish sand studded with little stones like currants. Going barefoot up the shingle bank wasn't so much fun - very prickly stuff, shingle.

I've been enjoying the 'painting-a-day' project;

Wesnesday 12th was Runner Beans 

And also this (copied from a book) as a wedding card  

Thursday 13th - flowers in the border, painted standing up, using a waterbrush

Friday 14th - Gerberas, a present from some children I teach

Satruday 15th - I was looking through the windows, didn't go out. 

Sunday was the Gardens

Monday 17th various tubs in the garden 

Tuesday18th more vegetable tubs, before I picked the tomatoes

Wednesday 19th August to day is a frabjous day - a new brush I ordered, having seen reviews and watched someone using it, arrived - actually, it cam a day or so ago, but we leave things 'in quarantine' for a couple of days.

It is amazing. It reminds me of the first time I played the concert Bosendorfer piano at school (the best thing at that school for sure) and I discovered that there are pianos that make everything you try and do 100 times easier, and 100 times better. It reminds me of the time I bought a new bow for my cello, after over 40 years, and discovered that a right bow transforms the sound you make, and how easy it is to play - if I had had that bow when I first got the cello everyhing might have been very different.

I've been playing with the brush off and on all day;

  

and also ordered a travel version to take when I am out and about.  

Monday 27th July - Week two of Summer holidays

We've seen the sea!

I've been wanting to go to the seaside for ages and ages, and on Friday we actually made it. It was a grey blustery day with a sharp cold wind, the sea almost the same colour as the shingle with only a few hardy souls braving the heavy swell and breaking waves.

And then the wind dropped, the sun came out, and the sea became a turquoise with white twinkling tips to the waves. Time to remove my windproof jacket and fleece and walk along in a Summer tee-shirt like a holiday-maker.

We've been out and about all week; not Monday, which was, if I remember a bit of a miserable day, weather-wise.

But on Tuesday afternoon we drop to the top of Ditching Beacon and walked eastwards. I was able to use the 'distance vision' part of my vari-focal glasses for the first time in months;

It was glorious.

On Wednesday we panned to go to the Prairie Gardens in Henfield, but there was a fairly long (socially distances) queue at the entrance, so we aimlessly  drove into the viallge, and found a car park alongside the South Downs Link Path. We followed the path down to the River Adur, and then turned off to follow the river for a while, before circling back and up though tracks and lanes and roads to where we started.

We had another try at Prairie Gardens on Thursday;

The first delight was encountering the giant cardoons; I so want to grow these in our garden. They are like thistles, only about seven feet high.

It was fairly busy in the gardens, although there were other quieter parts, so we could wander along the paths through the flowerbeds, dodging the sprinklers which appeared to change direction and speed at random.

It was also full of butterflies - a Gatekeeper

Large Tortoiseshell

 Comma

There were lots of buterflies at Ditching Beacon too; notably a small blue butterfly, apparently called the small blue and some small dusty tortoisehell types, probably called the small heath butterfly. They were too quick and too small to photograph.

All these photographs were taken by Himself using a Proper digital camera. That's why there are so much better than my usual snaps using my ohone!

Friday 20th March - Unreal Times

In the past 8 days,

I've visited my godmother's house for the last time, saying goodbye to things which I can't keep but hated parting with;

The cabinet came from my childhood home and I'm pleased that my brother took it. The wall hanging(it's huge) and pictures were all made by her, but there's a limit to how much I can fit into my own house.

I decided to stop teaching after last weekend. I felt that I was a bit of a 'typhoid Mary', collecting the germs from one school and taking them along to the next. That took endless phone calls and emails, and I've had to organise refunds or credits for a dozen pupils. As part of this exercise I ended up working out the self-employed part of my income for the tax year ending April 2020; everything was a complete tangle as so many lessons were cancelled or rescheduled over the year while my god-mother was ill. Still - that is a huge achievement - this could be the first time ever that I get my tax return in within weeks of close of year!

I've restarted my music blog, www.themusicjungle.co.uk, which has lain dormant for over a year. I'm posting up various music bits and pieces to keep the pupils going in the meantime.

On Tuesday I went to Nymans Gardens with some friends. Bitterly cold, but the place is full of flowers;

I was wishing that I had added my nose to the fingerprint sensor so that I could unlock the phone without taking my gloves off.

I've been having lovely slow mornings and breakfast in bed! Oh what luxury!

Lent is still happening; I'm reading St Mark's Gospel along with Ryce's commentary, roughly the same vintage as my great-grandfather might have used. How Biblical interpretation has changed over the years... I'm using a Bible with space for you to add your notes and drawings

The font is minute and the pages paper-thin, but I like having them all crinkled up where I paint pictures as I go along. (Maybe painting watercolours in bed is living dangerously, but so far, so good.) Any book looks more cheerful with lots of coloured pictures along the way.

Himself has had a birthday. The off-spring came a-visiting, bearing lunch and presents and cards. We had planned to meet in a cafe halfway, but these days....

Leo the cat thoroughly approves. She pins me down so that I can't move

Today we tried out the exploding chocolate snowman Himself received for Christmas. The idea is that you heat a mug of mild, drop in the unfortunate snowman, stir him about and drink him.

Himself pronounced it 'very good',  the snowman didn't get a chance to express an opinion. It will be the turn of my white chocolate one soon. I wonder if I should drop him into a cup of coffee so that he shows up properly?