Daily List - Sunday 16th April

It tells me somewhere on the internet that you should make a list of ten things every morning when you wake up. Apparently this will make you more cleverer. We shall see.

Today is Easter Day. It is 7am, and we have just come back from a dawn service at the top of the hill. I've consumed a bowl of porridge with maple syrup and just about stopped shivering. It was COLD up there!



Sunrise

1. Birdsong (today we heard owls)
2. Surprising the cats
3.Dark turns into light
4.Shadows become shapes become things
5.Breakfast (and first coffee of the day)
6.Monochrome world becomes multi-coloured
7.The day warms up - both in temperature and in the colour of the light
8.Sunlight reaching the blossom on the apple tree (assuming itbis going to be a sunny day
9.New day, new start
10.Opportunities....

Saturday 15th April - Book Review 4

Appointed to Die - Kate Charles

I am a sucker for period-style, rather retro murder mysteries. Not too much violence or blood, nothing to keep me awake at night. Kate Charles fits the bill completely. I had guessed some of the plot, but not all of it, but that never spoils it for me. Like doing Sudoku - I'm happy to be handed the answers at the back of the book if I'm finding it too much like hard work on my own. I don't read for work - that's what I do for a living! They books were on offer so I bought two - I'm trying not to read them both in one go.

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

I was reading this Very Slowly as a sort of "Lent" book - reflecting on the personalities, situations, behaviour, of the main characters. I've enjoyed it very much - squirmed a bit at Toad's dreadful hubris, sympathised with him when Badger is "jawing" at him, loved how tenderly Mole and Ratty look after each other when they each experience a crisis. It has stood the test of time well, for me. I've been given a paperback copy of  "The Willows in Winter", and also a DVD of the original story, which I can't wait to read/see.


   

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor

This reminded me a bit of "Miss Buncle's Book" by D E Stevenson, in the sense it is partly about the writing of a book. (Which reminds me, one day I must get hold of the sequel.) 

I was listening to a book programme on the radio in the wee small hours, when they started discussing "Angel" by Elizabeth Taylor - NOT the actress!. I was fascinated, so downloaded a book more or less at random.

I remember being fascinated by "Residential Hotels" when I was young - whatever could they be, and how did people live in them? Now all is made clear. Although living was what one was expected to do. Early on Mrs Palfrey remarks to Ludo "We are not allowed to die here". This was a story that pulled me into the world of Mrs Palfrey and the other elderly residents of the Claremont, in the Cromwell Road. 

Tuesday 11th April - Bicycles in Amsterdam

We're back now! But I'm just getting round to posting.

Here's Amsterdam Centraal - a magnificent station, where we pitched up on Saturday morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Centraal_station

It didn't look like that when we got there - the weather was cold and grey, and the forecourt was bustling. The last time I was in Amsterdam I was probably about ten or twelve years old. I have almost no memories of that stay apart from the traffic, specifically trying to cross the roads. I still have occasional nightmares about that. 

No-one in Amsterdam walks about looking at their mobile phones - to do so means death. Probably. After a while you get the idea of which direction the nearly silent trams are likely to appear from. They ring their bell at you, so that you leap into the path of the tram coming the other way. 

Thankfully the buses, cars and motorbikes make more noise and you have a chance to hear them coming. 

But then there are the bicycles. No-one can properly imagine a city full of byicyles until they have been to Amsterdam. They hurtle towards you from no-where. I swear they use magic to appear when you least expect them. Dutch bicycles are not the highly-strung, light-weight contraptions like the ones that flit about the London streets, driven by skinny-ma-linky-long-legs all dressed in neon lycra. No, no, these are substantially engineered frames of an upright nature, with a tremendous sense of momentum and, great barrows on the front, full of shopping and children. Also, as far as I could tell, they are not fitted with brakes. At least, they never seemed to stop at lights and crossings.

So, when in Amsterdam, the best thing to do is take a canal trip. My pictures didn't come out, so these are all from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_Amsterdam

An aerial photograph of the canals of Amsterdam

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Brouwersgracht

  

Herengracht

Sunday 9th April - A Day at the Beach

Back at the beginning of the year I started making a list of 64 things I'd like to do this year. The number isn't of any significance apart from that's how many lines there are in my notebook. However, "A day at the seaside" did feature, and on Sunday I was able to put a star by that item...

The occasion was a family gathering to scatter my mother's ashes on the beach where she grew up, in Ijmuiden, The Netherlands.



It is a long, long flat sandy beach, with dunes where she used to play with her best friend when they were very young. As children, on some of our occasional visits to the Netherlands, we had stayed in her sister's beach hut. I remember sand castles, and riding a horse, and kite-flying. Chips with mayonnaise, chewing zoethout (and spitting the fibrous strands into the sand everywhere). Gas lighting. Sun. Wind. The cold North Sea.


Now, after all these years, we were back there, along with many of the Dutch relations. Most of us hadn't seen each other for decades. The cousins we used to play and argue with are all grown up (like us!).

It was a hot sunny day, tempered by a sharp wind, just as it had always been in my memory. A "beach taxi" - now there's a brilliant idea - took us along the beach away from the crowds, to a quiet place among the dunes, and there, we made a depression in the soft sand, and deposited the ashes. We covered them over, and scattered petals, and taosted her memory with prosecco. Someone (was it her sister?) thought she would like a share in the drinks too, so we poured some of the prosecco over the petals.

It was all very casual, very informal, very easy. A little quiet, maybe, but not solemn. And afterwards we went back to a pavilion for a (very late!) lunch together and catch up on theevents of the past forty years.

Back in January, last year, leaving her bedroom in the nursing home after we had gone to see her on the same morning that she had died was hard, very hard. I felt disorientated, and rather at a loss as to what to do next (lunch, as it happened, proved to be the right decision then as well!).

Later in February, walking out the the crematorium at the end of the funeral felt entirely wrong, as though, once again, I was leaving her when I should really stay (as I felt on so many occasions when we visited her in hospital). I took the funeral wreaths home with me, at my cousin's suggestion, and re-arranged the flowers into vases. That helped a lot.

Leaving the spot in the dunes was easy - the sun shining, the wind blowing. We had brought her to one of the places where she had been so happy. The other funeral and memorial gathering had all been about "us" - the family. This one was about her.

Wednesday 5th April - too soon, too soon

I know you are not supposed to...

But I did pull up a radish plant to see how it was getting on. No sign of a radish growing yet, so I've put it back.

The Pak Choi has survived several days in the garden and is looking good. I was a little alarmed to hear that there had been a frost in Oxfordshire this morning but we were ok here.

Here are the next seedlings, on the windowsill. Beetroots and spring onions. There is some spinach as well, but it is out of shot. It is ridiculously exciting to see the little green shoots appearing.

Sunday 2nd April - of flowers and fudge and other things

This week I saw the first flowering of Lady's-Smock, also called Cuckooflower;

I've deliberately snitched a blurry picture from the web, because that's how I see it - in drifts of pink in sunny patches along the lanes as I zip along from one place to the next. Every year I struggle to remember its name... although it didn't take me quite as long to get there this time.

I've been seeing primroses for a while now, and today I saw great drifts of cowslips along the grass dividing the hither and thither sections of a dual carriage way. "Primroses," I said to myself. "No! The first cowslips!". Other travellers must have been able to notice them for days already, as they were well in flower.

Celandines, daisies, dandelions, wood anenomes... this past week's weather of alternating rain showers and sunny afternoons has done its work on the Sussex countryside.

I've been forgetting to bring in my seedlings overnight, but they have survived, so yesterday I shoved them into planters in my growing vegetable plot.

How about that shadow for showing for the strength of the sun at midday today? The green sack has 9 pak choi seedlings, I've added another four lettuce plants to the black planter next to it, filling the space not used by my broad bean plants. 

 The brown planter has two more broad bean plants and a tangle of radishes, and the remaining black planer just has four sad and spindly brussel sprout plants. I've been using loo roll and kitchen towel inners and various cardboard cartons as pots to start my seedlings in, so that I can just put them into the planters without disturbing them too much. The earth was surprisingly warm - I'm glad the cats haven't discovered that they are excellent sun traps.

The next load of seedlings are on a window ledge. This morning, the spinach seedlings arrived - the beetroot and spring onions are taking a little longer.

What of the fudge? We went to Arundel for a belated Mother's day out, taking No 1 Daughter with us, meeting up with No 1 Son (that's how come I saw all those cowslips).

Well, hey, what do you know! Roly's fudge is back - it disappeared for a while which was a great loss as far as we are concerned. We went on a little walkabout round well-known haunts. Every restaurant that looks at all appealing was fully booked, but in the end we found an outside table at "Belinda's"

 

which to begin with seemed a "not-so-good" idea - it was still a bit chilly. As time went on, tea arrived (large teapot accompanied by large pot of hot water, trademark willow-pattern blue-and-white chine) and battered cod and chips and salad arrived, and the sun arrived.

Then we walked further on to create space for more; Spark's Yard is a favourite.

http://www.sparksyard.com/

It wasn't gift wrapped like the picture... inside it is full of everything you never knew people wanted to buy. Once you see it, of course, it all becomes "wantable". We escaped with merely a silicone washing up thingy which we thought would be good for grooming one of our cats. It's a sort of brushy kind of thing - ours is blue and rectangular and only one, unlike these examples which appear to be like flowers and come in threes. I suppose I could always have dug around in my handbag and photographed the actual thing.

Why would that be more effort that hunting around on the web for a picture?

Roly's fudge.

I was coming to that. I was very restrained - I sampled the strawberries- and-cream and the clotted-cream - twice, to make sure. I didn't need to taste the salted caramel. I abhor salted caramel. Then I bought one small piece of each of the maple-pecan, butterscotch, and coffee-walnut flavours. I left the shop at that point, leaving the rest of the samples in peace, and the others to choose what they wanted, and BB to pay. It's a very small shop and I was just in the way.

Time to go home - Mother's Day complete.