Saturday 30th May - and Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as well

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... 

Wednesday 27th May - Roses etc

 I promised you roses;

at the front of our house - this rose will carry on flowering until at least October, sometimes even December 

These are the yellow ones I was keeping an eye on, until I forgot. It's a David Austin rose belonging to our neighbour, but we are lucky enough to share it. The white flowers are mock orange.

This rose is just outside the patio door, and is doing well.

These are our other neighbour's 'Frankenroses', he has grafted several different varieties onto just two or three original shrubs, so the dark red, pink and white ones are all growing from plant! 

....

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.

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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 (!)

Tuesday 26th May - Breaking News...

 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

and are knitting squares in pairs (now that could be a collaboration title too!), one to keep and one to send. Each square is over about 33 stitches so they don't take very long, and with short knitting needles it makes a very portable project.

Izzy whizzy let's get busy! I was surprised at how much I was missing the collaborations when we took a short break.

Monday 25th May - Hot!

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!'.

Sunday 24th May - Pentecost

 

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.

Saturday 23rd May - MOUSE!

 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.

I hope she wouldn't mind me putting it up; but as there are a lot of her pictures on instagram, which I don't use (nor facebook...) she obviously made her work public. Thank you, Elisabethd for sending it to me.

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.

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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.