Friday 5th June - Ang's squares

 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've taken the images from her blog... for ease of posting. That'swhy theyare both so beautifully in focus!)

I over-watered  my supermarket basil plant and suddenly it went all horribly droopy. So I snipped off all the plausible looking stems, trimmed off the bottom leaves, and put them into a little jar of water. They seem to be much happier! 

It does please me that they are in a little 'mixed herbs' jar.

Here are some yarn cakes;

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...

Wednesday 3rd June - a thunderstorm

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. 

Monday 1st June - Ah, Summer...

 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.

 

Sunday 31st May - T-shirt weather

 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     

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.

....

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 (!)