Sunday 29th June - Learner Driving along

We had a very pleasant trip back to my son's flat this afternoon - with him doing the driving!

Maybe an Alfa-Romeo is not the most suitable car for a learner driver, but we have a history of unsuitable learner-driver cars in our family.

My husband learned on ancient tractors, cranky old land-rovers, and whatever else was lying around the farm that could be made to go. He tells hair-raising stories of cramming an 1800 Maxi engines into an mini --- and succeeding --- and then driving the horrid contraption around until the inevitable inevitably occurred. Apparently there were issues; "It was nose-heavy, the drive shafts were seriously unequal; actually it was more or less undriveable, but very interesting." Yes. Quite. It was never road legal, so confined to the farm tracks.

My first ever driving experience was in an Alfa Romeo Berlina. It probably looked like this. Except this one is clean and shiny.



The experience was relatively short lived. My father's comments when I attempted reverse were memorable (no-one told me that you had to use the clutch for reverse as well as forward gears. This kind of thing is not obvious to everyone). It ended with demolition of the wooden gatepost at the entrance to the driveway. My mother shot out of the kitchen door at the speed of light and I abandoned the car in the hedge and that was that.

Later, much, much later, I started driving lessons, and my first car was a Sunbeam Stiletto. One of these:



(That isn't mine - for a start it isn't rusty, and for another it doesn't look as though it needs topping up with oil, water, air, brake fluid and clutch fluid before every trip. The petrol tank at least didn't leak. But then what do you expect for £141, even back in 1983?)

They are a poor man's Porsche - an over-exciteable rear engine sports-mobile. The tyre pressures say it all - 16psi  at the front, and 32psi at the rear. Go figure, as my Canadian friends are wont to say. Given the least excuse it would swap swap ends at any speed over about 30 miles an hour. Like red setter dogs, they have a desperate prediliction for ditches. In a strong wind they will do a vertical take-off and landing into the next lane without any warning. I learned ALL SORTS of things in that car... like how to enter roundabouts at speed, traverse them with the car sliding diagonally round, until, with a twitch of the steering wheel and a blip of the throttle the back end would flip round and I would accelerate out of my exit. If you are ever following one of these, give it plenty of road-room.

So it seemed entirely reasonable to let my son practice his driving in my 2 litre twinspark.Alfa 147. My husband was the co-pilot, and I managed not to be too much of a backseat driver (it IS my car, after all!) He did a jolly good job too - no gateposts were in any danger at any point in the whole trip.

Saturday 28th June - Tea and - cake?

After we had finished watching air displays - formation flying from the Red Arrows and a couple of crows, and acrobatics from a skylark, and flying round and round in circles by the Vulcan, we eyed up the gathering clouds, getting blacker as we watched, and decided to leave.

We drove through a series of heavy rain showers to the Cowdray Farm Cafe, an old favourite stopping point  for me from the years when I used to teach at a school in a small village beyond Midhurst.

Teatime - a bit early, maybe, but that was what we wanted.

Tea? My son chose a cream tea,

I had a flat white coffee and shared a sticky toffee pudding and cream with my daughter, who also had a hot chocolate.

Sorry, it's another "empty plate" picture - once we had tasted the first spoonful, nothing was going to interrupt the next ones until it was  a-l-l  g-o-n-e.

And as for himself - it seemed a hot chocolate, and a serving of chips was just what he wanted.

Each to their own, I say.

We called in on my parents once we were back home to drop in birthday cards. It was my father's birthday, and my brother and his son (are you keeping up with all this?) had been round for the day, bearing birthday gifts - joint present, from him and me. Books and a bottle of port to accompany them. It looks as though my father had done well - the carers who come four times a day to help my mother had brought a large creme caramel, someone else had given them a cake, and there were plenty of cards as well. They had all gone out for lunch together in my father's new wheelchair accessible car, a shiny silver Fiat.

So - in one way another, every Father got their day?
   

Saturday 28th June - Happy (rescheduled) Father's Day

I don't know when the official Father's Day was, but the children decided that this would be the day.

Up early, with a picnic lunch, and off to The Trundle, a high point on the Downs overlooking Goodwood Park. Our plan was to see the Vulcan air display over the Goodwood Festival of Speed event, at lunchtime.

As plans go, it was remarkably successful.

We got there early, and had a choice of parking spaces. The early bird can park their car, late arrivals had to stick them in the hedge in the lane. The weather was NOT promising, although the view was breathtaking. I think it was the view that took my breath away, could have been the wind.

It's a steepish climb to the top of the Trundle, and I am Very Slow going up hills, so the children went on ahead to bag a good spot.



looking back down the path from most of the way up

While we waited, we could watch helicopters and birds and butterflies and listen to race car engines and skylarks and goldfinches. There were wild flowers everywhere.

The Red Arrows were due first and duly arrived bang on time.

Their display was as precise, and balletic, and beautiful as always. There is something so poetic in the lines they fly as they climb and dip and bank and roll.

We had an hour before the Vulcan was due. I was following its progress south from Doncaster on Twitter, @hx558 as they tweeted where they had got to, and their ETA. Time for a picnic overlooking the racecourse on the other side of the hilltop. We were all fine and warm, wearing coats and walking boots. Some were dressed like us, in walking gear, and others were sauntering (or struggling) up wearing shorts and tee-shirts, sun dresses, high-heeled sandals. The rain held off, the sun was out, although the wind was brisk.

Back to our vantage spot overlooking the festival area (acres, and acres of car parks - it must have been a solid mas of people down there).

Then we saw it, slicing through the dark clouds like a knife.

 

It came over so quietly, so slowly, and it wasn't until it turned and the exhaust faced our direction that the powerful sound of the engines reached us. It made several deceptively lazy circuits over the Festival of Speed area, sometimes flying level, so that it looked impossibly thin, sometimes banking so that we could take in the huge sweep of the wings.

 

 

What a sight - I'm not one for aeroplanes, but it made my heart sing to see both displays.

Sunday 8th June - Just Us

We have had a quiet day at home. I expect they were whooping it up at church (Pentecost Sunday today) but 9am, and 10:30 am came and went without us stirring beyond the house and garden.
It's been hot. Just ask the cats.

I spent an hour gardening this morning, which, if I liked gardening, would have been very enjoyable. But I'm not that keen, so I kept myself going by humming "Veni Creator Spiritus" under my breath as I removed couch grass and other weeds. The earth was just the perfect consistency, not to dry, not too wet, which made the job easier.

I've sprinkled poppy seeds, saved from a year or so ago, and love-in-a-mist seeds, free with shredded wheat cereal last year, all over the earth and will see what happens; germination 14-30 days.

Hopefully it will become like this bit that I got done three or four weeks ago;

with lots of little flower seedlings coming up.

I've also prepared my pay claim (having missed the deadline for last month, but that will be nice later on), and done some lesson planning bits and pieces, and TWO blog posts, and I'm about to pour myself a generous glass of chilled sherry, and tackle www.themusicjungle.co.uk which has been neglected of late.

The various family events and crises of the past few weeks seem to have settled down somewhat, which is just as well as I am approaching another busy time - music exams, end-of-term concerts, school fetes, and a couple of extra pupils.

Although I've been busy, it has been quite a restful day in many ways. Now, where's that sherry bottle gone!

Sunday 8th June - Catch-up Sunday

last week, 26th May - 1st June, was half term - whoopee!

That's when I catch up on housework that hasn't been done, odd-jobs, filing, work-related admin, and do a lot of sleeping. I try and meet up with friends that I can't see during term-time.

I had a to-do- list with 26 items:

lesson write-ups and lesson planning, school reports, marking, going through and sorting out the various bags I use for the different schools and music club that I teach through the week and so forth, getting my pay claim in for a 27th May deadline

gardening - a back-log of weeding, extracting earth from the compost bin

de-cluttering tasks in the bed room - under the bed, on top of the wardrobe, clearing the bookshelves

perhaps even finishing a couple craft projects, maybe manage to meet a friend for coffee.

household - a mountain of laundry, some Proper Cleaning, some Serious Tidying-Up.

There were 30 items on the list. I got 10 done. The weekdays had been pretty much filled with other family activities.

So, here were are, a week later, and still 20 items on the list from last week, and another half-dozen added.

It's been a busy morning so far.

Sunday 1st June - Battle Abbey

Posted on 8th June - a week later after writing it.


Today we walked widdershins around the Battle Battlefield, so all the signboards, if we had read them, told the story of the battle in reverse. We knew the story anyway, because we walked round it the proper way yesterday after watching the introductory video.

The holiday cottage is at the bottom of the battlefield, now a vista of wild flowers and clumps of trees, bathed in sunlight and full of bees and butterflied and the sound of birds. Upwards of seven thousand men died here on 14th October 1066. You'd never know.

I was singing the "Sans Day Carol"  in my head as we walked, because I had seen a holly flower
("Now the holly bears a blossom as white as a lily flower, and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our Saviour")

We revisited the beautiful vaulting in the ruins of the dormitory

and in the Novices' Room (it must have been cold there in winter)

It was another mooching day today