Sunday 21st June - Reading - "The Invisible Library"

This was fun! (If you like that sort of thing)



Loaded it onto my Kindle a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I finished it a few weeks ago too. It's got everything - alternate universes, dragons, magic, steampunk, faerie, werewolves and even Sherlock Holmes.

Hopefully there aren't any spoilers in that list, and it's enough of a description to encourage the enthusiastic and help the non-enthusiast pick something different!

I'll be looking for a sequel - it's all set up and ready to go.

Saturday 20th June - "Food for Thought"

Or rather, read, come to think of it.

Robert Farrar Capon "Food for Thought"

One of my mother's books - she handed it over to me decades ago, and I have read it before. I remembered the tone of the book more than the content. A dense amalgam of food writing, recipes and Christian theology (Amongst other things he was an Episopalian priest, seminary lecturer, a food writer for "The New Yorker".). He is urging simplicity, and freshness, and seasonality, and due reverence for the way food in produced and treated.

Written at a time (1977) when "food" was in a really bad way in the States, and "modern" cooking involved tins and packets and prepared gloops, by the sound of it. We were married in the Autumn of 1977. as students, pot noodles, baked beans, and all kinds of stews in tins were a mainstay, but we tended to cook from fresh. Cheaper, (our food budget was £10 per week), and better tasting than tinned gloops.

[Pause for  memories of home-made scones (we never bought bread) scraggy lamb and broth-mix stew, boiled fruit cake, flake-meal shortbread, left-over chicken cooked with rice and veg. Tinned mushrooms, because fresh ones were had to find. Small tins of Plumrose ham.Fried eggy bread with marmite. Rice pudding.]

The book is heavy going in places, but some lovely, thought-provoking trains of thought on the nature of Grace and the importance of a sacrificial, mindful approach to the way you live.

I've down-loaded his book "The Supper of the Lamb" onto my Kindle to read in a few month's time.

Thursday 18th June - The Doorbell

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Tuesday 16th June - Reading (books, not the town)

At school I used to read a whole book every day - on the coach to school, breaks and lunchtimes, on the coach home, in bed at night.

No, I didn't use a torch under the bed clothes. I used the crack of light slipping through the bedroom door hinge, slicing across the carpet from the landing light. Or, more risky, sitting on the loo in relative comfort and full light. If my brother hadn't got there first. You had to stay alert; if you heard anyone downstairs, the trick was to pull the light cord just enough to make the light go off, but not enough to actually switch it off, as the resultant "click" would be heard and you would be caught.

Recently, after a period of hardly reading anything much at all - well compared to how much I used to read - I've started spending more time with books.

This caught my eye in a bookshop when we were in Canterbury last month, and I've loaded it on to my kindle (but not started it yet). It appears to be an amusing account of books read over the year by someone (who?) called Andy Miller.


It has inspired me to start keeping a list of books I've read. I'm going to back-date the project to the beginning of June. And, knowing me, probably abandon it somewhere around the middle of July. We shall see.

Monday 15th June - Featuring - "The Feature!"

We've finally nearly sort of finished The Feature.

We've planted the shrubs and bedding plants that we bought on Saturday, and we are both very pleased with the results.

My parents came round for lunch a couple of weekends ago, when The Feature looked like this;

This is the top on of our back garden now;

Pebbles and pots in place, planted up with various shrubs and some bedding plants. Wild strawberries in the foreground, some kind of grassy thing that seems to have arrived under its own steam, and on the right our small water garden/pond effect bowl.

Some pots and "the coffin", an over-size storage bench thingy that came from my parent's garden. It acts as a boundary between the drive and the garden, and also prevents people from tripping over the lifted corner of the concrete slab that the garage stood on.

View of the back of the house, taken from the concrete slab. Some of the pots around the back door are for herbs; bay, parsley, rosemary and mint have survived so far.

 

 

 

In the jungly corner near the patio door are a couple of concrete statues brought all the way over from Bali. 

Take it from the cat - they are really quite benign, in spite of appearances.

Leo is recovering from having "lost her squeak". I'm not sure what caused this, but for a few days (after a series of peace-shattering yowling contests with the local feline visitors to the garden) she was silent. She could walk up, open her mouth to miaow, but no sound emerged.  These were followed by a day or so of hoarse miaows, and now she can make a bit of a squeak.

Saturday 13th June - Gardening, The Feature, Bathroom (updated)

To-do list

The Double Glazing Saga is complete, so we called in to pay the final invoice. We are very pleased with the windows and doors. Well worth the wait.



He is in the process of installing a doorbell.  This is a multi-phase operation. So far we have a suitable hole drilled through from the inside to the outside of the brickwork along-side the door.





















We have just placed the order for a proper, legible, plaque with the house number.

We've been to the garden centre and bought more pebbles. He's even added them to the feature, and we are trying out different arrangements of half-barrels.

We've bought some plants to go in them.

I eyed up a gorilla, but decided not to buy him yet,

to go with the trio of frogs

that I suspect may be coming our way.

We've tried out different arrangements to deal with a potential hazard, where the workmen laying the patio lifted a corner of the slab that the old garage was built on. This is how it looks now; for the moment;

AND we've visited the last, and probably the best, of half-a-dozen bathroom showrooms. I'm tempted by this basin;

and this bath is a possibility

After all that, I went for a lie-down.

Friday 12th June - National Kindness Day

This has been quite a hefty week of teaching. It's probably the first week since the beginning of May when I have taught every lesson in my timetable (apart from one piano lesson on Friday evening). Thinking about it, I have taught extra lessons this week because of the various music exams looming on the near horizon.

Friday was full-on, with extra lessons in the morning and then a hectic afternoon getting three classes of year 6 children to play "Frere Jacques" on boomwhackers,

At the end of the day I was standing in the classroom trying to summon the energy for the next task - replacing the ten tables I had stacked to the side at the beginning of the afternoon, and setting 30 chairs back in their places.

A pupil from another class appeared with this:

It's a Thank You card, with a lovely long letter inside thanking me for teaching her to play the recorder. Today is National Kindness Day, and the children in her class were asked to choose someone who had helped them, and make them a thank-you card. She chose me!What a lovely present; made all the difference.

Thursday 11th June/Friday 12th - The Feature

I came home from from work to find this:

The pebbles had been delivered on Tuesday, and ever since then he had been hard at work clearing the area, getting the edging in place, laying the weed-proof membrane, and finally emptying a dozen bags of Premium Scottish Tweed Pebbles over the area. Raking them smooth was slightly compromised by discovering that the metal handle of the rake was almost completely corroded through. We'll need to get another couple of bags of pebbles. Because of the slope they need to be a bit deeper at the far end.

I have to say it's looking every bit as good as we had hoped.  

The next morning we woke up to find that it had rained overnight, which had washed the grit and dust off the pebbles and made the bricks on the patio all shiny.

We had been expecting rain, because the mock-orange had just come into flower. It's a bit like when the magnolias burst into bloom in the spring; a sure forecast for rain.

Tuesday 9th June - The Feature

This was what we had a couple of days ago......

Today, he started digging out the edge. With a trowel, as the ground was too hard-packed and stony for a spade.  

I wish I'd managed to get a picture of Leo the cat carefully walking round the finished channel as though is was a path especially made for her. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't, considering what she did when she reached the end!

We have a table for each cat to take a view from. Here's Leo

and, behind all the barrels, there's McCavity.

The plan is to put a weed-inhibiting membrane on the bare patch of earth, and fix edging around the border with the "lawn" (scraggy grass is a closer description), before covering it with a layer of pebbles, and then a selection of patio pots and flower barrels planted up in a tasteful manner.  

That's the plan, anyway. Meanwhile our friends (you know who you are!) are keeping us supplied with a selection of "adornments" ranging from solar-powered "pebbles" to weird and wonderful water features. I'm partial to the idea of a couple of strings of colour-changing solar fairy-angel-flower lights, myself. I reckon they are in keeping with the white plastic roses stuck into a planter in a previous picture...