Wednesday 20th February - of reading, and words

and flowers and dentists...

I am reading 'Persuasion' by Jane Austen. This is because I have signed up to a book challenge, which gives a suggestion for a 'Classic' each month.

I read 'Dorian Gray' last month, and I've made a start on 'A Room of One's Own' but not found it very gripping. Maybe I'll find a renewed interest in March! 

Looking through the selection, I'm apprehensive about the Communist Manifesto and Frankenstein as neither of these have had any attraction for me in the past. We shall see!

I've previously read 'Persuasion', 'Alice in Wonderland', 'Wuthering Heights' (only half) and 'Anne of Green Gables' , and I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' performed several times, but never read the actual play. I'm looking forward to rereading them, apart from 'Wuthering Heights' , which I started as a teenager and found unreadable at the time. But then, I had the same reaction to 'Jane Eyre' first time around. 

I've been on a bit of a hunt to find out when the word 'electric' was first used; 1600, it seems. The word itself is derived from the Latin for 'amber', and was used in the context of the way amber can attract things. The hunt started when I read this paragraph in 'Persuasion';

"She was quite easy on that head, and consequently full of strength and courage, till for a moment electrified by Mrs Croft's suddenly saying,"It was you, and not your sister, I find, that my brother had the pleasure of being acquainted with, when he was in this country."

'electrified' indeed.

Earlier, Jane Austen writes of a visitor

"she only came on foot, to leave more room for the harp, which was bringing in the carriage." 

A curious construction...

Himself has gone off to the dentist this morning. It's a beautiful morning for the journey, but I don't think he's going to enjoy himself when he gets there. The hygienist is Extremely Thorough, and there are also to be discussions regarding repairs to bridgework and a replacement crown. I suspect the crown is inevitable, but am hoping the bridgework will escape. I have fortified myself with a second breakfast of tea and toast as lunch is going to be Very Late, if at all.

My contribution to his happiness has been unloading the dishwasher and hoovering the downstairs of the house. Next I intend to write some letters and walk to the local shop/post office as the weather may remain sunny for another half hour or so.

    You can see a patch of blue sky in this (slightly crooked) picture of the last two flowers on the amaryllis. I had brought a knife out from the kitchen to cut off the stalk, but will wait another couple of days before I carry out the deed.

Sunday 17th February - Sun and Sea

Church first though - I was on 'Stewarding' duty. The first time I did this, I had to ask what was involved. Ah, if they had said 'Sidesman' I would have known what to do already, but of course 'Stewarding' is gender-neutral... which I approve of, but a little sadly at the loss of another old-fashioned word.

The main entertainment (of course the liturgy and worship is not meant to be entertainment - but there's always something to make you smile) (apart from the Vicar's microphone unexpectedly switching from off to ON partway through her welcome) was the wrong part of the Scripture being read to us. Muttered consultation halfway through, and the reader exclaiming 'this is my favourite bit in the Gospels'. So we compromised - finishing that reading (given to her in error) and going on to the one we were supposed to be hearing. Actually Luke 4; 14-21 (accidental lesson) ties in reasonably well with Luke 6; 17-26.

Onwards. It was a lovely, lovely day, so instead of going home, we said 'where to next?' I set to work on google and found an old Sunday Telegraph '10 Best Seaside Places for Food' article and it included East Beach Cafe in Littlehampton. Do follow that link to see how it was built!

This is what it looks like from the land... It was still the breakfast menu when we got there, so that's what we had for lunch - eggs Benedict in my case, and smoked salmon and scrambled egg in his.

Then we set off for a prom along the prom. There was a holiday atmosphere; families out walking in the warm sun (wrapped up well against the brisk breeze).

A noticeboard mentioned the longest bench, but did we have to go East or West to discover it? I asked a woman passing by; while she was explaining that she didn't know anything about it (we realised later she had been walking past it for the previous ten minutes) a small boy interrupted 'is that the one that goes loopy loopy loop?' I nodded, guessing from his description that was probably what I was looking for. 'That way,' he pointed, and caught up with his own family.

This is what we found;

The longest bench in Britain!

You can have your own message carved (engraved?) onto a slat, which you 'lease' for five years. Many of the messages commemorate weddings, birthdays, families or express love for people and places. The whole construction is one of joy and fun.

As we walked along, more and more people seemed to be emerging into the afternoon sun. It felt like the final scene of a disaster movie, where the people appear from their shelters after a long period of danger and terror and depression into the burgeoning hope of a new dawn (or afternoon). Or maybe the opening lines of 'The Wind in the Willows', when mole emerges from underground spring cleaning and discovers the sun;   

Saturday 16th February - Knitting and Reading

Yesterday was a gloriously sunny day, which we spent waiting in for a delivery ('all-day' delivery slot turned out to mean around 3pm).

Today has been grey, dank, miserable sort of weather. Best get used to it, as that is the forecast for the rest of the week.

I had another morning-in-bed, surrounded by cat, cups of coffee, mobile phone, Kindle, diary, suduko. Excellent. I would have got up if the weather had made it worthwhile. Still,, in spite of spending half a day lolling about, I have cleared a reasonable amount of admin

• send in pay claim for music lessons
• send in completed registers for music lessons
• email parents about forthcoming music exam dates
• email round everyone on the Women's World Day of Prayer committee to remind them to gather numbers for the coffee morning next Saturday, and persuade some of them to bake Slovenian Apple Cakes 
• email to say I would Much Rather Not play for a memorial service on Friday as I will be baking Slovenian Apple Cakes
• email to give transport dates for fetching an elderly parishioner to church -  I try and share the duty with a friend - she does the taxi bit, which I dislike, and I do the 'looking after her in church' bit, which she dislikes.

And so on and so on. Stuff. Paperwork. Things to lose and find and put somewhere sensible and lose and find again.

I've also been reading a lot recently; currently I have got these books on the go;



Persuasion - Jane Austen
Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen - Fay Weldon   
Holding - Graham Norton (book club on Monday. I did read this last year, so am sort of skimming through)

and I'm about to re-read 'Arthur and the Seeing Stone', or maybe one of the others in the trilogy,



just to revisit the way the books have been written, like a series of little word-pictures.


I am determined to finish the red and yellow jumper that I finished knitting ages and ages ago - all it needs is to be sewn together, but I haven't dared tackle this until the right moment - that is when the ingredients of time, mental acuity and good lighting all coincide. I'm hoping that this conjunction of the stars and fates will happen sometime this week...

 

This picture dates back to 31st May 2018!

My current 'mindless knitting' scarf is going well; I started it at the end of January and it now looks like this;

It is meant to be an odd shape; all the increases are along the curved edge and the effect is a sort of crescent shape. I have had to switch from the circular needle I started with as some of the alloy near the point flaked off (never had that happen before). I would have swapped needles in any case - the metal tips are hard on your fingers compared to these nice bamboo needles, but I'm going to run into trouble soon as I will have too many stitches. You can see how the knitting is all bunched up at the top.

The knitting is progressing well - not least because I have discovered audiobooks on YouTube!

I'm halfway through listening to a dramatisation of 'Tiger in the Smoke' by Margery Allingham, originally a radio production. So far the Bad Man has murdered four people in one night, and Albert Campion's wife has survived a near miss. Thrilling!

Himself sitting back in his chair with a glass of wine and little olive palmieres - and apperitif before supper. He brought me mine earlier;

I've been making my way through them while I've been blogging. Ah well. Nothing lasts for ever.

He's taking a break from cooking, sitting and reading and consuming his own little dishlet of palmieres and glass of wine while the kitchen timer ticks away like an unexploded bomb beside him.

     

Friday 15th February - Half term - tea and chocs

Half term arrived in the nick of time - it felt like 'touch and go' whether I would last out... gales of laughter when I knocked on the door of a classroom on Tuesday requesting a child for a piano lesson, only to be told I had already taught him in the morning. (Really? I wonder what we did in the lesson - hopefully I will have made a note in my teaching records.)

Fortunately swathes of pupils fell by the wayside over the last two weeks - either they were ill, or on school trips - whatever - the respite was welcome! I've some lessons to make up next term, but that's something to sort out later.

I think I've been taking photographs from time to time, meaning to write a blog post. So they will now be acting as an aide-memoire;

Let's see;

The only picture I can find is this one. I had quite a few fancy, weird and exotic teabags leftover from Christmas, and have been working through them, saving the empty packets in a pile for some reason...

I've come to the conclusion that matcha tea (Japanese green tea) is matcha over-rated, in my opinion... And lavender and rose petals are much better left out in the garden or used for perfume and pot-pourri rather than stirred into boiling water and drunk. Mint works well with most things, as does ginger and lemon. Liquorice was an unexpected ingredient in several teas, but acceptable. There you go. Now you know.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day; for once it didn't pass us by. I sent off for a Green and Blacks Chocolate Subscription for Him, so random bars of dark chocolate will arrive through the post for the next few months. The first ones came at the weekend - classic 70% cocoa and "hmm, do I, don't I, like" currant and nut chocolate. Several tastes along the way and the answer is no! Hey ho - but you won't know unless you try.

He brought a Hotel Chocolat box of weird and wonderful chocolates; I think it was this one;

This was more successful - between us we enjoyed all - even the 'carrot cake' and the 'eton mess' - except one (cherry).

Friday Saturday 8th February - English Winter

And English winter really just means rain, here in the South. If I were an Eeyore, I would say it was just like the English Spring, and Summer, and Autumn too. But I'm not. (And yes, I am thinking it, even if I am saying it.)

Here's what outside looks like

The only saving grace is that wonderful, wonderful amaryllis. Both flower spikes are fully open now.

The best Eeyore is Geoffrey Palmer. With Judi Dench as the Narrator and Kanga. Here they are, on youtube. These stories, with this cast, are on my mp3 player for when I am not sleeping in the middle of the night. Although I am listening to Ngaio Marsh 'Death in Ecstasy' which is one of the very silliest of all of her 'Inspector Alleyn' stories. It is taking me a long time, as I fall asleep after a couple of tracks and wake up several hours later to silence. Then, the next evening, I find the last bit that I can remember and listen to the next ten minutes.

The cats are learning to share the settee. It has to be done carefully, making sure each cat knows that the other one is there. and No Sudden Movements allowed by anyone. Leo likes to be wrapped up, and McCavity likes to be on top of the pile of blanket.

It's not an entirely satisfactory result because now I have nowhere to sit. So I am blogging instead, and listening to the story 'In which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents'.

This morning, He took the Panda to the vet tyre depot, as the front right tyre is leaking air. This was problematic, as I needed to go to a village school to demonstrate what a fun instrument the descant recorder is, to recruit some more pupils. Luckily a friend was willing to provide a taxi service, and lurk in the school car park while I went from class to class, and bring me home. I need to recruit at least two, and preferably about six children to make up my hours.

The tyre depot were very inconclusive, their unconsidered  advice being that we should take to Panda to their contacts in the next town and have the alloy rims refurbished. We'll get a second opinion before we go down that route, and meanwhile just keep on pumping up the tyre.

I'm testing the recipe for Slovenian honey biscuits for the Women's World Day of Prayer coffee morning at the end of the month.

 So far, so good, apart from forgetting to glaze the second batch with beaten white of egg. I'm too impatient to roll the dough out and play with cookie cutters, so I just formed the dough into a long sausage and cut off slices. The final result is supposed to look like this;

The line missing off the bottom is 'bake for 10-15 minutes, leave to cool on the tray for a minute before transferring to a wire rack'. Then you ice them - I'm wondering if that would be a fun interactive activity for the people attending the coffee morning? No, I thought not. The biscuits are supposed to keep for a fortnight in an airtight tin, or longer in the freezer. I reckon I'll get around 30 biscuits from my sausages. 

Right, that's all for now, folks - I'll save the adventure of 'not enough petrol and I haven't brought my purse out with me' for another day - the moral of that tale is that it is not a bad plan to stash some cash somewhere out of sight in your car. Which I had. (Stashed some cash, for car parking). So I didn't. (Run out of petrol). So it wasn't. (An adventure).

Monday 4th February - happy

Keyboard

   The keyboard is fine!

Cats

The cats are slowly coming to the realisation that it is perfectly okay for them to share a piece of furniture. McCavity is in her usual place, and Leo is in MY place

Thursday 1st February

McCavity is in her alternative place, on a 'catmat' fleecy square wedged on top of the radiator behind the settee, and Leo on the seat (in MY place). I have had to shift McCavity's hairy knitted cushion in order to sit at that end of the settee. 

Sunday 3rd February

There was nearly a 'cat'astrophe when McCavity decided to descend from her perch to nestle in the blue throw, not realising that Leo was happily snoozing inside the folds. I managed to get her to see that Leo was already there, so, reluctantly, McCavity chose a different route down to the floor.

Brexit  - NOT happy

I can't begin to discuss Brexit. Every day in every way it seems stupider and stupider. How did we get into such a mess. And don't tell me it will all end happily - too late for that with so many companies already relocated to Europe even BEFORE the outcome is settled, and people having to prove their right to stay in this country and  - I could go on for ever. 

Where are the rats who started this whole pantomime? Come out, come out, wherever you are!

Sunday 3rd Feb 2019 - Tea, biscuits, Sunday afternoon

Amaryllis

     I promised a picture of the amaryllis;

Saturday afternoon

It was the best part of the view out of the sitting room window yesterday -
six E N O R M O U S flowers on one stalk. I have no idea how the flowers that are even as I type emerging from the buds on the second stalk will find any room to expand their petals. I wondered what they looked like in the wild; there are pictures on the www.pacificbulbsociety.org website, but I haven't copied the pictures here as I expect they are copyright protected.

Today is a better day, weatherwise, but still cold. We considered going out, and we considered drinking tea and eating a biscuit or two, and here we are.

Sunday afternoon

Church

I was playing for the morning church service today (first Sunday of the month). I really do need to change my glasses, or at least get some kind of Very Strong reading glasses. I wear varifocals, and can't work out which lens to look through when I am reading the music. It seems to make no difference whether I look through the top, middle or bottom. Those little dots and squiggles scattered over the pages remain vanishingly small and wriggly.  Today I had the horrid experience of losing my place in the music halfway through the verse of the last song. I ploughed on using a mixture of memory, luck and  guesswork to get to then end; unfortunately I had forgotten what key we were in, but found my way home in what I hope was a musical manner.

Knitting (and a short 'tale of the unexpected')  

As part of making an effort to play less freecell, I have cast on stitches for a scarf using a ball of wool I bought back last Summer, when we were staying in a showman's caravan in Bodiam. We took the steam train to Tenterden, and, my oh my, there was a superb wool shop!

I had been resisting starting anything with this wool until I had finished a few other things and now seemed the opportunity. The wool is called 'zauberball'; I have an idea that 'zauber' is German for 'magic', and the wool 'magically' changes colourways as it unwinds. I have come to the conclusion that this is one of the attractions of yarn; watching the different colours slip through my fingers as I go.

The pattern for the scarf is only 'slightly' interesting, but that is the whole point - I play freecell because it is 'slightly' interesting, because it is repetitive, because it is easy, because (and after a long teaching day this is very important) it doesn't talk to me, ask questions, or require decisions and answers. Very much like this knitting
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That was all a bit sudden. Somehow, as I put my mug of tea down it sort of bounced (how? dunno) and the tea leapt out of the mug and onto the keyboard. (I don't think it would be helpful to mention at this juncture that the keyboard needed a bit of a clean. )

He went from sitting semi-comatose in the chair beside me, reading a book, to full action stations in a nano second; emergency shut down of computer and cleaning tea out of the keyboard... which is now drying off in the airing cupboard for a while while I was still wondering what ha happened and how.

I have moved to another part of the sitting room and am using the laptop! Here's hoping that I haven't destroyed the keyboard.

Now, where was I?

I honestly can't remember. Except my mug is now empty; perhaps I should put the kettle on?

Friday 1st February - Birds, trees, flowers,

I've been looking forward to this Friday for  while - it's been nearly a fortnight since my last 'silent' day. As in 'all-by-myself' day. I need these from time to time to stay sane, or at least what counts as sane in my case.

So here I am; himself is out, and I am set up with tablet, fleecy blanket, cat, coffee, Kindle, snacks, writing book and pen, flask...

I have got as far as breakfast (in bed) bath (in the bath) and putting clothes on (me).

Flowers

A surprisingly wonderful Christmas Present has been this amyrillis;

This photo was taken three days ago, and I only planted the bulb at the beginning of January. Today it has four huge, white blooms. You will have to wait until I go downstairs for a picture. I am not disturbing the cat Again.
So much energy and vitality concealed in such an unpromising bulb! Which reminds me, I need to check on those poor little iris bulb, which, according to the instructions, have to be shut away in a dark cupboard for TEN WEEKS after being planted. Last time I looked they were inches tall, all pale and loitering among the spare china and tablecloths.

Birds and trees

When I look out of the rather high window of the little music room I use on Mondays and Tuesdays, I can see a great expanse of sky, and the tops of a couple of oak trees. These are always full of starlings. At a first glance I don't spot them, but one or two will move, and suddenly the tree is alive with a score of black shapes shifting from twig to twig. Watching beguiles the minutes between pupils, or even moments when I need to 'count to ten' before responding to some playing (or behaviour) which needs a measured and effective approach to achieve  a positive result. 

'What are you looking at?' asked a provoking boy.

'The birds in the tree over there.' (is honesty always the best policy?)

'Why?'

'Because you are messing about and not listening to a word I say so I would rsthee watch the birds.' (Let's test this policy)

He was totally silenced (for a moment).

'Shall we have another go at those notes now?'

On Wednesdays I drive under a rookery. I was very concerned that the rooks were all checking out the nests a few weeks ago... too soon, too soon! They must have heard my thoughts as they were absent for a while. This week they were back as I drove to school at 9am; each nest had a black rook sitting beside it. When I returned along the same road several hours later they had all gone. Where?

On Thursday the week before last, driving along another road (did I write about this before?) I passed several trees each with about a dozen pigeons hunched among the bare branches. They were still there on my return. I've just remembered that a couple of years ago at about this time of year they were all crammed (not as many of them) into a small birch tree in the middle of a nearby roundabout. Odd.

It is remarkably difficult to draw small birds sitting in a tree on the tablet using just mt finger, but the stylus is downstairs. It is even harder to persuade the picture into the blog; in the end I took a photograph of the drawing using my phone.