Monday 8th June - Relampago

Which means 'lightning'.

 This piece by Amy Ferguson won a composition competition run by 'the Pianist' magazine. They printed the score in the May issue and I made a point of getting hold of a copy as I love it.

Here's the first page; as I hoped it's not that difficult, but sounds very impressive. You have to remember to play it 2 octaves lower than written.

After I'd spent about half an hour on it, I discovered my fitness watch had added about 400 steps to the counter! That felt too much like cheating, even for me, so I took the watch off and added 400 real steps to balance things out.

I'm trying to achieve a total step count of 100,000 by then end of June. Not as a target, I don't like targets because I feel pressured by them. It's just a notion...

The first week is looking promising. 

......

This looks a promising new book: Phillipa Perry well known psychiatrist and agony aunt, and also wife of artist Grayson Perry, has written a cosy mystery.

It's out in hardback, audio and rather expensive  kindle editions at the moment, so I will have to practice patience and wait for the price to come down.

Meanwhile I shall carry on with 'Homecoming' by Kate Morton. It's all apparently disconnected strands and secrets at the moment; it had better start coming together soon or I fear I will abandon it!

Sunday 7th June - Psalm 23

 I'm thinking of the verse

'Peverse and foolish oft I strayed,

But yet in love he sought me,

And on his shoulder gently laid

And home rejoicing brought me.'

Today it came to mind when we saw this bizarre little scene through the window. 

It's not very clear, but you should be able to make out the geese which nested by the pond. For some reason they have arrived in our road along with three goslings, and a neighbour is trying to persuade them to walk to the corner (about three houses along on the right) and then up to the pond. That road has about 14 semi-detached bungalows. Then there's quite a busy road to cross.. It's going to be a tricky bit of shepherding.

Next-door's cat it watching with great interest, but is keeping a safe distance away.

...

I vividly remember my class being made to sing that verse on our own in school hymn practice as a punishment for being too chatty. We were so embarrassed. We were a perverse lot, and often strayed from the rules.

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.