Wednesday 1st July - cock-a-doodle-doo!

Here are my step totals for this half of the year;

What a massive difference for May and June!

I'm very grateful to RusticPumpkin for inspiring me to stop being such a blob.

Wednesday 1st July - Bad Ideas, better ideas

 Good idea;

Bad Idea;

I tracked down the name of the wonder app; it is called mellowflow and the reviews are SCATHING;

Following up on the Reddit forum, I've come to the sad conclusion that my gut feeling of 'if it looks too good to be true, then it really is too good to be true'. My advice; stay away, and just stick at lesson no 1; 'tidy three things in your line of sight'.

Sadly, for tidying up and keeping it tidy, there's no way around actually... tidying! There doesn't seem to be a magic method, especially for butterfly brains like me. 

I do try to;

• Set small, quickly achievable goals, like 5-10 mins, or one surface, or one task at a time.
• Take time to gloat and congratulate myself on the little successes.
• Never, ever, berate myself if I don't manage to do 'it', whatever 'it' is.
• Never push myself too far beyond what I am already able to do.
• Switch between types of tasks fairly frequently. 

These have all come from the way I've learned to teach piano over the past 40 years, the main idea being to try and always

• Build upon successes; start with a low bar and raise it slowly.
• Associate the activity (even scales and sight reading!) with positive emotions.
• Avoid all negativity, crossness, tension, distress in learning.
• Gamify Just about everything.
• Constantly cheer oneself on.

Now, what three things can Iput away next? Oh dear, I'll have to find somewhere to put them first...

Now, here's a little 'spot the difference' game;

Before;

After three things were tidied;

I seem to be on a roll; three minutes later;

Happy happy happy! 🌞 💐 🏆 

.......

I've shared this before but here we go again!

Chopin Minute Waltz, Luca Sestak Trio

Tuesday 30th June - genius idea

I took a mug of ginger tea for a little walk around the garden. My cardoons are flowering;

So spectacular. 

They were covered with blackfly at the beginning of June, and I persuaded BB to rub his fingers gently up and down the stalks while he still had his thick heavy duty leather gardening gloves on. That totally dealt with the problem, which is why the top part of the stalk looks black.

The jasmine is flowering now, with clematis twining through the shoots, and below the saliva 'hot lips' is adding a splash of colour.

I'm trying to make the most of them; sadly they are all likely to be demolished one the little diggers get going. We might be able to dig out the salvia, and take cuttings from the jasmine,  but the cardoons will have to take their chance. The roots will be on their way to Australia by now!

....

The genius idea? There's a tidy-up/declutter app around that gives you a simple task every day. I think it is a Swedish system, and keeps popping up as an advertisement in my newsfeed. I refuse to be beguiled into paying for something, but there are examples of the tasks. I've only paid attention to the first task;

'Tidy up three things in your line of sight'

So I did; I put away three things on my little swivel-top table beside me on the settee. I even threw away a fourth!

It made a ridiculously big improvement for a minute's effort, all without getting up from the settee. I think that's enough for me to be getting on with; just put three things away at random times of the day.

...

I've already hit my step count for today, so I know I've d one at least 100,000 in June. I'll total all the steps tomorrow. 

Happy Happy Happy!

....

I've made a start on finishing the little sewing square for for my on-going QAYGO (quilt as you go) project. 

A 'start on finishing' is a bit optimistic! I want to use couching to outline the leaves, and then I'll embroider the centre veins, also in green. After that - I'll see .

So my 'Finishing up Days' have been effective in finishing two things; a collaboration square and the back of the cardigan, and doing some more to the QAYGO piece.

Monday 29th June - National Finishing Up Days

 I made that up.

I've got a number of nearly finished projects and I have decided that today and tomorrow are the days for sorting them out.

Starting with this;

The experimental patchwork cardigan. This is the back - I had less than 8 inches left of the last panel left to sew, and I finally, after much procrastinating completed it at morning coffee time. About half an hour was all it took, including sewing in all the ends, and probably about ten pound's weight off my mind. I've already made a start on the front 

I've a few rows to add the the current double knitting square, and about an hour's stitching to add to a patch that has been stalled for about a month while the Double Knitting Collaboration with Ang absorbed my interest. 

Yesterday I sorted some books to sell back to wob or donate to charity if wob won't take them.  This morning I updated my piano teaching records and put away a couple of sets of knitting needles that were cluttering up my life.

Maybe 'Manic Monday' would have been a better title for today's post - I seem to begin every week full of enthusiasm and then crash out the next day... I'll write that idea down for next Monday's post!

I'm learning to accept that I'm a great starter of things, but not so good at finishing them off!

    

  'Snurretoppen' means 'Spinning Top'.

Meanwhile, my step target took a bit of a dive last week, unsurprisingly, although as the cooler weather returned I did manage a marathon effort on Sunday so I reckon I might well meet my target of 100,000 in June. Which makes me very happy!

Dr Alan Howard, University of Iowa, playing 'Promenade' by Prokofiev, Op 65 no 2   

Sunday 28th June - Beati quorum via

 meaning 'Blessed are those who walk in the law of the Lord', here set by C V Stanford and sung by Voces8.

Which ties in with the reading for today Matthew chapter 10 from verse 40;

“Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 

Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward.

And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.”

There's a certain amount of synchronicity going on with Ang's blog here; I wonder if she had the same reading in her church? 

Saturday 27th June - rest and relaxation

 After yesterday's ridiculously early start and busy morning we were both ready for Very Early Night last night. Indeed we slept through the thunder and lightning and heavy rain - a friend told me this morning that it had kept her awake! If she hadn't mentioned it I wouldn't have known, as there was no sign of it when we got up at 6.

I met up in the park with a group of friends - teaching colleagues - that I haven't seen for years. It was lovely to hear th

eir news and what they were doing now, ranging from 'retired and loving it', to 'working part-time in a gift shop an loving it'; a few were working in teaching related areas, but no one was still class teaching. The modern classroom is a whole new world these days. 

Lunch; I'd poached some salmon fillets yesterday morning. Those, arranged on the plates with a decorative line of mayonnaise, accompanied by a near instant salad of a packet of Tilda's precooked rice with sweetcorn and peas and french dressing stirred in, couldn't have been easier. No-cook either, unless you count tipping frozen veg into a bowl and zapping them for a few minutes as cooking.

After lunch we sat in the last patch of shade near the house, a little table which should hopefully become the kitchen sink, and currently has my herb pots.  

This is looking across to what will become the living area...

Yesterday's meeting with the builder and architect was very useful and reassuring; the traffic lights are amber (wait), moving to green (GO!) over the next week... all being well, with a fair wind...    

Friday 26th June - prepping...

 Not the 'armageddon survivalist kind of prepping... just 'heatwave survival' prepping.

After another hot and sticky and restless night, and a other very early 'rise and shine' (hello sun, good morning, do you know what time it is?) I got up and plunged straight into a luke warm shower before I could think too much about the day ahead. Oh yes! That made all the difference! 

By 7am we had finished breakfast - BB is still eating porridge in the mornings but I've switched cold cereal  - and we're relaxing with the First of our three coffees of the day.

By 7.30 I was in full prep mode;

Crustless quiche going in to the air fryer:

And 25 minutes later;

Broccoli prepped and in a microwave pan ready to zap in the microwave, and two fillets of salmon poached for 8 minutes in water with peppercorns, rosemary, bay leaves and a sliver of lemon.

We'll have crustless quiche, broccoli and air fryer frites for lunch today.

 The salmon is for tomorrow with my go-to dressing of equal quantities mayonnaise and Greek yoghurt, some French dressing to taste, and lemon or mint or finely chopped pickled gherkin or something.

I have a pint bottle full of water with a green tea teabag infusing in the fridge... I just keep topping up the bottle more water until the teabag stops working.

We've been eating lunch outside at this little round table;

BB  cleared the erigeron daisies from underneath, while I was meal prepping. They were so pretty, like the ones under the bigger table nearby. But they were full of little black insects, or maybe ants, that kept biting my ankles! Once we finished our coffee he'll remove the others ones... more bitey insects and, regretfully, they are a bit of a trip hazard. It's only 9.30 am, and still relatively cool here.

The sun slowly creeps up the grass towards the house until the only bit of shade at lunchtime is here, and that's gone by 1pm. After then, all the garden is in full sun except under the apple tree at the bottom. 

An early lunch has to be the order of the day!

The afternoons have been hard going... so hot... today we have a site meeting with the architect and the builder, to dot some 'i's' and cross some 't's', with a view to agreeing a start date of 6th July. I reckon that where I'm sitting now should be about where the little table in our new extension will be. Now there's a vision to cling to.

The recipe originally came from the good food website. I like it because it doesn't use cream, which I almost never have in the house. Today's version has more cheese, and no pancetta/bacon, and mixed peppers.

Tuesday 23rd June - it's too darn hot

 Normal blogging will resume tomorrow... maybe. 

Ang sent me a link to this today...

'Too darn hot' from Kiss Me Kate on Broadway. 

I hope they had air conditioning on stage!

Sunday 21st June - Out and about

 We met up with our son and daughter about 45 mins drive away. That meant going over the top of the South Downs, which meant seeing the beautiful view across the valley towards Amberley. Sadly I don't have any photographs...

But I do have a sketch of a very similar view, from Ditchingly Beacon as opposed to Bury Hill (Summer 2021)

Do you know this version of the popular hymn 'All things bright and beautiful' composed by John Rutter?

Friday 19th June - I received a cable!

(I've pinched the blog title from Ang!)

 I remember visiting Porthcurno in Cornwall, on the beach below the Minack open-air theatre and seeing the curiously small and insignificant hut where the huge, vital trans-world undersea cables came in;

Oh my, this brought back memories of watching a play as the sun set into the sea, a fishing boat slowly making it's way across the horizon...

The sea really was this colour, the sand really is golden....

The hut is at the head of the beach. We trudged up the sand to see the massive tarry cables emerge up through the floor, and continue to the office (now a museum) at the top.

But I digress. It wasn't that sort of cable...

I was momentarily baffled that she had only sent one photograph of the squares in the write-up, but she had created two the same. I love tracing the paths of the different strands in cable knitting. 

It's a nice shade of green, very soft wool with good stitch definition so the cable really stands out. 

The flat gift is an interesting guide to a textile exhibition she went to at Blickling Hall with fascinating pictures and information. 

I sent her a square from one of my favourite patterns for knitted squares;

You cast on enough stitches for two sides, and steadily decrease at the centre until you are left with only three stitches, which you knit together. The thing to watch out for with this version is you do a double decrease in every other row... you have to keep track of where you are and what you are doing! It's not as easy as marking the centre with a stitch marker, as the centre stitch is involved in the double decrease (slip 1, knit 2 together, passed slipped stitch over). I call this 'mindful knitting' and not entirely relaxing! 

(For 'mindless knitting' I  mark the centre and do a single k2tog after the marker on every row. Not as tidy, but with fuzzy yarn like this who can tell?)

The pattern actually called for Liquorice Allsorts stripes;

but I used self-striping yarn and let it do its thing. Two ends to sew in instead of many.

I've kept the pale square and sent Ang the darker one; it looked a little neater.

Finally, another flashmob. Clearly a setup, but still brilliant. The 'flute' player, Michel Tirabosco, is amazing. 

Thursday 18th June - Four bags and one box gone!

Yesterday we did a quick round trip - Aldi, to leave a box of books that I'm selling back to World of Books in the in-post lockers, and the British Heart Foundation to leave four bags of bric-a-brac and other stuff - some books WoB wouldn't take, a couple of school bags (when did I stop teaching? when did my daughter leave school?) and oddments of china. Gone, gone, gone!

We use the British Heart Foundation because it has a space at the back entrance where you can stop easily for dropping things off. I always ring a charity shop and check first to save a wasted journey as sometimes they can't accept donations for some reason or another. This time they seemed very pleased at the idea of four bags coming their way, so that was good.

I've another box of books ready to go to WoB now. That will make six boxes and bags to charity by the end of June, so I'm back on track for the 'two boxes a month' New Year Resolution. 

It occurred to me that the money I get back on the books could go some way to feeding my own book-buying...

....

Today was a cardiology appointment (all's well, no changes) and I had found out that there was a Little Free Library near the clinic premises. So we detoured there as it was on my list of places to visit, with a couple more Wob rejects and a Judi Dench biography to leave as a swap. Or just leave.

But we were out of luck;

It had been taken down on 9th June for repairs. Ah well, I'll put the books in the next charity shop bag. 

 

   

Tuesday 16th June - in and out of the garden

In view if the possibility of building work starting perhaps maybe at the end of the month, we're getting a bit more focused on clearing the garden, moving plants and pots and ornaments down to a place of safety at the bottom of the garden.

Today Vicky-the-gardener came, and as she is bound and determined to rescue a rose, we cleared the space around it so she could try and extract it from its spot in the patio.

BB went out to help... I joined just in time to see him do a sudden backwards roll down off the patio steps, waving the main stem of the rose in both hands and scattering earth from the rootball. Judging by the 'ow' it wasn't a soft landing... fingers crossed he won't be too sore tomorrow. 

Vicky has replanted the rose. We'll just have to see if it survives. 

Meanwhile I've quite a few of the flowers and buds in a vase to enjoy.

Monday 15th June - where's the cat?

 He stayed hidden in the weeds all the time we were out on the patio with BB's proper tape measure, my sewing yardstick/metre ruleyard, spare bricks for marking out edges and pavements chalk.

We were trying to fathom out how to arrange the steps down from what will be the new patio, without encroaching on the garden. Tricky, as the patio is only 2m deep from house to garden, and because of the slope of the ground the garden edge of the patio will be about 45 cm above ground level. 

Chalking the lines makes everything so much easier! That pillar of bricks, 45cm tall, marks the height of the floor of the extension. 

This sketch is just part of the patio area. We worked out that if we have a drop from the extension doors to the patio of around 10 cm - a shallow step - we can do three steps in an L-shape, each having a rise (or drop - depends which way you are going!) of around 12 or 13 cm.

Aki the cat put up with all this happening around him... perhaps he was muttering 'there is no cat' and hoping we hadn't seen him.

There's a rumour that work might start soon... I'm not holding my breath...

...

It's been a bit tough this week but I have persuaded, pushed, cajoled and bribed myself to get 3,400 steps each day. 30 days times 3,400 steps comes to 102,000; just over what I'm aiming for...

I need to get started on the rest of today's steps...

.....

I gave started reading an old copy of a Young Adult book by Madelaine l'Engle called 'Prelude'. One of the characters, a woman who was a concert pianist but badly injured her shoulder in a terrible car crash was playing this Gigue in G by Bach, from his French Suites. There was a time when I could just about get through it, but never as well as Andras Schiff here!

It's such a joyous piece. 

Sunday 14th June - Prayer of st Richard

 This is one of the hymns used today at zoom church. The words are st Richard's. He was a 13th century bishop of Chichester, and is celebrated on 16th June, Sussex Day.

The prayer seems quite modern today...

Saturday 13th June - listicles

 Listicle

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item. A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry. The word is a portmanteau of list and article.

(Here I started down a rabbit hole... there are novels written entirely in the form of letters, could one write one in the form of listicles?)

Back to the here and now, I reckon my blogs are nearly all listicles; a variety of topic headings and then a few sentences to expand further.

Like this paragraph!

...

My father's flat isn't selling (yet, always add 'yet', to imply that any day now there will be a queue of people aged 55 or over and needing assistance to maintain their independence, all desperateto buy it). We've started to notice flyers from other estate agents appearing on the doormat when we go to check. They make me think of vultures.

I don't know any estate agents socially. It's rather hard to work out what they are doing for the fee... like spiders, spinning a Web and then just waiting to see if anything turns up...

I'm pretty certain that none of these companies are my friends!

The whole 'how can we sell the flat' issue nakes me want to hide... like Archimedes the owl meeting Wart, the boy who will become King Arthur in T H White's 'The Once and Future King'

I shut my eyes and say 'There is no flat'. Of course that doesn't work, and sadly neither does 'There is no me'. Life just isn't the same as fiction!

...

Eating noodles is always a messy business. We gad noodles with teriyaki salmon and various bits of vegetable; the last of the broccoli, the remains of the asparagus, the dregs of the packet of frozen green beans, a few rather dessicated spring onions... tasted a lot better than I've made it sound! We sat opposite each other forking up noodles and slurping the straggly ends, or chomping them off with our teeth. Not a meal for invited guests!

It reminded me of this passage in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, written in 1850, about how their rigidly correct ladies ate their oranges;

Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.

Maybe we should have taken our dishes to eat our noodles in separate rooms? 

Friday 12th June - harvest lunch

 This looks like being my vegetable harvest for 2026. Because of the impeding house extension work I haven't sewn, planted, or grown anything this year apart from three stunted broad bean plants.

Yesterday I noticed a few pods had filled out. I picked them this morning and we had them at lunchtime.  Delicious!

There won't be any more produce until the apples are ripe.

....

Knitting the squares is a very pleasant way of filling in a few minutes here and there in the day. I've got a wooden knitting bowl which is perfect for a couple of small balls of wool and my needles 

I've photographed it with the current square wrong side up in order not to give away the pattern, and I've added a few extra balls of wool for further camouflage. 

The square I've chosen has an easy repeated pattern over a couple of rows so it is really simple to work out what comes next when I pick it up to add some rows.

I've also cracked continental combination purl knitting, a game changer for me.

Somewhere else I read that this method twists the stitches - true - and the work around if you want to knit these stitches in the next row is to knit through the back of the stitch - yes! Easy peasy too.

Thursday 11th June - Reading all day!

 I think I must have spent nearly the whole day reading Kate Morton's 'Homecoming'. I had to pause a couple of times; a piano lesson to teach in the morning, a long detailed telephone conversation with our architect about the extension, and making supper. (BB cooked lunch; we had steak, his speciality, yum yum very yum yum!).

I also had to pause and brace myself a few times; there were moments when characters did things that were so breathtakingly awful that I needed time to think about what I had read before I could continue, and instances characters who where pillars of rectitude were concealing such terrible wrongs - but one could understand why, what had tipped them over the edge.

Finally, I needed to keep reading in great chunks as the book switches between 1959, 1979, 1989 and 1999, and even though the chapters and context were clear in the chapter headings it was still a bit of a jolt to time travel back and forth.

It's a meatier read than I was expecting, and although I had several ideas as to what the plot twists might be, I was still caught by surprise by the several revelations.

It's set in Australia, and I realise I have no idea of where the cities and provinces are. I should think my ignorance is not unusual for British people, judging by the woeful answers whenever Australia is the continent for the 'where is Kazakhstan' game comes up on 'Richard Osman's House of Games', where you have to mark where various cities and landmarks are in answer to the questions.

Maybe tomorrow something will get done!

Meanwhile it is nearly bedtime and my step count is a measly 1700 - I'll get a couple of hundred in before I go to bed, and will try and make them up over the next three days (or I could just play Relampago a few times on the piano...) 

.......

Or I could try a bit of this... (in my dreams!)

Electro Swing by ShuffleDance.pl Parov Stelar Booty Swing, Em Delacrem choreography

     

Wednesday10th May - midweek news

 There isn't any...

I knit, I write up my diary, I add a few bits to the ever-growing pile to go to the charity shop, I cook lunch, I read, I might tackle a housework chore (or I might not)...

Wednesday and Thursday are a piano lesson days, so I taught a piano lesson. 

I played suduko, 

and soon it will be bed time.

I'm happy enough with this... slow steady days are a blessing. 

The New List; BB and I are compiling a list of places to visit, things to do, in the area. His 70th birthday, some years ago, was massively overshadowed by othe family events, and mine is later this year. So we're thinking of slightly celebrating both of them. At the moment we're concentrating on places within an hour or so of where we live;

Pallant House gallery in Chichester

Bignor Roman Villa

Wings Aviation Museum

Tangmere Aviation Museum

a Little Local Library box in Hove just because it is there

I'd love to set up a little free library outside our house! 

That's as far as we got with the list today. 

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.

 

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...