Codlinsandcream2

A River of Stones moment

2012-02-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

On our way back from dropping middle daughter off in Swansea, the sun lit up the mynydd . . .

Behind the moor,
Rainclouds black as anvils
Devour the bleached horizon
In stubble-tinted bites.

The photo shows the same bit of moorland several years ago, well, the top right horizon is the same, and the dead grass shows you how light it turns in the winter, especially with the sun on it. I wish I'd had the camera today, for the contrast between the moor and the black skies.

I shall never complain again about the cold . . .

2012-02-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

At the moment, I just seem to be wishing the winter weeks away, and the weekend's routines mark another step nearer to some sunshine and warmth again (I am hoping for a good summer).

At the car boot sale this morning, we found a book on the Welsh Borders, with lovely illustrations and excellent snippets of local history, folklore and interesting facts. I was reading it earlier on and came across the following, which I have read elsewhere a while back, but it is worth repeating here (and I shall never moan about the cold again, I promise!!!). The author is talking about a walk on the Long Mynd in Shropshire.

In fine weather its beauty has an oppressive quality; in winter, as the Reverend Donald Carr found out back in 1865, it can be deadly. Mr Carr was the rector of Woolstaston, north of Church Stretton on the eastern side of the Long Mynd, and was also responsible for the remote outlying village of Ratlinghope on the west side, 4 miles away from Woolstaston. On 29 January 1865 he set out through the snow on horseback to take the afternoon service at Ratlinghope. The fallen snow was deep enough to force Mr Carr's servant to take the horses back home, but the clergyman went on alone, crawling on hands and knees through the drifts, to reach the lonely village on the moors and take a short service in the company of a handful of people. The Journey home was a different matter entirely. Back on the heights, a furious gale had blown up. Mr Carr was at first confident that he was on the right track, but soon realized that he had lost his way, with darkness coming on and the blizzard getting worse all the time. Then he fell down the side of a ravine . . .

"I found myself shooting at a fearful pace down the side of one of the steep ravines which I had imagined lay far away to my right . . . I continued my tremendous glissade head downwards, lying on my back. The pace I was going in this headlong descent must have been very great, yet it seemed to me to occupy a marvellous space of time, long enough for the events of my whole previous life to pass in review before me, as I had often heard that they did in moments of extreme peril."

He survived that fall, but shortly afterwards, now conscious that he was completely lost, had another even worse, this time losing his hat and gloves. He still had his brandy flask, but "could hardly get my hands to my mouth for the masses of ice which had formed upon my whiskers, and which were gradually developed into a long crystal beard, hanging half way to my waist."

Somehow he kept going all through the night, continually falling down and forcing himself up and on again, fighting the overwhelming desire to lie down and drift into sleep. Dawn brought no relief, as a dense fog lay over the Long Mynd. Mr Carr found that he had gone snow blind when he could not tell the front of his watch from the back. Staggering on, he found himself at the top of the Lightspout Valley, and in his weakness tumbled over the upper part of the waterfall - somehow without adding to his injuries. Then he lost his boots:

"They do not seem to have become unlaced, as the laces were firmly knotted, but had burst in the middle, and the whole front of the boot had been stretched out of shape from the strain put upon it whilst laboriously dragging my feet out of deep drifts for so many hours together, which I can only describe as acting upon the boots like a steam-power boot-jack. And so for hours I walked on in my stockings without inconvenience. Even when I trod upon gorse bushes, I did not feel it, as my feet had become as insensible as my hands."

At last the exhausted man, "crowned and bearded with ice like a ghastly emblem of winter", stumbled down the Cardingmill Valley and came upon a group of children, who promptly ran away from the apparition. However, help soon came, and Mr Carr made his way home to Woolstaston and eventually to a complete recovery.

Taken from Philip's Welsh Borders, by Christopher Somerville.

What are you reading at the moment?

2012-02-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

Last week, being pinned to the sofa with the chest infection and the side-effects of the anti-biotics, I read my way through "Daphne" by Justine Picardie, from cover to cover. This week I am back into Edward Thomas country, reading the biography I got for Christmas: "Now All Roads Lead to France", with the Annotated Collected poems of Edward Thomas beside me for company. Bedtime reading is Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room".

Now we are virtually out of heating oil, we are down to one-room living, although my little office is bearable as long as I have the small oil radiator on when I am at the computer. Curtains are pulled early, a hot bath is the highlight of the day, and regular hot drinks the order of the day! Slipping into a warm - no, HOT - bed at night is bliss. Roll on spring! But then it will be all the outside jobs which cannot be done at the moment, so I will read whilst I can.

A walk in Brechfa Forest

2012-02-07T05:11:00.001-08:00

I had cabin fever this morning, after being confined to barracks last week with my chest infection and the bitter weather. Yesterday's walk convinced me to get out again, and I persuaded K to get the paper from Brechfa for a change, so that we could have a walk in the Forestry. The sun was out, so we grabbed the moment (just as well as it's disappeared again now). Here is Brechfa in the distance, photographed through the car window.

We parked up on a good piece beside the road, so we weren't locking the lane, and walked half a mile or so to the Forest edge. This gateway seemed to beckon me in to take a photo.

From the bridge, looking upstream.

Fallen trees across the river. Further along, a beech had toppled over, but continued growing, with lots of upright branches crossing the trunk.

The track ahead.

The Afon Clydach below us.

This footpath leads you along the bottom of Allt-y-Garth.

Above and below, early morning sun highlighting the moisture on twigs and leaves, as if they were touched with mercury.

Whinberries grow amongst the mosses and small ferns on this wet slope beside the path. Whinberries are a common feature on higher ground here. We used to pick them when we camped on Dartmoor.

Looking across the river from the pathway - a tangle of brambles and Fireweed (Rosebay Willow Herb).
The Afon Clydach scampering away downstream.

These were the colourful mosses I was speaking of yesterday. A different bridge, but same plants and same stunning colours. This is Pont Cymmawr-du.

I was intrigued by this little cabin beside the ruins of a former Hafod or barn. I wondered if anyone used it as a weekend retreat or whether it was a Hippy hideout.

I LOVED this photo (hence it being the new header.) It is the atmosphere of it - sun breaking through the river-mist and the beautiful tangled blackness of the tree boughs. This is our lane home, back down the valley.

Looking back up the valley in the direction of Abergorlech.

Frost still held captive the North-facing slopes and low-lying marshy fields beside the river.

Looking towards home . . .

A short walk

2012-02-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

As it is so mild out again, I decided I would do a short walk to blow some of the cobwebs away and burn a couple of calories, having been stapled to the sofa all week. I took the car to the bottom of the hill, as I knew I wouldn't be able to struggle back up it at the moment, as my peak flow reading is still down (though improving).

It was a . . . mindful . . . walk. I was able to clear my mind of all my worries, and just really LOOK, noticing a sodden Celendine, and then one which had just burst into flower, and plenty of Celendine leaves pushing through now. Fresh grass on the banks, leaves of wild Strawberries and Ground Ivy, and in the wet Alder-carr woodland, whole rafts of Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage. The birds were singing - Robins and Great Tits mostly, whilst a Wren flew across the lane at ankle height, and I saw Blackbird after Blackbird in the trees beside the lane. A Jay's raucous call sounded from the Hazel copse, and I watched a Buzzard hunting for worms in one of the pasture fields which normally has sheep in. The deep red walls of Goitre farmstead were even darker after the rain and the house stood out against the winter-bleached fields around it.

Sheep grazed just below the Gorse coverts which surround the lips of the Iron Age hillfort and I watched a solitary Red Kite languidly riding a thermal. The emerald moss on the grey stone bridge was sporting a beard of scarlet and russet which held droplets of moisture, such an intense concentration of colour. The wheelrut of a tractor had turned into a mini-lake as a leaf-filled ditch, no longer maintained by the farm, seeped into it.

What we miss when we don't LOOK . . .

Just in case you're worried . . .

2012-02-04T11:59:00.001-08:00

We're not snowed in. It's been arctic outside, and the hill turned into the Cresta Run when a spring decided to re-route itself across the road instead of into the ditch . . . Next door, him with the tractors and Landys, had no trouble getting up or down. We had to spread some grit, but got out on Friday. Yesterday though, I had a chap at the door looking for someone with a tractor, as his delivery van had fallen foul of the ice and was in a precarious spot, hanging over a sharp drop into the stream. I pointed him in the right direction for our neighbour (still milking), but gosh, it took two hours to get the van out safely, and my OH got involved in gritting the hill so he could get back up it.

Anyway, it's been raining all afternoon, and hopefully will stay a little warmer. We have been snuggled up by the wood burner all afternoon, covered in quilts and cats and quite snug! I've finished my Daphne book, and can heartily recommend it (Daphne, by Justine Picardie - just a penny on Amazon . . .) I didn't want it to end.

The custom of wife-selling

2012-02-02T07:40:00.000-08:00

Herefordshire city centre.

Many of you will be familiar with the custom of wife-selling through it figuring large in "The Mayor of Casterbridge" when Michael Henchard sold his wife to a sailor in the doorway of the frumenty tent at Weydon-Priors fair. However, it was not confined to Wessex, as this webpage shows. Far from being frowned upon by the Judiciary, as one might expect, it was even actively enforced by the Poor Law Commissioners, so they were absolved from having to support the entire family in the Workhouse. The standard procedure was for the wife - usually more than willing to take her chance with a new man than the one whose failings she was only too familiar with - to be stood with a halter around her neck or arm or waist (as if she were a horse for sale) and for bids to be offered until a mutual agreement was reached. "Marriagable age" at the time of the Marriage Act in 1753 was the age of consent (12 for girls and 14 for boys). HERE is Wikipedia's take on wife selling.

Anyway, I must be feeling better as I have been blowing the dust off a bookshelf looking for a.n.other book and my eye fell on The Folklore of Herefordshire, and this has mention of the practice:

"There can be no doubt that the horrible custom of a man's selling his wife, in the open market, with a halter round her neck, was kept up at Hereford into the 19th C. In 1802, a butcher sold his wife by public auction, in Hereford market. The lot realised one pound, four shillings, and a bowl of punch. "Nonagenarian", an old lady whose reminiscences of old-time Hereford have been referred to, witnessed a similar scene more than once. Here is a description of it in her own words:

I must recall to your memory my statement as to my being playfellow to Mona Delnotte Coates, for it was while walking with her that I first saw a man selling his wife. We were going from the Barton to the other side of the town, and necessarily had to pass the bottom of the pig market. Here we saw a crowd. The girl was desirous of knowing what was the matter, so she elbowed her way through the people, and was followed by the children to the open space in the centre. There stood a woman with her hat in her hand . . . This woman's hat was a very smart one. She stood looking down. At first I thought she was admiring her own red cloak, but as she stood so still my eyes wandered over to see what was amiss, and I shall never forget how surprised I felt when I observed she had a rope about her neck, and that a man was holding one end of it. "What has she done?" we both cried out, for I believed she was going to be hanged. "Oh," said a bystander, "she has done no good, depend upon it, or else he wouldn't want to sell her." Just then there was a loud laugh, and a man shouted, "Well done Jack, that is elevenpence more than I would give. It's too much, boy, too much." But Jack stood firm. "No," said he, "I'll give a shilling, and he ought to be thankful to get rid of her at thatt price." "Well," said the man, "I'll take it, though her good looks ought to be worth more than that." "Keep her master, keep her for her good looks," shouted the laughing bystanders. "No" said he, "good looks won't put victuals on the table without willing hands." "Well," said Jack, "here's the shilling, and I war'nt I'll make her put victuals on the table for me, and help to get it first. Be you willing Missis to have me, and take me for better for worse?" "I be willing," says she. "And be you willing to sell her for what I bid maister?" "I be," said he, "and will give you the rope into the bargain." So Jack gave the man his shilling."

Well, I had better go and see to the evening meal now before a) I freeze my extremities off (9 deg. today in the house - I've known it warmer!) and b) in case my husband decides to get a shilling for me . . .

N.B. header photo taken a couple of days ago, so a slight change in the colour balance of the sunrise.

Daphne du Maurier and Branwell Bronte

2012-02-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

Ths morning we visited our local shop and PO, which is now run by volunteers. It is a mere 6 mile round trip away which is "close" in rural terms, and also has an excellent book recycling system. Several shelves of donated books are there for you to browse, and it is 25p to take a book and swop it for one of your choice, or 50p if you are empty-handed. This morning I pounced on a book titled "Daphne" sure that it must be about Daphne du Maurier, an author whose life intrigues me and whose novels were milestones along my literary quest. I was right, and better still, it involved du Maurier and her research into a book on Branwell Bronte and his personal genius. This is all wrapped up into a modern-day story, based on the true story of du Maurier's work and correspondence with a literary academic who was also fascinated by Branwell. Justine Picardie is the author and one I've not read before.

Perfect timing, given that I finished Philippa Gregory's "The Virgin's Lover" last night, glad to get to the end as I knew the real-life ending (Amy Robsart's death of a broken neck and weakened physical state from probable breast cancer) and the shadow this placed on Robert Dudley, Amy's ambitious husband. It kept him from sharing the throne with Elizabethg I. An interesting take on it, and very well-researched.

Anyway, I am now at Menabilly in my head and on familiar ground with du Maurier's psyche and her increasingly distant relationship with her husband "Boy" Browning, who had by then found himself a mistress - although the deception of his wife and family was destroying him mentally and causing a breakdown.

The Bronte details are familiar territory too, especially as I was re-reading Juliet Barker's "The Brontes: A Life in Letters" last Autumn. The Bronte family have been a passion of mine since my late teens, when I moved on from my early interest in Jane Austen. I have quite a few literary biographies about them (and many other authors) and love to discover more.

So this book had my name all over it. As I am also hock-deep in Edward Thomas books too, the sofa is getting quite crowded at the moment. Me, books, cats and sewing (for later tonight I hope). I feel a little better, but although the a/b's have kicked in, making me feel slightly better, I woke up with a desperately nasty headache first thing, and I get out of puff very easily.

Weather-wise, there is snow on the hilltops around us, but we are above the frost line and below the snow line here, but I will say it is bitterly cold outside, with a piercing East wind - the lazy sort which goes through you instead of around you. It's fair to say that we have known the house to feel warmer - average temp. in the kitchen (indeed all the house bar the sitting room) these days is about 9 degrees in the daytime. Set to get worse on Friday apparently, when strongly minus temperatures arrive from the Russian steppes, so it will be a bit like living in the Gulags then . . . Well, we survived last year without heating, though we did at least have enough to put the Hergom on in the kitchen (not that it made a great deal of difference). Perhaps we should buy a scratch card . . .

Still poorly

2012-01-30T05:17:00.000-08:00

I thought I was getting better, as my temperature had subsided, but now I find myself with the first Chest Infection of 2012. . . I took myself off to the Doc's this morning before it really got a hold, but won't get the A/Bs until tonight, when my OH goes in to town to collect D from work.

Or leastways, I hope he will be doing that as it's just started snowing. It's too wet to lay right now, but if it starts to freeze later then things may change. This of course coincides with getting so low on heating oil we can't have the heating on and believe me, 11 degrees is COLD. So we have all decamped to the sitting room and the wood burner - the cats too have migrated like Gnus across the Serengeti! Who can blame them?

As I drove out of the Doctor's car park, I thought - as I often do - of the Roman road which crosses the surgery grounds and as I waited to turn onto the road, the line of the Roman road stretched ahead of me, disguised as a gravelled farm track. I bet those Roman legionaries cursed the Welsh winter and missed the civilization of hypocaust central heating and locally-procured olives and fruit back home. (Well, those from the Med, anyway).

Gladeye the War Horse

2012-01-28T10:17:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid that I have this post all out of context as I meant to write about this book just after I had seen the film War Horse recently. Then the book got overlaid by a pile of other books and has only just resurfaced again.

It was written by Brigadier Walter Brooke, a lesser-known brother of Brigadier Geoffrey Brooke whose books on horses I have on my shelves from teenage times. Geoffrey Brooke married Dorothy Gibson-Craig and they set up the Brooke Hospital for Animals. Primarily they wanted to rescue horses which had been sold into slavery in Egypt following the end of WW1. Many of the officers took their horses out into the Desert and shot them, rather than have them sold to the locals, as they knew the fate which awaited them. Many thousands upon thousands of horses remained in Egypt, and even by 1930 when the Brookes first started their Hospital, many were still alive, though aged and half-crippled by work. Amazingly her appeal for funds in 1930 (time of the Great Depression) raised sufficient funds to rescue 5,000 ex War Horses and is still doing good work today. You have probably seen their adverts in National newspapers and magazines.

Anyway, Gladeye was Walter's horse, and was his partner from the age of 4 years, to the day of his death aged 29 - a good age for a horse. He was bred in Ireland and was a chestnut with three white stockings and a blaze. Walter was ADC to General Sir John Keir at the outbreak of the war and they were shipped out, horses and men, to the Aisne front, near Rheims. Gladeye tells of his warmtime experiences in the book - being saddled up after dark and taken to the trenches to bring his master back, and how they used to find their way home on the transport tracks, across country, passing columns of limbered wagons drawn by pairs of teams of 4 horses, loaded up with rations and letters for the men, or more mundane things like barbed wire or ammnition.

Gladeye was then sent to Egypt with his master. After the cold and mud of Flander, being camped by the seashore with its golden sands and stunningly blue sea was wonderful, the beauty only being spoilt by the flies and the trams, which had screaming horns. From here, they later sailed for Salonica, which was described as being a true melting-pot of huymanity, with soldiers from France, Greece, Russia, Italy, Serbia and England. If you ever doubt the fitness of Army horses in those days, think of Walter and a fellow officer deciding they would like to go and explore the country a bit - they rode for 50 miles (landing up in the French part of the line), and then they rode 50 miles home again. All in the same day, and because there were no roads, only grassy tracks, they cantered much of the time - certainly on all the flat stretches - although their riders got off and rested their backs walking up and down the hills,

He must have been a pretty unflappable horse as on one occasion his groom took his saddle off and put it to one side, when a shell came and blew the saddle to kingdom-come. Gladeye carried on eating his rations as if he were deaf . . .

This marvellous old war horse went on to lead a full life, hunting, playing polo, show jumping, showing and even ploughing! back on Walter Brooke's West Country farm. One of the lucky ones.

Richard Jefferies by Henry Williamson

2012-01-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

I collect Henry Williamson's novels. This one turned up at the Car Boot Sale last weekend and I had to have it. Indeed, Williamson's assessment of Jefferies' personality from childhood made me think he could have been describing poet Edward Thomas's personal development . . . Jefferies was Thomas's first literary hero and he happily roamed the countryside which Jefferies knew and loved - that South Country which Thomas was to later write about, and indeed in 1909 he had his own biography of Jefferies published. Apparently Jefferies was a lasting influence on Edward Thomas's wife, then widow, Helen Thomas, which is displayed in her antidote to grief, "As It Was" . . . THIS is an interesting blog post on the subject.

Here is a little taster of Jefferies' observational writing from a chapter entitled The Life of the Fields:

"It was between the may and the June roses. The may bloom had fallen, and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches that would feed the red-wings in autumn. High up the briars had climbed, straight and towering whils there was a thorn or an ash sapling, or a yellow-green willow, to uphold them, and then curving over towards the meadow. The buds were on them, but not yet open; it was between the may and the rose.

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges - green waves and billows - became full of fine atoms of summer. Swept from notched hawthorn leaves, broad-topped oak-leaves, narrow ash sprays and oval willows; from vast elm cliffs and sharp-taloned brambles under; brushed from the waving grasses and stiffening corn, the dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed. Steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind."

Have a good weekend - I have been laid up on the sofa today with a Bug which has given me a nasty temperature and aches in every joint, but I am feeling slightly more human now.

Gardening in January

2012-01-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

I don 't recommend it. The sun was shining just a tiny bit, so I quickly put my gardening clothes on and headed outside to do battle with the tangle of roots of Sneezewort and Michaelmas Daisies which are heading in all directions and thriving too well in an area I intend to plant a shrub (Viburnum bodnantense "Dawn") which has been languishing in a big planter for 3 years now, being intended as something I was going to take with us and plant in our next garden . . . I have abandoned that hope now, and will put it in when I have finally cleared the Achillea and M.D.s.

I enjoy a challenge, but this one will take a bit longer than the half an hour I managed out there before it started with mini hailstones! The water level was so close to the surface anyway, and although I had my stout kneeling mat beneath me, water was squished over the edges and through the handle cutout! Anyway, I got a complete large rubber trug bucket full of weeds and roots out and I have distributed them to grow on in the wilderness in front of the paddock.

I had my rubbery gardening gloves on but they did little to dispel the cold of the mud that is my long border right now, but I warmed up a bit when I pulled out some half-dead Pansies in a planter and replaced them with some corns I found in a margarine tub in the barn which were wanting to grow and had been overlooked.

One of the positives was that at least the house felt warmer when I came indoors again - we are virtually out of heating oil and no money for any more this winter so things are a tad chilly. Now I'm tucked up on the sofa again, with the wood burner throwing out lots of heat - the best place to be right now.

What you see is what you get

2012-01-25T03:30:00.000-08:00

That just about sums me up. I learned when I was 8 that telling fibs gets you nowhere, and no-one likes a liar. I am an Aries, and too honest for my own good - I always assume other people share my code of conduct - although it is obvious to me on meeting some folk what sort of person they are. They don't have to say a word. I just "know". I have to sit on my hands sometimes, as there are some topics I could get on my high horse about and I am a bit opinionated! Just don't ask me about wind farms, or mass immigration or the employment situation in the UK.

On the Internet though, things are more Shadows and Mirrors and people can assume totally different personas and there are some more dubious characters out there!!! I once belonged to a Family History site where one chap started having an argument with another and boy, were they vitriolic! Then someone twigged it was one and the same person and pulled the rug out from under him/them! There's nowt as queer as folk . . .

But then, having said that, I have met people on the intertnet who have become the dearest - and lifelong - friends. You begin chatting and just "know" that you are on the same wavelength. These friends are like sisters to me - the sisters I had but never knew as they didn't survive birth/very early infancy. Some acquaintances fade out of your life - friends are for a reason, a season or life, so says the old saying. But sometimes others come back into your life and the chance to develop the friendship further is given.

There are many blogging-friends I would love to meet, and know we would get on like a house-on-fire. Others are a source of inspiration - especially where crafting is concerned. It gives an opportunity for different areas of your creative personality to shine - my drawing "skills" are having a work-out right nowand I even tried my hand at a small watercolour the other day. It was going well till I found the "white" was more pale pink!

I have to say, with my limited internet access at the moment, I feel quite lost without my friends to chat to when I feel the need. I am nailed to the sofa again today as I slept very badly last night - worrying that the alarm wasn't going to go off (our son had to be in work for 8 a.m.) Now I feel like I ran a marathon instead of sleeping last night!

I shall be glad to be able to use my photos on here again too . . .

Car Booty again

2012-01-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

I didn't sleep well last night. We had had a viewing yesterday and last night I lay in bed worrying and fretting over how long it will take to sell the house and all sorts of associated problems. I was awake for about 4 hours and felt like death warmed up this morning, which made us late away to the boot sale. Anyway, it was still worthwhile as I got some John D Wood blue and white china in the "Yuan" pattern I collect - 6 cups and saucers, and 5 side plates for £3. I also found four books which came home with me - Henry Williamson's treatise on Richard Jefferies; Crafts from the Countryside by John L Jones, and best of all - one I'd wanted ever since I was doing my degree - The Settlements of the Celtic Saints in Wales by E G Bowen . . . I also got a craft book Decorating with Fabric Crafts, an American book which has some interesting ideas in it.

I also seem to have done a bit of Cosmic Ordering as my OH and I were discussing calling our builder (for advice) who specializes in restoring old houses and working with lime and other natural ecological substances such as hemp etc. We got back from the car boot sale, and blow me down, but he was out in our top field, metal detecting! Apart from meeting up in Tesco's in the run up to Christmas, we hadn't seen him for years . . . We had a lovely chat (all afternoon!) and got worries sorted out. Hopefully I will sleep better tonight.

I'm still on D's laptop . . .

Computers!

2012-01-20T01:51:00.001-08:00

I'm writing this on my son's laptop aas my monitor developed a thin blue line of dead pixels and has been consigned to the bin in Curry's. It is being replaced FOC with a new one, but meanwhile I am left bereft and unable to function as normal.

Lynn - I will get back to you ref. postage, but right now it's difficult to function normally, as I have to keep looking up all my signing in details each time I borrow this. The cookery book I found I've discovered is half in Welsh (big section at the back, replicating all the recipes that were in English in the front half). That would be impractical as cost of posting it is for a book half of which is no good to you! I will get back to you and recommend a good one anyway.

Everyone else, hopefully by next week I shall be back to normal.

Frosty mornings

2012-01-17T08:18:00.001-08:00

The header photo, and this one, were taken within minutes of one another this morning. I dropped the sash window open to get a better view, but gosh, the rush of cold air nearly took my breath away.

The last few mornings we have had a hard frost, though today was marginally better and it is slightly milder out now. It will take the house a few days to catch up though, as its thick stone and rubble walls have absorbed all the cold.

I was back to volunteering yesterday and enjoyed myself, although it was very quiet - just half a dozen people arrived during the time I was there, and four of those were regulars and just there for the cafe. So I sat quietly, waiting for more customers, reading a book of short stories I'd got from the mobile library a couple of hours earlier. Rather odd little stories, not without merit and capturing the little idiosyncrasies of the human spirit, by author Margiad Evans who spent most of her - short (1909 - 1958) - life in Herefordshire, near Ross-on-Wye, an area I am familiar with myself. I picked it off the shelf because the commendation on the jacket described her as "A close observer of nature, her descriptions of trees, water, rocks, the movement of air and the interplay of light and darkness, are both exact and fluid." I tend to be complacent with my choice of leisure reading and a book of short stories is easier to pick up and put down.

It was a bright sunny - if cold - day, and the view across the Deer Park was magnificent. I kicked myself for not picking up my camera as I had meant to, as a couple of dozen deer grazed the parkland, and the layered skirts of a massive Cedar of Lebanon showed inky-green against the washed out pasture and the paler trunks of oak, ash and chestnut which thrust branches up against the Wedgewood blue of the sky. I jotted down: "spindrift fingers of sunshine sent golden echoes beyond the trees, and spread a gilt nimbus around the deer." A belated River of Stones entry for the week . . .

As I sat and read and pondered, I was subliminally aware of the noises of people talking quietly in the corridor, of the music played in the Drawing Room (the Polka had my feet dancing), and the heavy deliberate ticking of the Grandfather clock across the hall from me and in my mind's eye, people from the house's past wandered by, preoccupied in their own spent lives, their emotions just a whisper held in the fabric of the place.

Moonlight on snow

2012-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

Sometimes my memory is jogged by something and becomes stuck like a needle in a groove, hiccuping over and over the same link, finding something different each revolution. Here is one such memory.

We were 16, Tricia and I, when we were lured into the winter night by a snowfall and a full moon in a clear, clear sky which ripped the stars from their anchors and bid them play. The amber-paved streets passed beneath our feet as we left the lights behind us and cut across the Strawberry Field to Mr Starke's. It was light amongst the birch trees, and their elfin twigs supported no snow and showed like dark veins against the snowfall. A dark shadow hid the rotting remains of the ancient side-saddle in the recumbant shed. An old tin bath peeped from beneath a meringue of snow. The moon showed us that we had been preceded by wildlife, showing bird tracks and fox prints beside the fence.

The trees in the copse were the colour of wood-ash, lit by a reflected glow. Not the smallest breeze stirred the ivy which swarmed up the creviced bark of the oak tree where we crossed the stream. The moon splintered into fragments between the trees, and showed us sleeping zebras in the snow.

Heads shot up as we climbed the slope and grazing ponies were aware of our stumbling footfalls and heaving breath. The old hunter mare and her yearling were the first to approach, blowing clouds of soft hay-scented breath at us as they drew near. The moonlight showed her gaunt shape and the filly's toast-rack ribs. No extra feeds for gypsy-stock. Nicky, Cheeco and Maize crowded up, hoping for treats, and nudging our pockets with muzzles as warm as velvet cushions. In the periphery, Amber, wild as a hawk and twice as beautiful, hesitated for a moment, before deciding we were not the threat we were in daylight, and approaching us. We fetched a flake or two of hay from beyond the fence, and shook it across the snow, so there was a mouthful for all. We proffered it to her. Hungry, she grabbed a mouthful and stepped back, but then, to our amazement, stepped forward again and we touched her for the first time, running our frozen fingers down her tangled mane, stroking her shoulder and feeling no fear in her. Other ponies appeared from the shelter of the thick Hawthorn hedge and we threw over more hay.

The old grey mare, Cindy, glowed in the moonlight as she hobbled to another pile of hay, doomed to perpetual motherhood by a shoulder injury. Corinne followed her like a shadow, matching her mother's stride, and then they fed, noses together.

Never venturing near, little chestnut and white Tangy tit-tupped like a clockwork pony at the edge of the herd, still terrified of people. He wasn't to know that his life was ticking away, like the second hand on a clock.

I swear time stood still - that old cliche - in the magic of that moonlit night. None of us, human or pony, knew our futures - they had yet to unfold - and many of them holding heartache and tragedy - and for little skewbald Tangy, death . . .

Walking through time

2012-01-11T01:17:00.000-08:00

Map of early Southampton from Wikimedia Commons.

I had a strange end to my evening yesterday. We came up to bed early (I was really tired). I just wanted to look up something on the computer - two boundary stones I'd seen marked on an old (1835) map of Southampton (my home town) - the Bosell Cross Stone and the Haven stone. I'd never heard of either, so curiosity got the better of me. I found out about them (but Lord knows what happened to them, as they faded from memory, unlike some other places such as the village of Hill on the western borders of the town which ended up giving its name to busy Hill Lane.

Anyway, I digress. I got a Google map up of where I used to go riding, at Testwood. I was horrified to find that though the lane was largely unchanged, where the riding school had been was just a tangle of undergrowth and some sagging barbed wire. When I drove down there 8 or so years back, the outbuildings and stables were still standing although it was overgrown. Now there's no trace of them. It upset me beyond belief.

I knew I wouldn't sleep with that on my mind . . . so I Googled up a map of the area where I used to live in Southampton, starting at old Mr Stark's, where we kept our first ponies. The old couple are long dead - he was in his very late 70s/early 80s in the late 1960s. He had been a blacksmith in WW1 and one of the lucky ones that survived. I like to think us girls brightened up his life a bit, especially when the rats ran over our wellies when we went into the swill room (he kept pigs and we kept our pony feed with his pig feed) with only feeble torches for light on winter nights. We screamed like Banshees!!! One Christmas he and his wife asked us in for a Mince Pie and gave us a small glass of sherry each and then worried themselves witless that we would get home safely after" having had a drink". We were 16 at the time!

Their bungalow is still there. The 10 acres surrounding it no longer houses hens and black Dexter cattle for fattening, or teenage girls' ponies, but has had Christmas trees planted on part of it and vehicles abandoned in one corner.

Anyway, I popped the "walking person" down outside the field on the map and began walking up Portsmouth road, where all looked pretty much the same. I turned into Grange road and then Shop Lane - a couple of new houses, but the rest of it was comfortingly familiar and the fields either side of Shop Lane hadn't been built on so it must still be Green Belt. Then left into Botley Road, and lots of newbuild houses there - some replacing elderly bungalows which had had big gardens so made for good building plots. One place always looked abandoned and scary, and was surrounded by huge trees (the balsam-scented firs). We used to walk very fast past that one! That's long gone and a couple of big houses in its place.

Down past my old junior school, and the little fields opposite, that the gypsies rented and grew strawberries on (and which we cut across to Mr Stark's as they backed onto his stretch of woodland). I was glad to see they are still fields. When the gypsies bought ponies and grazed them there, we offered to "look after" them and I can remember buying hoof oil and the owners telling us to "put lots of that on!" - as they hadn't paid for it! I can still see those ponies so clearly: Shane, a narrow little palomino of about 12hh, Storm a similarly-sized skewbald and Kerry Blue, who was a grey Irish-bred gelding of about 13.2, with a hogged mane which rubbed our faces like a dandy brush when we jumped him. (The record was 4 foot - we maintained!!! - over a single "pole" (read branch), balanced on old oil drums and bricks, and approached galloping up between the old rows of abandoned strawberries. All bareback with just an ex-Army Surplus bit and a bridle made of a length of rope - the loop of the reins ended half way up Kerry Blue's neck!

My school hadn't changed much, nor had the houses by it - just a few newer ones. I wandered the long way back to my old home, as I had to follow the Google route, so along Orpen Road, which used to be "unadopted" and all muddy gravel and puddles in my time. Past the back of Charly Fadden's house - "don't go in the back garden, there's Adders out there" Mr Fadden senior told us. Past where the Target pub used to be and just the other side of the busy Bursledon Road is still the house where Spitfire inventor R J Mitchell lived. The Target was so named because it was built overlooking where the Rifle target practice area had been in late Victorian times, and Butts Road was named for the Rifle Butts there.

Then down the hill and past the old Co-op and then the little corner shop which was one of the first self-service shops in the 1960s - I can remember my mum going on about it! I still have a little bread-making recipes booklet I bought there in 1971, for 60p - and use it all the time. The refit was quite a change from the corner shop with the little dark brown pony in a "stable" (more like a prison, as it was dark and overgrown by shrubs) out back, that did the deliveries in the 50s. I can remember always looking in to see him when I took the cut past his stable. He had navicular and went the way of all broken down ponies, sadly.

Past Old Don's, "Don't talk to him dear, he's a bit strange - has a metal plate in his head from the war and he likes little girls . . ." Poor chap - he was always trying to give us sweets and entice us into his house, but whether he was what we would now call a paedophile, or just a sad lonely old man with a damaged head and a liking for children, we'll never know. Our parents didn't worry much and we knew better than to go with him.

Past the Ivy Tree - just a big old Hawthorn swarming with ivy - where the travelling gypsies would set up their caravans when they were visiting neighbours in the area. Once a little strip of a field, it had long become overgrown with shrubs and weeds and eventually got covered in housing, as did much of Weston Common. We used to go in and talk to them and they would come selling things to the houses roundabout - I remember swapping a pair of johdpur boots which rubbed me for a lovely arrangement of moss and Primroses that they'd made . . . All under houses now.

Past my old house, looking small and hemmed in on either side now - it stood in about 1/2 an acre when my dad bought it back in the 1950s, and had been the brickworks manager's house once. On one side was a wilderness of Gorse and Damson trees where the Nightingales sang. In those days, the old trackway to the brickworks still ran down past the back of our garden, and the remains of the brickworks buildings were still there, plus the ponds where they had dug for clay. Much of this area of Southampton had been brickworks from the late Victorian period until the 1930s.

Where Queenie Goddard resided behind her lace curtains and Fir Trees, with her tall hedge which was smothered with the white moonlike faces of Greater Bindweed and divided her plot from the prefabs - all gone and replaced with houses. The next corner shop is now turned into a private house again, whilst a tree still remains in Canterbury Avenue which probably even now has my DNA inside it after I was practising being a Dressage Horse and cantering BACKWARDS (as they do!!!) until I met the tree and came to an abrupt halt . . .

Beauchops, where we bought wool, talcum powder, haberdashery and wool, and also paraffin for the heater for the bathroom, is now a Tesco Extra . . . and the rest of the little row of shops is still serving the public too.

Past the Bullseye pub - still there - and past Checkleys corner shop (now a hairdressers') and down Bunny's Hill, where I once managed to bend my scooter round the one and only lamp-post in sight . . . Then along Botany Bay, which hasn't really changed at all, except for some more permanent dwellings for its travelling community . . .

I still know it all so well - like the back of my hand of course, as you do with your childhood haunts. The stories I could tell - the scrapes we got into - the adventures we had - and the freedom we had to run wild.

I hear that they will soon be filming The Wartime Farm (the next wonderful series with Peter, Ruth and Alec of The Victorian Farm, The Edwardian Farm and previously Escape to the Green Valley) at Manor Farm, Hedge End. I know this area as Cricket Camp. My parents lived there temporarily with other families after the war with dad's parents, when they had been bombed out of Southampton. I walked and rode and dog-walked there year upon year and know it well. Time Team were there, on the edge, excavating the remains of a Tudor warship (I know the exact spot). Happy memories. Perhaps I shall walk round that way next time . . .

Sewing and crafting

2012-01-10T00:12:00.001-08:00

My creative skills have suddenly resurfaced this new Year. You've seen I'm back drawing again - although the one I tried of poet Edward Thomas last night was not flattering. Having said that, it was a very difficult photograph to copy because it was "arty" with the light falling across his face so that the highlighting was very difficult to transcribe. I think it's fair to say that even his own mother wouldn't recognize him from my effort! I also did a slightly better drawing of a horse jumping - full stretch, a superb photograph - from the Racing Post, although the jockey had his elbow out and up and that was damn near impossible to draw as well! I might put that up later, but the Edward Thomas is one for the back of the cupboard!

Anyway, I can still remember how to sew cushions. These materials (half metre lengths of each) took me a long long time to chose - but what bliss it was choosing! The prints are from the Amy Butler Daisy Chain range. I wanted to make something extra for my middle daughter as she got sold short over her birthday present after the boots I thought I'd ordered were out of stock. The themed colour for her bedroom in the house she's sharing is turquoise and I LOVED these materials. The bold floral print looks very 1970s and retro and the yellow design on the other material is so pretty. Fortunately they don't match any of my colour schemes or I'd have been tempted to keep them myself! I just need some zips for them now, but that will have to wait until the weekend. To make the material make 2 cushions from each length, the backs are plain white glazed material - from the 50p a pair Lidl curtains!

My eldest daughter is having two cushion covers made from the purple Liberty print which I have hidden as much as possible - far left. She expressed a yearning for Liberty prints, so I thought I would do her a brace of cushion covers too. As she occasionally comes on here (and would you believe, did just before Christmas so she saw the Bunting destined for her!!!) I've hidden it as much as possible, but I'll put a photo up when they've been posted off to her.

Of course, I couldn't be left out and I spent FOREVER drooling over fabrics at The Cotton Patch Shop (I shall be back!) before finally plumping for one which had leapt off the page at me (a Kaffe Fassett design). Like G's fabrics, it matchs absolutely nothing in this house, but I DON'T CARE! I've wanted to paint our bedroom in Pansy violets for years - this is the nearest I shall get to purple in the bedroom!

Walking into the view again

2012-01-08T00:29:00.001-08:00

I have had a very busy - but creative week - and I am afraid my commitment to A River of Stones now seems rash. It will have to be sporadic:

A River of Stones

As I walked, a chirruping stream sang a cascade of watery notes.

The landscape looked like winter had laid her petticoats out to dry.

The new wind farm above Brechfa. I'm afraid the words "wind farm" are not good ones in this area. I wish I could support this alternative energy technology but it is not cost-effective, not practical, is a placebo given by the Government to their totally impractical commitment to the Kyoto agreement, and a total rape of the countryside.

Looking towards the coast. On a clear day, you can see the hill topped by Llansteffan Castle. But not this day . . .

Through the trees, the top of the hills above Llanfynydd.

This sort of moss takes full advantage of our high rainfall and will colonize virtually any tree or branch or stump. I am being fanciful, but to the top rightt of the tree it looks rather like a human face and the broken stumps of branches could almost be arms!

Close to the start of my walk, the sun came out properly.

Above and below - evidence of practices from the past. These trees were once cut and laid, but then left to grow probably for the past 30 or 40 years. I'm glad to say that this particular skill is now being encouraged once again and there are new practitioners in the countryside.

The sun was breaking through and lifting my spirits as I strode downhill.

The photos above and below are typical of the landscape hereabouts. Fields of a few acres which formerly were much smaller but mechanisation and grants have encouraged farmers to grub out old hedgerows and banks to make the fields more easily managed. The tree of choice for boundaries in the past was either Hawthorn or Blackthorn to garner respect from livestock! When allowed to grow on, they make respectable trees.

Looking South-Eastwards down and across the valley of the Cothi. Right in the valley bottom are a couple of our neighbours' properties.

With such a diffuse light, the grass on the hedge banks was the only splash of colour.

Where it continues mild, amazingly I found this Blackberry still in flower, sheltered from the prevailing (West) wind by a thicket of Blackthorn.

My shop is almost open . . . you can browse anyway!

2012-01-07T01:21:00.000-08:00

HERE is the link for the C&C shop, made necessary by a big vet's bill for Tippy's treatment (I've another bill to come too.)

A while ago I mentioned having an embroidered vintage tablecloth etc stash which I needed to downsize before we move and several people on blogs and forums expressed interest. I have listed some things in my shop blog, and there will be links to other bits on e-bay (later today hopefully) and I will add more items, including books etc in due course.

Now, if anyone can tell me how I can open a 2nd hotmail account, and then link the blog to it so people can get in touch with me directly, I'll be delighted! Brain currently in Frazzled mode!

Drawing . . . Rackham would have got first prize!

2012-01-05T08:35:00.001-08:00

This took me hours - but it has been a good exercise in seeing what is really on a page, and interpreting it. I bet it didn't take Arthur Rackham anything like as long to execute, but he drew and painted all day long. Still, after pretty well a break since school days, with a few forays inbetween - mere arty hiccups - I am reasonably pleased with this. Mind you, I just could not get the hoof right (the foreleg with the darker shoe) - such an odd angle, and I rubbed out and drew it SO many times. Likewise I am not happy with the near hind leg, because whatever I did I couldn't get it to give the horse the movement and power that Rackham did. I think I have the length and angle of the second thigh wrong. I am surprised there is a rider AT ALL as I'm not good at people and stupidly, did the horse first and then had to fill in the rider!!!

Anyway, this - in its entirety - is Beaumains defeating the Green Knight.

Click on it twice for all its imperfections!

A little bit of rain . . .

2012-01-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

The floodplain of the Towy at Llandeilo.

A River of Stones:

Contorted Hawthorns queue to dip their toes
In the Towy's murky waters
As islands of green float by.

I was aware of gale in the night, but this house was built in the lee of a hill, and protected by tall trees, so spared the worst. I didn't hear the rain at all, but it must have deluged down as this morning the river was still very high and there were all the signs that it had been higher still. For starters, the lane was still under water when we drove down the hill and we had to reverse all the way back up again and go out over the top.

I ventured out later with my camera, and took some more photos. Above shows the river quadrupal its usual width, though it has been even worse in other years.

The stream took the short cut here, and went straight across the lane.

This one shows how the stream bank was trashed so the water level must have been a good couple of feet higher.

The river had been through this gap, but it also comes up through the drains.

This is fairly normal, the river rising and dropping several feet in a few hours.

Below is the leafage left behind by the river being on the road.

I also took photos when we were in Llandeilo, where the Towy had burst its banks just below the town. I'll post those tomorrow.

Artistic inspiration

2012-01-03T02:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was so inspired by Ann Somerset Miles' blog Journaling the Journal, and wanting to do something similar, I decided I would blow the dust off my sketch pad and have a go. It's only copying, rather than drawing freehand, but hey-ho . . . For inspiration I used a lovely book I found at the car boot sale recently, "Hedgerow" by Anne Angus, a local artist (Carreg Cennen way) and naturalist.

Birds don't come naturally to me. I did these first. I am at home with horses and flowers, as I know how they "work". I was secretly rather pleased with the birds . . .

And then I went blog-hopping and really blew my mind: Look HERE for starters, and HERE for starters!

So, a new year and a new start . . .

Landscape through Trees

2012-01-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

A River of Stones:

Bee-banded ferns caught my eye,
And lifted it to see
The sun on green fields,
Mossy roots and Green Trees . . .

Words

2012-01-01T10:38:00.000-08:00

I had time to think today . . . mostly when I was baking, trying to keep a flow of baked goods going into the oven and coming out ready to feed us for the week. In the name of frugality, I never put the oven on for just ONE thing any more.

Anyway, first of all I was thinking of a New Year's Resolution that I read in today's paper, where someone (whose name is already forgotten) resolved to learn a new word each day, to broaden his vocabulary and keep words alive. I loved that idea, and my word for today is dossil. That is probably extinct in usage now as it was "a plug, a spigot, a roll of cloth used for wiping down an engraved plate in printing; a pledget of lint for cleaning out a wound." Note to self, now look up pledget . . .

Do you remember A River of Stones from last January? I thought I would revisit it and join in again for this January. Whilst I was washing up, I looked across the yard and noticed:

As dusk falls in the yard, drowned cherry logs glow amber.

As I fed the outside cats their teatime meal:

A robin challenges the dusk with his song and,
Head cocked, awaits the reply.

New Year's Eve walk

2011-12-31T05:11:00.000-08:00

I've just blown the cobwebs away with a New Year's Eve walk - I have ended the year as I intend to start the next - with exercise. It was mizzling with rain all the way, but very mild, and I only needed the lightest of waterproofs to keep me dry. I didn't take the camera, so the above photo's a bit of a cheat, and taken on a November day, but shows you the landscape.

I walked solidly for an hour, stopping only to look at the colours on leaves and to notice the FIRST CELENDINE OF THE YEAR - flowering still in the Old Year!!! Blimey - never seen them this early before.

The Filipendula (Meadowsweet to you and I) are past blooming along the valley, some with yellowing leaves and browning tips, and others gone over completely to chocolate brown with dropping wet leaves. There were splashes of colour still in the hedgerows, especially the acid yellow of the wild strawberry leaves interspersed with brighter green ones, the glassy green of Harts Tongue ferns, bottle green of ivy and holly leaves reflecting what light there was. A few Bramble leaves looked like they were on fire with their fierce sherbert yellow and rose pink and scarlet, and beach leaves danced nut-brown in the breeze.

The hilltops were shrouded in low cloud, which had settled like a hug across the valley, sinking into the woodland and masking the trees. The dead bracken clung to the steeper hillsides like a cinnamon-brown blanket, whilst in the depths of the hedgerows tiny creepers of Goosegrass were already growing up towards the light, and Hedge Sparrows played hide and seek.

The birds were quite noisy, though hard to identify against the dull light (and without my glasses on). A Thrush, startled by my approach, ceased singing until he had reached safety at the top of the tallest oak tree along the lane, and a Bullfinch swooped into cover in the Hazel behind the hedge.

In the woodland Hazel catkins were already showing, with the tiny little scarlet male flowers, and the Alder trees showing up maroon against the grey-green of the oak and ash, wound about with ivy like a leafy scarf.

What is life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL.

Planning ahead

2011-12-30T08:42:00.000-08:00

In this strange hinterland between Christmas and New Year I have had a sudden rush of blood to the head. I am busy sewing when I can - trying to finish an extension to a single quilt - a hexagon one I made for G to take to Uni with her to remind her of home - and which she handed back to me when she came home to her double bed. It has been keeping our feet warm all winter, and I began - probably a year ago - to piece the hexagons to make it full size for our bed. Anyway, during yesterday's scheduled power cut, and having taken down the tree (to let more light in the room) and packed Christmas away for another year, I pulled a chair into the bay window and sat sewing for several hours. Bliss . . .

I am currently accepting "orders" from my girls for their Christmas presents next year, which gives me time to make them! I have tracked down some fabric for cushions which I have wanted to make for a while, and just ordered that - 3 x 1/2 metre lengths - and a little bit for myself, another 1/2 metre so I didn't go mad (couldn't afford to!) I can't wait for that parcel to arrive.

Primroses on Christmas Day!

2011-12-27T07:12:00.000-08:00

My eldest daughter and I had a lovely walk today. It was very mild, and has stayed dry - if grey - all day. We felt we needed to walk off some of the Christmas Excess! Anyway, we cheated a bit and got my husband to drop us off about half a mile from home (thus neatly avoiding the steepest and most tiring hill) and walked for about 2 1/2 miles at a fairly leisurely pace - especially up the inclines!

The grey skies meant that the light was poor for photography, but as it turned out, it wasn't really the views which tempted us, but things far closer to us, as we found summer flowers still blooming, and now spring flowers are coming to join them! We found Primroses in full bloom, and the bud of one of the little wild Daffodils. I'm sure in Cornwall, which is warmer, they have been out a while, but it's a first for us to notice them so early here.

A neighbour's Muscovy geese - and the fruit from old apple trees which have been forgotten, now that you can buy cooking apples in supermarkets . . .

The first buds on the little wild Daffodils.

One of the donkeys on our walk.
A view across the fields towards Carmarthen.

Walking into the view . . . looking out across the damp Towy Valley.

How the Primrose blooms lifted my spirits - they made me feel that even in the depths of winter, spring cannot be too far away. These have been in bloom several days so would have been out for Christmas Day!

Red Campion still blooming from the summer.

A wild strawberry makes an early start to the season. We found another plant half a mile on which had a green fruit too!

Meadowsweet still putting out flowers, having been in bloom since the summer.

When the gorse is out of bloom, then kissin's out o' fashion! You're OK in these parts, apparently!

One of our neighbouring farms, Allt-y-ferin, showing that this site has been inhabited for thousands of years as that is a Norman motte and bailey castle - or rather, where one once stood), and that itself is on the site of a prehistoric Promentary Fort during the Iron Age.

We have had a lot of rain recently. This little stream pouring down from a field met up with all its family and friends in recent heavy rain, with the result that our lane has been much damaged and will need to be repaired where the tarmac has been ripped up.

We were glad to get home to the warmth of the kitchen.

The Home-made Christmas

2011-12-27T00:17:00.000-08:00

One of the first things I made were some felt biscuits (as you do!!!) having been inspired by the cover picture on Mollie Makes magazine a couple of months ago. I thought they looked fun, and they are delightful to sew. I thought the Jammy Dodgers were a bit too big from the pattern given, compared with the other biscuits, but they looked good all the same. The felt was all taken from a selection of felt squares I had already, some of which came from a wonderful £2 auction box a couple of years ago. I am sure its original owner would be delighted to know I am still using her craft things.

The pretty pressed glass plate they're displayed on was £1 from the car boot sale. It's the sort of green glass I collect myself, but it was just right for what I had in mind as part of G's Christmas present . . . I happened to have the crochet doily amongst my collection of such things . . . as was the tablecloth beneath in the photos.

G had been saying that her bedroom was very bland and she wanted some colour in it, so I decided on turquoise as a colour theme, and bought some ready-made pillowcases from a certain well-known supermarket, and put pretty edgings on (fat 1/4s from the patchwork shop). Not as well-done as the lovely ones on Morning Minion's blog - I shall add that extra border another time - bu she was pleased with them all the same.

Then I did the same for her sister.

The scarf is a very simple pattern called Old Shale. I seemed to be knitting it forever as scarves need to be long, but it was eventually finished and G pleased with it.

This frame was 50p at the car boot sale. The Aida material was some from a big bag of Aida fabrics from a charity shop (£1 the lot). The embroidery floss is something I use regularly and carry on adding to my skeins. The design of the House Martin and Swallow comes from a booklet of Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady designs I must have had 30 years now. I return to it still to work more of the same designs or try a new one. This was to accompany a little blue bird brooch for T, which I found on an antiques stall at Wells Market back in early Autumn.

I also bought some hand towels and used fat 1/4s to give a pretty border. This one went to one of my aunts, and there was a 2nd I forgot to photograph, which had a pretty dark green and red patterned border.

This one was more purple than puce and I had to use the ONLY design that matched for colour, and I did deliberate long and hard as it was part of a wonderful parcel of materials that Mornings Minion sent me and which is destined to become a quilt for our bed - perhaps this winter now that I have some time to spare (I hope). The photograph doesn't do the print justice as it is just the PRETTIEST design I have ever seen, with purple hollyhocks.

And of course, you already know about the bunting . . .

Christmas with Thomas Hardy

2011-12-24T06:05:00.001-08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL.

This poem is taken from "A West Country Christmas" compiled by Chris Smith.

'It's not difficult to conjure up a picture of that marvellous man of Dorset literature, Thomas hardy, sitting by the fireside at Christmas time as the flickering light from the fireplace draws shadows on the walls - an atmosphere perfectly captured in this poem:

While I watch the Christmas blaze
Paint the room with ruddy rays,
Something makes my vision glide
To the frosty scene outside.

There, to reach a rotting berry,
Toils a thrush - constrained to very
Dregs of food by sharp distress,
Taking such with thankfulness.

Why, O starving bird,
When I one day's joy would justify
And put misery out of view,
Do you make me notice you?

Thomas Hardy.

Extract from "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas, because I cannot have a Christmas without mention of Cats!!!

Here is Jarvis, posing nicely. He is called Jarvis because we are - somewhat distantly I believe - related to musician Jarvis Cocker, through my mum's Battams family.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

Now for my favourite of Hardy's seasonal poems and I make no apology for repeating it year on year!

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy.

Carolling

2011-12-23T08:19:00.000-08:00

Whilst we don't go carolling hereabouts, I did in my Southampton childhood (being a Hampshire Hog, though of Devon stock through and through on dad's side.) Just a bunch of kids, well wrapped up in the evenings leading up to Christmas, and hoping for a bit of spending money - which we normally got - a sixpence here or a thrupppence there, and the Posh House once giving us half a crown between us, so we must have sung well for them!

Here is fellow Hampshire Hog (and more claim to it than I) Norman Goodland's take on Carol singing:

"Carols is funny things! They bain't all to do wi' Christmas! if you dont ring 'em oout proper, they might not answer the door, not gie thee nar 'apence!"

Foster Father was delivering his annual lecture to the Baughurst bell-ringers, of whom he was Captain. They practiced in Foster Mother's scullery, on the handbells.

I remember them - big bewhiskered men, shirt sleeved and leather belted, standing facing each other in a double row. Flashing up the brass bells. hecking the swing with broad thumb, to make them 'speak'' in their clear, fluid tones. It was all taken very seriously. Standards were high; they had to be, to impress the gentry upon whom they called.

They walked from Baughurst to Wolverton, back through Ramsdell and Pamber End, and home through what was then known as the 'gypsy'' village of Tadley. Or made their way up to Heath End, aiming for the high spot of the season - Aldermaston Hall.

"We had to watch they sarvint galls!" Father once told me. "They was always up to mischief!"

"We was invited up to the hall oncest. We 'ad to go in through the back, an' through the kitchens, y'see. An' we left our 'ats in the kitchen along wi' they gals.

"We went in and give a tune or two to the Master and the Mistress, and them as was there. They gie us a sovereign! They told us to go back to the kitchens and Cook would gie us a drink.

"So we done that. And when 'twas time to get on, they gals was round the door away from the light. An' they wouldn't gie us our 'ats until we give 'em a Christmas kiss.

"Waal - yu never put yer 'at on inside a gentleman's 'ouse, luk. So we put 'em on outside in the dark - so we didn't see what was gwine on.

"Anyways. We went on down to the Hhind's Head, t'other end o' the street. We went in, took off our 'ats - an' everybody started to laugh! We didn't know what to make on it! 'Til we looked at each other - an' then we seed we all 'ad white 'air - like a bunch of old men!

"Twas they sarvint gals! They'd put flour in our 'ats - whiles we was a-carollin' for the Master!"

Father and his bell-ringers faced some competition from other Christmas and New Year rounders - the village bands of the time - The August Hill Drum and Fife Band. The Temperence Bands; one from Tadley, one from Baughurst. But is is said at the end of their rounds, the Temperence Bands were not more temperate than Father and his bell-ringers, when they came to clanking up the garden path well after midnight, to collect their bicycles and wobble their ways home!

Taken from "A Hampshire Christmas" compiled by Sara Tiller.

People were tougher then . . .

2011-12-19T02:46:00.000-08:00

At yesterday's car boot sale I picked up a little book called Exmoor Wanderings, by Eric R Delderfield. I have a couple of others by him too (The Raleigh Country and Just Wandering in Devon). They are all published in the 1950s, when I was a little tot. By golly, but life was different then. E R Delderfield was brother of the novelist R M Delderfield and their father was editor of the Exmoor Chronicle. HERE'S a link for you if you want to learn more.

Delderfield writes of one old boy, still living (at that time), who, when he felt rather ill and went off his food, kept himself going on beer instead. And not just a couple of pints but 30 PINTS A DAY FOR FOUR MONTHS!!! I can only assume it was home-brew, and on the weak side. Apparently "he was very ill before he got better".

Then there was the farmer, Bill Ridd of Challacombe, weighing in at 30 stones if he was a pound, who managed to sire 8 children, never left the district (he died at Brendon in 1916) and despite his bulk, was out managing his farm every day, riding on - not a Shire-proportioned cob - but an Exmoor pony which must have been delighted at its master's demise! I have always known that Exmoors are tough (and stout) ponies (for photos see HERE) capable of carrying a man all day, but carrying 30 stone takes some beating.

Then there was the weather. Imagine snow so deep that even 5 bar gates were buried beneath it - which was the case in the dreadful winter of 1915. The farmers were going out with feed for their stock, using a horse and cart, and walking over the TOP of the gates! 1947 was another bad winter across the country, and it was 10 weeks before the roads were all cleared of snow . . .

Back to Bunting

2011-12-17T01:18:00.000-08:00

I have to say, although it took me ages to make the two lots of bunting from start to finish, it was very enjoyable and I was quite pleased with myself. Firstly, I will post the link to the blog where I found the Bunting Tutorial: http://www.myhomemadehappy.com/?p=54

This was very useful and told me all I needed to know. I used a crochet hook to push out the points when I had turned the little flags inside out. As I didn't have a long enough length of ready-made bias-binding (you will need the 1"(2.5cm) width if you are buying it), I had to make my own. I had lots of the green Laura Ashley fabric still - donated by someone who had made curtains from the rest of it - so I used that for one lot, and a neutral fat quarter of lighter-weight patchwork fabric for the other. I cut it 1 1/2" wide (4cm) and then turned back and pressed 1/4" (1cm) on either side. This took forever.

I had a colour theme for one lot of bunting, but the other was made with leftover fabric which had gone into the hexagon patchwork quilt I made for my daughter (they both got one to take to Uni), so the colours and patterns are more random. I used plains and patterns, regularly spaced. When they were all assembled I pinned them in 4" (10cm) apart, ready to machine into place, having already turned the bias binding in half and ironed it to give a good crease. Finally, I just sewed the ends in on the bias binding.

I am sure they will be well-received, and I doubt very much if either of my girls will visit my blog before Christmas (hence the photos!) as they are busy, and don't normally visit very often even when they're not! They will certainly dress their otherwise neutrally-decorated rented accommodation and hopefully remind them of their mother's love for them . . .

Leftovers - I think I shall make some bunting for me next, and then some Christmas bunting (probably for NEXT year!)

Dressing the tree

2011-12-16T08:39:00.000-08:00

Why is it cats always have to "help"? I think little Ban will get a shock if I hung her in the tree!

R.I.P. Tippy

2011-12-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

I wish I could say he got better. But he didn't. We had to have him pts today.

Making bunting

2011-12-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the bright idea to make some bunting. I'd never done it before, but I soon got OH to make me an appropriate template, and then I set to. Well, I have to say it wasn't to difficult, but talk about time-consuming . . . It would have been a doddle if I'd been using felt flags and ready-made bias-binding, but making your own bias binding takes forever . . .

Still, I'm very pleased with the results, and hopefully they will be well-received in due course. Photos to follow . . .

Winter weather!

2011-12-12T11:02:00.002-08:00

Well, we knew it was meant to rain "a bit" yesterday, but what the weathermen omitted was the bit about "rain of Biblical proportions" . . . Hell's teeth, it was a cross between a gigantic bath being emptied over the land and a monsoon. Our steep lane turned into a river. The river came up across the lane and backed up a fair way towards the Chapel. When it subsided a little, there were still big streams of water at the sides of the lane, and piles of leaves dumped higgledy-piggledy, along with big chunks of tarmac, where the water had undermined the road! I think that the Council workmen are going to be busy out there in the New Year.

I stayed indoors, listened to the Archers, finally got around to bottling 10 bottles of Damson Wine, and cleaning out 3 demi-johns and racking the New Forest Crab Apple wine. I meant to change the oil in the chip fryer, but that had to wait until today. I also made a fresh lot of Damson Ice Cream. Oh, and I managed some x-stitch, and some card and unavoidable letter writing.

Tippy is slowly getting better, but I want him to suddenly become his old self, and I think it is going to be a slow business, perhaps 1 step forward to 2 back. He is eating better, but after I "missed" with the Boscopan injection he was meant to have yesterday and DIDN'T get the needle beneath the skin, his bowels have slowed down again. I am still administering oil and water by the dropper.

The photo wasn't taken yesterday. It's one from a couple of years ago I think, and the rain was much worse yesterday. A real flash flood.

Anyway, I will try and get myself out of the doldrums where I seem to have descended, because of worrying about Tippy.

Oh, and just when we needed it, a stray cat which has been doing the rounds locally for a couple of months now and which I have discouraged from coming up the hill every time I have seen it doing so, has finally turned up here, desperate and will NOT go away. It's a girl, and she looks pregnant. She is going to have to go to the CPL, because we CANNOT have any more cats - certainly not pregnant ones. The old Christmas story - there is no room at the inn . . . even for cats who are half-sisters to our boys, and are grey with apricot/buff highlights and eyeliner and white bibs and paws . . . and are tame.

Winter weather!

2011-12-12T11:02:00.001-08:00

Weekends

2011-12-09T10:39:00.000-08:00

Well, The Invalid is still seeing his Personal Doctor, but things are - hopefully - moving in the right direction now. He had to go down again this morning for, ahem, one of those "bend over" moments, but this time no enema necessary. I am trying to get liquids down him (I am not his favourite person when he sees me arriving armed with a small syringe). He ate a very good breakfast though, and LOVED his cream and egg yolk. Tomorrow there will be fresh ox heart for supper. (Thank you Susan for your advice, which has been taken on board). In fact, many thanks to all of you who have been so helpful and supportive during the last couple of weeks. Your thoughts are much appreciated, I can tell you.

Now I have the weekend ahead of me. The usual routine is grocery shopping on a Saturday morning, when we have dropped D off at work. Meals will be loosely based around what is available in the "reduced" area! We are having a frugal week this week, to try and put money aside for bills (including the vet's bill, although they have been VERY good about what they have charged for - only one enema when he had 3 . . .) I want to try and clear that as soon as I can. So it will be an "eat from the freezer" week, and we will only buy essentials.

Of course, one person's essentials differ from someone else's. One of this week's "essentials" in our house is (ground) Cinnamon. We use this a lot. My husband has it sprinkled on his home-made muesli each morning and says it helps ward off colds. I use it for baking too. Anyway, we have nearly run out.

Bread flour and fresh yeast are more essentials. I am back to trying to bake fresh bread every other day. It has gone by the board recently because of nursing Tippy, but tonight I made two pizza bases and with the 1/3 of dough left over, I baked a small crusty white loaf. After years of me telling him - but him not REALLY listening - we saw a programme this week about bread making where they showed the ingredients in the average loaf, one being derived from animal hair . . . OH was suitably horrified and said he is never going to eat Supermarket bread again. Well, the occasional best quality loaf won't hurt, but I agree with him, home made is best and only has 4 ingredients - flour, water, a little salt and fresh yeast. It takes very little time to make - perhaps 20 minutes from start to finish - and is so much more filling than the rubbish bread . . .

Cheese bread . . .

Saturday afternoon will be spent watching the horse racing, whilst I work on another Christmas gift for my daughters. One piece of knitting is now finished, so I need to crack on with the other. There is a half-done piece of x-stitch needing to be finished as well.

Sunday morning rain is forecast, which bodes ill for the Car Boot Sale, but there are always some stalls under cover, and you never know what turns up. Sometimes there are more stalls than you can shake a stick at, but nothing worth buying. Other times, there are only a handful of stalls but something just up your street is on offer. You never know.

I had hoped to go to the local auction tomorrow, but finances are tight. I will be listing more belongings on e-bay instead, as this is really helping our tight finances at present, and we have far too many things we don't need so we may as well get some money for them.

Sunday afternoon is "free" - I'd like a walk, weather permitting. So much to try and cram in though, during the short hours of winter daylight.

What are your plans for the weekend?

Yet another update

2011-12-06T04:34:00.000-08:00

He's back from the vet's, and his night at one of the female vet's houses where she said the first thing he did was to pass big sharp bones all over her kitchen floor - and it would appear he had eaten a Rattus Giganticus (the farm next door breed 'em BIG). She thinks most of it is now out, but he still "may" need another enema etc. I do hope not. He has been delerious with happiness a being home and very clingy - it's just like having a poorly toddler all over again. I couldn't do anything - tried the ironing and he just sat on what I was trying to iron!

Anyway, he's having a snooze now, which is good. I will have lunch whilst I can and get back to the ironing.

Tippy . . .

2011-12-05T11:29:00.001-08:00

He's back at the vet's again today. In a very bad way this morning straining to go, and crying in pain, then being sick again. Another drip, another enema - which has produced large sharp bones - where were they hiding when they took the X-ray last week then? Lord knows what he ate - pheasant perchance? He is on steroids now, to try and calm his inflamed bowels, and spending the night at the vet's home, under the radiator in her bathroom (bless her), as she said how much they hated being left in a cage overnight at the vet's. He has had his bowel greased a good way up too, to help him pass anything still lurking inside. I am exhausted with worry and the awfulness of watching him starve to death in front of my eyes.

Say a little prayer for the wee man, please.

My favourite shops . . .

2011-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

This follows a set pattern for me, in chronological order. From the age of little till my teens, sweetie shops were IT. I could tell you the range of sweets for sale in any sweetie shop in our part of Southampton, and can still recall the wonderful one at Weston Park, with its huge counter of penny sweets, four for a penny sweets, parma violets, Spanish Gold "tobacco", chocolate fish, mushrooms, shrimps, lips, false teeth (these latter three in a tasteful Germoline pink), Flying Saucers, Gobstoppers, "cigarettes", Opal Fruits, Lovehearts, Sherbert Dabs, Rainbow drops, Lucky Bags, Fizzer bars, Five Boys chocolate, Frys Chocolate Cream bars, and many of the chocolate bars still on sale today (though with different names). Then there were the sweetie jars (now, I note, being offered for sale (empty) at Antiques Fairs for upwards of £20 a time!!!) Rows and rows of them with anything from Barley Sugar Twists, Peardrops, Quality Street (always too expensive to buy!), rhubarb and custard, chocolate limes, apple drops, acid drops, kola cubes, blackberries and raspberries, pineapple chunks, to the - horrid to me - clove balls, aniseed balls, Fox's Glacier Mints, Fisherman's Friends, Zubes, Cough Candy and Coltsfood Rock. No wonder I had so many fillings!!!

Around ten, my taste in magazines changed from comics (the Beano and the Dandy religiously every week) to taking Horse and Hound weekly. I used to always look at the Countryman magazine too and Country Life (ideas beyond my station there!) I was never far from books, but they were usually the sort on offer at the Library (I devoured four new books every week), or the offerings in the hardware store down the road, which were mainly Enid Blyton (whose books I scorned as they didn't have PONIES in them) to the Children's Classics, which I read my way through. Then when I got my first job at 16, I discovered the delights of Gilbert's Bookshop in Southampton, house in a tall terraced Regency building, and it was my first port of call on pay-day. My collection of antiquarian horse books dates from that time and I still have them all, and have greatly added to that collection over the years, and still do. I have been a bookaholic all my life and needless to say, rarely come home empty handed from the car boot sale (another 4 books today!) and our regular trips to Hay-on-Wye are one of our greatest pleasures.

Around this time (16) I got my first pony, and although he was only a yearling, and spent lots of my wages buying equipment for him from the saddler's at the bottom of Southampton High Street. How I LOVED to go in that shop - the smell of leather was so seductive - and I bought my first saddle by paying £1 a week for it. It was a 16" half panel leather-lined pony saddle and cost me £16 - £1 an inch . . . and it was a bright London Tan colour when I first got it. Subsequently I bought a girth (red nylon I seem to remember), linen saddle cloth (white with red and white Tattersall check), numbered stirrup leathers and solid nickle stirrups.

Food for Maize (my pony) was initially bought in 7 lb brown paper bags from a feed merchants in Woolston. I would go and buy 7 lb bags of broad bran (huge flat flakes, not like the rubbish you get today), rolled oats, pony nuts, and rolled barley and stagger home on the bus with them. I bought linseed and boiled it up on the cooker. Eventually I saw sense and bought my feed in half hundredweight sacks which lived in the back of the larder, underneath the stairs.

My dad gave me my first initiation into the delights of antiques shops and I can remember us regularly looking in the windows of the ones in Wickham when we all went out for a Sunday drive. We never went inside though, as we couldn't afford to buy anything, and didn't want to be "time-wasters" . . . He would have loved the Antiques fairs we go to now, and was no stranger to buying stuff at auction as he bought old prints to use the glass for painting his copies of Impressionist paintings on. I still have them . . . A few old chairs came our way in the same manner - half a crown a time perhaps - and a jug and basin set (very plain with a grey pattern). My real love of antiques has come since I married my OH, although when I lived just outside Salisbury I always used to buy little things from the antiques and junk shops in Lammas Street, and the big collection of antiques stands where Sainsburys now is. Little sugar sifter spoons at 50p a time, blue and white china, interesting little bits. Dorchester Market was another hunting ground of mine.

Somewhere along the line came my interests in crafts and making things, embroidery, sewing generally, quilts, knitting etc, and so I have been in enough shops to have stashes of material, wool and craft paraphenalia. This has been passed on to my eldest daughter though her sister rolls her eyes and sighs if she sees me stroking wool or trying to persuade myself NOT to buy another piece of material . . .

What are your favourite shops?

P.S. Tippy is hopefully on the mend again - cheese got him "moving" (a bit too well!), but today he is eating a little and has been out hunting. Currently asleep on our bed . . .

Update on Tippy

2011-11-29T02:00:00.001-08:00

I've just taken him back to the vet as he was sick again last night, and still so constipated he is blocked, so we are back to square one. He is to have another enema and more rehydration . . . Poor little chap. I just want him back to his old self again. He was so much brighter on Saturday and then went downhill again. He is full to the gunnels of bits of mousy giblets set in concrete . . .

Tuesday evening (my comment to the comments!):

Thanks everyone. Today's treatments - all day on a drip and another enema (poor boy) seem to have helped a lo and he has been bouncing off the walls tonight! He REALLY wanted to go out, but the answer is no, until he has "been" regularly again.

I've just had him laid on my lap, like a baby, stroking him so softly so that his eyes were closing and he was nearly asleep. He has eaten, and had some more Liquid Paraffin - the syringe got stuck and I removed it from his mouth and gave it some welly and it went EVERYWHERE! He looked at me like I was mad . . .

Fingers crossed he will "go" from now on. Vet took an X-ray to check all was well, and it appears to be. Fingers crossed he will recover fully now.

Wednesday morning:

He's "been" in the night, wanted to have a wander into the kitchen and poked his nose out of doors, now he's come back in for breakfast. Fingers crossed.

A poorly pussum

2011-11-27T23:52:00.000-08:00

A week ago today I noticed Tippy looking rather quiet and not joining in the usual bun fight at feeding time. I thought he - an inveterate hunter - had probably eaten some mousy giblet that didn't agree with him (they usually leave the rank-tasting organs of Shrews). Anyway, about 9 p.m. that night he came in from outside and was spectacularly sick (lots of mouse fur and giblets) in the kitchen. I was heaving in sympathy and darling son (bless him) offered to clean up. Tippy was yowling to come through into the sitting room, but I told him he had to stay in the kitchen in case he was sick again. The next morning he was off-colour, and not eating, but perked up a bit in the day (on the sofa), then once the vet's was shut, he went downhill and was still not eating or drinking. Wednesday saw us taking him to the vet, who gave him a anti-biotic and something-else injection, and dispensed a pussy-cat Gaviscon and more anti-biotics. She mentioned he was getting dehydrated.

We took him home, and he still looked rough. He wouldn't eat but kept asking to go out and he would go to the pond and meow pitifully, then try and drink but he didn't appear to be lapping properly. We would be out there for an hour at a time (me with a book!) as he moved from one lot of water to another. He was still weeing, and when I spoke to the vet on the Thursday she said not to worry if he didn't eat, as long as he was drinking . . .

Friday saw us back at the vet's, and this time he had to be left as he was very dehhydrated and very constipated, so poor lad had to be sedated, have an enema and be put on a drip. He was much perkier when we picked him up and picked at a bit of food (mushed up with water) and has been better over the weekend, although I hate having to give Liquid Paraffin (worried it might go down the "wrong way". Yesterday he was more or less his old self, eating properly, asked to go out in the garden for a while, but this morning he isn't quite as bright. We're due back at the vet's for a check-up anyway today. Sigh . . .

Update: he is still constipated. I have more Liquid Paraffin for him. I hope he is soon properly on the mend, as if he goes downhill again, it's back in the vet's on the drip . . .

Jennie's Hand Made Christmas . . .

2011-11-24T22:42:00.000-08:00

This is not a spin-off from Kirstie's programme . . . this is absolute necessity in our house this year. Money isn't just tight here - it is earmarked to be spent before it arrives in my husband's account . . . In a normal year, when we weren't living quite so hand to mouth, I would squirrel things away when I came across just the right gift. This year I haven't been able to do that. I have picked up a couple of gifts (new or vintage) at the car boot sale or antique shop (the cheaper sort!), but apart from one proper boughten gift each, the rest of the presents under the tree will all be home made.

One gift I had a brainwave for earlier in the year was tarted-up pillowcases. The (white - but you can use any colour really) pillowcases were £2.34 a pair from a well known supermarket. The material - fat 1/4s of really stylish patchwork material - cost £2.75 each. One fat 1/4 does a pair of pillowcases. All you do is take a stitch ripper to the pillowcases and open up the seams back to the edge of the turnover. My fat 1/4 was already exactly the right length across the pillowcase, so I just cut the material in half, ironed a 1/2" seam, turned the pillowcase inside out, pinned the material so it covered the front open end of the pillowcase and machined across the bottom edge. I had left a little overhang on the open end which I folded over and machined. Then I pinned the seams, with the turnover back in and sewed those. I still have the ends to sew in, but the whole thing was done in under half an hour and the pillowcases look SO pretty. A variation on this would be a simple patchwork pattern border. I may get some plain white teatowels and give them pretty borders too - I'm sure aged aunties would appreciate these.

I am also knitting a scarf in Old Shale variation (3 rows plain/purl and one row of pattern) which looks really pretty. Also a much wider scarf/shawl in a soft grey wool which came from the car boot sale for next to nothing for 3 big balls. Oh, and I'm also sewing a x-stitch picture. My son has requested a jumper with a particular design on. Rather than knit the jumper, I will buy one and then stitch the pattern over the existing knitted stitches (intaglio is it called?)

If I get time I will make one or two new x-stitch decorations for the tree. We always make our own Christmas wreath - it is part of our Christmas tradition. A few days before Christmas we do a special wreath walk and collect the holly, ivy, greenery and willow wands for the base. It only takes an hour or so to make, and quite often we do two, one for the front door and one for inside the house.

I am going to severely prune my Christmas Card list this year as I simply CANNOT afford the postage. The Post Office has shot itself in the foot by just raising postal charges again and again. When I am sending e-bay packages, I often find that it only costs 5 or 10 pence more to post something to Australia, Air Mail, than it costs to send to an address in Britain!

Certain family members and friends will get home-made somethings, be it jam, jelly, chutney, biscuits, cake etc. They've blown it on the Sloe Gin/Damson Gin front though - that's staying in my drinks cupboard this year!!! The Damson Gin is GORGEOUS . . .

And the best bit about Christmas this year is we've just heard from our eldest daughter and she IS able to come home for Christmas after all, as they've changed her shifts at work (I think one of her work colleagues let on to the boss that T would be spending Christmas on her own). So it will be a full house and I can stop worrying!

Dear Prime Minister

2011-11-22T22:38:00.000-08:00

I wonder if you really have any idea of how people are struggling to cope in what truly used to be GREAT Britain, but now is a country seemingly being stripped of its cultural identity and history. Once Britain is culturally castrated and homogenised, surely there will be no outcry about being absorbed thoroughly into Europe?

I have just read the figures of cold-related deaths of the elderly in last winter's snow and ice, when temperatures where I live dropped to minus 17 in the river valley (and the river froze virtually right across) - but the thermometers for cold weather payments have to register below zero for 7 days before cold weather payments are made. When it's a choice of heat or eat, you can understand why there were so many deaths. Retrospective payments don't heat a house when you are frightened to use the heating in the first place, because of not being able to pay for it.

Youth unemployment has reached an all-time peak. Unsurprising really when Europe's youngsters move here for work and are employed ahead of our own in the job stakes, but apparently that's because British youngsters don't have a WORK ETHIC. Supposedly line bred in every man jack of them. I would beg to differ. A whole generation whose prospects of full-time work of any kind are blighted. Youngsters applying for job after job on-line, filling out forms that might take them a couple of hours to fill in properly, and not even an interview at the end of it. Soul destroying and demoralizing.

Well, I count myself fortunate that each of my children have a job. Sure, they're just part-time jobs, and my daughters appear to have got into terrific student debt to get a good degree which counts for nothing against EXPERIENCE in the workplace, experience which many companies are big enough to offer them as long as they are prepared to support themselves, possibly relocate, and work for NOTHING to gain, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it. What's the word meaning the polar opposite of philanthropic? Misanthropist apparently. . . Personally I call it exploitation.

And their jobs? Well, two of them are in different cities and have to try and live - no, exist - on part-time wages, but hey, it gets them off the official figures for unemployment which I understand have now topped a million for young people under 24 years of age. I'm sure my eldest daughter can manage really well on 20 hours' wages - she's always been able to make sixpence do the work of a shilling. Just as well really as there is NO help or safety net for those people working between 16 hours and 30 hours. Income support only kicks in at below 16 hours, and working tax credit at over 30 hours (when you need it MUCH less.) A clever notion - the biggest group of people really struggling and needing help don't qualify. We really love having our middle daughter home for weekends, so she can go back to waitressing on her days off to earn extra money. Insurance too high on our car for her to drive it on these weekends? No problem - we can have an early night and get up at 1 a.m. to go and fetch her if she can't get a lift.

As for our son, we'll have him at home a while longer yet as he can't afford to move out and at least a job in a warehouse is preferable to being on the Dole, which he was for over a year.

I was so pleased to hear that by not giving me my pension until I am 62, I am helping the country out of the gigantic financial abyss the previous Government deliberately dug for it. There's a lot of us in this age bracket think this way. The fact that I nursed my mother at home and saved the Government a mint of money in care home fee subsidies doesn't count of course. Perhaps I should have got a job working nights while mum slept and boosted my pension pot that way? Well, we didn't have a lot of choice, not exactly having much warning of this turn of events and no voice, no influence at all in Governmental decisions (it was ever thus). Perhaps a fairer way of doing this would have been a sliding scale with us oldies only having to wait 6 months longer for our pensions - but then, you wouldn't have saved anything like as much money that way.

We - stupidly it would seem - thought that we would downsize from the house we can no longer afford to heat, in order to cut our expenses and outgoings and give ourselves a little buffer in the bank. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the problem was our house arrived on the market at the same time as the Recession, Banks won't lend money to customers trying to buy their first house, (too busy trying to feather Banking Nests I believe), and this has a knock-on effect right up the chain. We could be here for years yet . . . At least there will eventually be money in the pot for our children when we finally pop our clogs, which is a comfort when we know there is no way they can ever afford to own their own home otherwise. What - our final home was sold to provide funding for our care in old age? They just got £16,000 between the 3 of them? Well, I am sure that will be very fair and . . . just. The better-off should have to pay their way from cradle to grave so that there are handouts to the feckless and those poor sods who never ever managed to get their foot on the work ladder and are unable to pay their way.

We try not to think about "getting old". We are heading that way, but still feel in our thirties inside. Strange that. We are frightened by the prospect of a sudden illness putting us in a hospital where they are too busy to feed you, bring you a drink, take you to the loo and leave you laying in filth, where total strangers decide on whether you live or die by writing "Do Not Resuscitate" on your notes - or by then will it be involuntary euthenasia? Past 85? Nil by mouth . . . they're a waste of rations.

But don't fret, I'm sure a whole new raft of Quangos (aka monetary black holes) will soon be afloat and dealing with these worries . . .

I know - totally out of my normal blog posting remit, but these are things which DO occupy my mind. Perhaps I should be writing for the Daily Mail!!! I try not to dwell on them, but the facts cannot be ignored. Even the different parties are becoming homogenized now, and I don't recognize much in Mr Cameron which I would describe as True Blue Tory . . . I think they are ALL for political career these days, and party edges are blurred - even more than we perceive to be the case. Perhaps you share my thoughts? I would love to know.

Lorna Doone

2011-11-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Badgworthy Water, Exmoor.

Our eldest daughter is home for a few days and last night we sat and watched Lorna Doone - it was a BBC drama on tv a few years back and this is the DVD of those two programmes. OH soon left us (!) and we sat down to thoroughly enjoy the story - yet again. I can remember buying the Ladybird book of Lorna Doone for her when she was 4 years old and she loved me to read it, especially the part where Jan Ridd tumbles down the waterfall. I have this as a story cassette too and even now will sometimes listen to it as I do the ironing.

R D Blackmore based the story on real life. In the Dartmoor village of Chagford, Mary Whiddon was married at the church of St Michael's on 11th October 1641. There is a memorial to her inside, stating that she "died a matron, yet a maid". Legend has it that she was shot (by a jealous lover?) as she left the church.

Is it anyone else's favourite?

Lest we forget . . .

2011-11-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

Those who lost their lives in the War to end all Wars . . .

My husband's grandfather, Private Bertie Harrison, who died on the Somme in 1916, aged 27 - just as a gypsy had once foretold . . . He was wounded on the 4th July and died a day later. A letter home to his wife mentions seeing her brother, George Bird (below) whilst they were in France, and one of his eldest daughter's last memories of him was the tears in his eyes as he said a final farewell and then stepped onto the troop train, reluctantly handing back little Edie, barely a toddler, and knowing that he might well never see them again. He was right. The final insult to his widow was the Army billing her a shilling for the blanket to bury him in . . .

And his brother-in-law, Captain George Bird of the 2nd Warwicks, (and formerly of the 17th Lancers, the "Death or Glory Boys"). He had been in India until just beforethe outbreak of the war, where the 17th Lancers formed part of the Sialkot Cavalry Division in the 1st Indian Cavalry. They left Bombay on 14th October 1914 under the control of Major-General Hew Dalrymple Fanshawe. His military career had begun when he joined the 17th Lancers as a Drummer Boy, and he accompanied them to the 2nd Boer War. Music was the love of his life, and he was an accomplished musician (this love of music is borne out elsewhere in our family, as my husband's brother also lives for music). He had been offered the position of Conductor to one of the important London orchestras and would have taken the position up and married his young lady on the Isle of Wight, but war intervened. He was already in France before the rest of his former regiment arrived, as he had been in England on a music course.

He quickly rose through the ranks, and his bravery earned him a Military Cross (he took around 300 Germans prisoner), and was recommended for a DSO, but as he was only a Leiutenant, this was commuted to a bar to his MC, as it was frowned upon giving DSOs to ordinary ranks . . . He rose to Captain, but was killed within 3 weeks of his brother-in-law, on the 30th July on the Somme. His body was one of those never found.

Even those who never put a foot on foreign soil, paid the price of helping in the war effort. My husband's other grandfather, Sapper Frederick Craine, who was in the Royal Engineers, but damaged his knee in training and never got sent to the Front. A tailor in civvy street, he spent part of his war service sewing Army uniforms, but unfortunately for him, was also one of those who was involved in testing gas warfare in Britain, probably testing the earliest gas masks which were terribly inefficient. He was gassed and his lungs weakened and he subsequently died of TB in 1919.

And from my family, my great-Uncle Ben Bolt, Hampstead born and bred but with the red soil of Devon in his blood. A shadowy figure, never mentioned by my dad - so I wonder if he even knew of him? He was a chauffeur in Kent before the War, and his widow never remarried. He died in the final months of the war but I don't know where he is buried in France.

I thought of them on Friday, and I shall think of them today.

Green Living Forum

2011-11-10T23:59:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many of you visit this forum, but it has been down since Monday now, so if you have been trying to view it, and thought there was something wrong with your computer (as I did!), fear not - it just has gremlins. However, hopefully they will soon be trounced and we can get back to normal.

P.S. The new header is the view from our bedroom window. This bit of woodland borders the stream (once the mill leat) and is so colourful with Hawthorn berries at present.

A long way to nowhere . . .

2011-11-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

When you live in the countryside, as we do, one of the accepted maxims is that it can be very inconvenient when you actually want to GO anywhere. Rarely does anything happen LOCALLY. The nearest we can usually manage to LOCALLY is Carmarthen. That's just a 20 mile round trip. If it's Swansea, that's about a 50 mile round trip. If it's Builth Wells (which we visit for the Antiques Fair, and a few years back, used to go to for the Smallholders Fair and the Royal Welsh Show), then that's a 100 mile round trip. The seaside - nearest is 18 miles away, and that's estuary really (at Llansteffan). If I want to take a basketmaking course, the nearest is just outside Cardiff - a round trip of about 120 miles or more.

I recently joined a craft group and have been so excited about learning new skills and improving on others. However, it is a 50 mile round trip. We have had so many unexpected calls on our finances this year, and now with Christmas approaching (and three birthdays amongst my husband and daughters), I have taken the decision that I shan't be going back to my crafts outside of the home until January at the earliest, and perhaps not at all. Fuel is so expensive and likely to get even dearer. I will just have to do without until we finally move. Sometimes you have to accept that you can't MAKE things happen. . .

I am envious when I read about other people visiting the London Museums (I stand a snowball's chance in hell!), or going to a Literary Group in the village (swoon), or meeting up with friends for a Crafternoon.

Close friends of mine here in Wales have either moved away or gone in a different direction to me, so we have lost touch. Rural living can be lonely, although I am so fortunate in having my husband here at home with me 24/7.

So here's a positive thought that our house WILL finally sell (hundreds of brochures have been sent out) when someone else has finally sold THEIR house and is in a position to start looking properly for their new home. Then I intend to be nearer family and friends and able to join in again.

Curtains and cooking - A productive week

2011-11-05T00:09:00.001-07:00

I have had a busy week this week as I decided I would make the new winter curtains for the sitting room. They cost me very little other than time, as the material has been in my stash for several years now and was a remnant from the Fabric Warehouse (much lamentation in this household when it shut down) and probably cost about £8 or £10. The lining was a pair of the now infamous orange Lidl 50p curtains . . .

The colour is actually more coral/terracotta than orange, but GOSH what a difference it makes to the room of an evening. It's like being given a hug! I made the first curtain in the early hours of last Sunday morning, after being woken by a hairy cat at 3 a.m. (old time) and not being able to get back to sleep. I didn't quite have the width I needed, so I had to join two remnants cut off the end into a long strip which was added to the outside edge of each curtain, but to be honest, unless you look closely, you can't see the join, as it is hidden by the folds of the material.

Whilst I was at it, I put a woollen lining on some blue curtains for the kitchen which I had picked up cheaply at the car boot sale. The lining was a whole roll given me by a neighbour, left over since they had wound up their office seating manufacturing business. Then I took the summer sitting room curtains and turned a faded edge and blind-hemmed it, so they are ready to go next year again. I've also started making some fresh cushion covers, one utilising a pretty embroidered tray cloth (!) and the other using left-over orange curtain material . . .

The scene of all the baking action. I preserved the beautifully-polished kitchen table top with one of my husband's grandmother's tablecloths. They don't make them like this any more - linen, and made to LAST.

River Cottage Gingerbread. This is a "double" Gingerbread as it has chopped preserved Ginger in it too. This is now down to the last piece . . . I baked it specially for my husband, as he had a dodgy tum, and he LOVES ginger, which is meant to be good for feeling sick.

RIVER COTTAGE STICKY GINGERBREAD

100g golden syrup
100g black treacle
75g unsalted butter
75g light soft brown or muscovado sugar (I omitted this as OH doesn't have a sweet tooth - it didn't need it, tbh)
150g plain flour
1tsp round ginger (Barts has VERY good flavour)
1/2 tsp ground mixed spice
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, lightly beaten
75ml milk
Finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
75-100g finely chopped preserved stem ginger in syrup (drained) - though I did add about a tablespoon of the syrup too

Icing (Optional)

50g icing sugar, sifted
1 tblspn lemon juice or water
50g whole stem ginger (2 pieces)

Equipment

1-litre (2 lb) loaf tin, greased and lined with baking parchment

Preheat the oven to 170C/gas 3. Put the golden syrup, treacle, butter (and sugar) into a small saucepan. Place over a gentle heat and stir until the butter has melted and the ingredients are evenly blended. Set aside to cool.

Sift the flour, ground ginger, mixed spice and cinnamon into a medium mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the cooled treacle mixture, egg, milk and lemon zest. Using a wooden spoon, beat well until the mixture is smooth and glossy.

Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in 1 tblspn. hot water. Add to the mixture with the chopped ginger and mix thoroughly to create a pourable batter.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake in the oven for 50-60 minutes, or until the cake is firm to the touch and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave in the tin for 10 mins before turning the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.

When cold, if you wish, mix the icing sugar with the lemon juice or water and drizzle over the cake, then top with slivers of stem ginger.

This cake is best stored for 3-4 days before eating. It keeps well for 2 weeks and freezes beautifully. (Keeps for 2 weeks? They've got to be joking - ours lasted 24 hours!!!)

A Cottage Loaf, made with half Spelt flour, and half strong white bread flour.

River Cottage Jammy Dodgers, filled with home-made Blackcurrant Jam. Scrummy! The Dodger bit is like shortbread . . .

RIVER COTTAGE JAMMY DODGERS

(Makes 6 or 7 - well, I got a dozen out of this by rolling a tiny bit thinner).

175g plain flour
pinch off sea salt
75g unrefined icing sugar (I had to use caster, as I had no icing sugar, unrefined or otherwise)
125g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g raspberry jam (or whatever flavour you like. Personally, I used home-made Blackcurrant Jam - WOW!)

Equipment:

2 large baking sheets, lined with baking parchment (oops - I just greased mine well)
6-7mm biscuit cutter, crinkle-edged or plain (perhaps I used a slightly smaller cutter)
2.5 heart, square or round biscuit cutter (I didn't have a small enough one, so I used the centre of my pie funnel)

Sift the flour, salt and icing sugar into a large mixing bowl. Add the butter and lightly rub into the flour mix, using your fingertips, until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and vanilla extract together. Make a well in the centre of the flour mix. Add the egg and vanilla mix and work together to form a soft, smooth dough. Seal the dough in a polythene bag and chill in the fridge for 25-30 mins. (Another Ooops, as I forgot to do this - and it was OK).

Preheat the oven to 170deg. C/gas 3. Divide the dough into two equal portions. Place one portion between two pieces of lightly floured greaseproof paper and, using a rolling pin, roll the dough to approximately 1 4mm thickness. Repeat with the second piece of dough. Remove the top paper. (D'you sense I'm a rebel? I didn't bother with the greasproof, but just sprinkled a little bit more flour about . . .)

With the larger biscuit cutter, cut the dough into discs (make sure you have an even number). Using the smaller cutter, cut out and remove the centre of half the biscuit discs, the cut-out pieces can be kneaded back into the remaining dough. Place all the discs on the baking sheets. Bake for 15-20 mins until just firm and barely coloured (this is MUCH less - half the time? - in my fan oven, which cooks very hot.)

Remove from the oven and place a teaspoonful of jam in the centre of each whole biscuit round. Spread to 15cm from the edge (in other words, not too close if you can't be bothered to measure, which I couldn't be). Place the cut-out rounds on top. Return to the oven and cook for a further 5-6 mins by which time the biscuits will be evenly cooked and the jam hot enough to stick them together. Leave the biscuits to cool for 5 mins before transferring to a wire rack. Or if, like me, you browned them a teensy bit in the first place, jus sandwich with jam and leave to cool. They are like shortbread, and DIVINE!

Apple Crumble - I am still using up my apples from the garden. Just 6 BIG boxes to go . . .

Dianne's marvellous giveaway

2011-11-02T00:13:00.000-07:00

(Autumn in the Elan Valley, mid-Wales.)

In celebration of her favourite time of year, my friend Dianne, over at My Southern Heart, is having a wonderful giveaway with a choice of marvellous prizes. Pop over and check them out, and enjoy her blog too of course.

You could win a choice of a Vogue knitting book, some beautiful yarn and a cookery book, or else two beautiful doll kits (one an adorable newborn).

Curtain making

2011-10-31T03:07:00.001-07:00

What do you do when you can't sleep? After an hour or so, I usually get up and get on with some work - quite often ironing, as that keeps me warm too. The clocks went back on Saturday and I was looking forward to an extra hour's sleep. A black hairy cat woke me a around 3 a.m. (before clock changing). By the time I'd taken her downstairs and got my feet cold, I was fully awake. I tried to get back to sleep but gave up and went downstairs and decided I would make a start on the new winter curtains for the sitting room. I had found some material I'd forgotten buying )when I was searching for Great Uncle George's WW1 medals which OH had decided to "put somewhere safe" and we haven't found that safe place yet . . .)

So, using material I'd bought as a remnant (£8 or £10 or so I think) from the Fabric Warehouse (which shut down a couple of years back, and is much lamented), and a pair and a bit of the orange 50p curtains from a recent Lidl sale, I set to and made a good start on the first curtain. I carried on working on it throughout the day, and it was finished by teatime yesterday.

Seams pinned.

I'll post another picture when they're finished and hanging.

Shopping and eating frugally

2011-10-26T05:50:00.001-07:00

Is time an illusion? It feels like it this past week! We're going flat out as jobs need to be done. We can rest after tomorrow . . .

Anyway, one of the things I have been thinking about recently is shopping, and how, when we are trying to prune our grocery bill to as little as possible - as when the bills come in the only place we can take money from is the grocery money - and everything is going up in leaps and bounds. I try NOT to do a one-stop supermarket shop. We have changed to doing the bulk of our weekly shop in Lidl, though there are certain things which we have to shop at another leading supermarket for as Lidl don't stock them or the price is better elsewhere. Fruit and veg we buy from the warehouse at Abergwili, buying the £1 bargain boxes when we can (what's in those varies daily and some is too far gone to be worth buying). We also have a lot of home-grown fruit to fall back on.

Anything remotely in the toiletry line we buy in the £1 shop - it goes without saying it's a daft idea to spend £2 plus on a tube of toothpaste when it is £1 somewhere else. I've never been one for buying ready-made food - everything is made from scratch where possible, although I do get fish fingers, frozen fish, and the occasional jar of instant sauce for a quick bung-it meal when I'm in a hurry or poorly. Home made bread is far better than shop-bought, tastier/cheaper/more filling all round. Home made jam is divine and not just a jar of coloured sugar, like "boughten" stuff. Home made pickled onions cost a fraction of shop jars and taste better. Home made mincemeat costs me next to nothing (just the dried fruit really) as I use apples from our trees, and use no suet in it. Cakes and biscuits and puddings - home made of course - and I usually try and fill the oven and freeze the extra baked. I use any leftover bread to make breadcrumbs for coating fish/chicken or making stuffing and would make bread pudding if it weren't only me that ate it (I'm on a diet!)

The wild birds will have to go without this year as we cannot afford £40 or so per sack of peanuts. We live next to a farm, so there are normally gleanings there and we will put out any damaged store apples if we get Redwings and Fieldfares coming through, although in last year's snow we regularly had 26 Blackbirds in the garden demanding breakfast. We will probably weaken and get a sack of bird seed if the forecast is dire.

Where else I can prune, I don't know. If it's just my husband and me here, we will have just something on toast for supper or omelet or something quick and fill up an empty corner with some fruit crumble.

I am at a loss as to how to prune our bill any further. How do you manage?

I love Museums - visit to Red House Museum, Christchurch

2011-10-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

I have always loved Museums. When I was growing up I used to visit the Tudor House Museum in Southampton almost every week. I can still remember the stuffed Dachshund . . . This particular museum has been beautifully restored now, and is totally different to the room layout I remember from the 1960s.

My husband also loves Museums, and we make a point of visiting any in the vicinity of where we have journeyed. A friend had reminded me how good the Red House Museum at Christchurch was, and so we spent a very pleasant morning in the town, exploring the Museum and the Abbey. I hope you will enjoy the Museum as we did.

The workhouse is remembered in this plaque. I don't doubt it contained many unhappy families and orphans in its time, folk "on the parish" largely through bad fortune. At all events, the old Workhouse now houses the Red House Museum.

View across one of the garden areas at the back.

Above and below. In an age when horses were the main form of transport and had relatively short working lives, this machine made use of the horsehair "harvested" at the knackermans . . .

Various earthenware steens, drainers and Dorset Owls from the Verwood pottery. This round jug with "lugs" was used by farm labourers to take cider or cold tea to the fields with them at harvest time.

Wonderfully set out inglenook fireplace with all sorts of goodies from the past.

A lovely stack of steens (or pancheons as some people know them).

Grimwade's quick cooker for stews or puddings . . .

Above and below. An early "washing machine". I bet washing day was NOT a popular workday in the Convent . . .

This display was to show the importance of home-sewing in the past, particularly when there were few ready-made dresses available.

All manner of lamps too, including a little rush light holder on the right, just in the picture.

I was keen to photograph these as they are relevent to my family history, as my g. g. grandfather was a coachman, who drove the Exeter coach in Devon. These would have been familiar to him. Above coachman's tools; below spare adjustable horseshoe.

Above and below, several of the beautiful period dresses on display.

Isn't this shawl gorgeous? I saw one very like in an antiques shop in town with £85 or so on it.

A selection of bags, fans and hats.

Medieval horse shoes and ox shoes.

Playing catch up

2011-10-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

Scarlet wilding apples from an apple core discarded 30 or more years before . . .

Well, much as I wanted to, I didn't go to my spinning/weaving group as I was so behind here so I had a catch-up day, and as I have pretty well ticked everything on the immediate list, so I am very pleased with myself. The day began with a walk up the valley - about 1 1/2 miles in all - I'd have gone further but I had a long mental list of jobs for the day.

I started by making crab apple jelly from the 9 lbs or so I had left of the fruit I picked in the New Forest when we were there recently. I had cut the fruit up and cooked it a couple of days ago and let it drip through the jelly bag overnight. Then it had sat on the stove in a pan with a lid on, reminding me it needed doing. I got about 4 1/2 lbs yield, which doesn't seem much from such a lot of fruit and sugar, but crab apples aren't juicy, although they make divine jelly. Whilst I was washing and sterilizing the bottles for the jam, I took another box of bottles I'd been given and soaked the labels off and they are dried and stored away for the next session.

Then, as I drank a mid-morning cup of tea, I peeled and salted the 2nd half of the pickling onions and have them waiting overnight before I wash them off tomorrow and bottle them using the spiced vinegar I made this afternoon. I think I will probably buy some more onions and bottle them up, so I have a full year's supply (I'm the only one who eats them).

Next it was the wine which needed sorting out. I searched for demi-johns first, but then realized I had recycled half a dozen last summer when we were having a clear out and I thought I would be cutting right back on wine-making as I haven't done much in recent years. Wrong move! However, during my search I found a brand new but dusty 5 gallon plastic fermentation bin (you just fit an airlock) so took that indoors to be thoroughly washed and sterilized. Into that was carefully racked and decanted 3 gallons of gooseberry wine, which is still working but sat on lees which is not a good thing.

Then of course I had to thoroughly clean and sterilize the three demijohns, as I had two further demijohns of Damson wine to rack. So I did that, and washed the other two d-j's. Then it was the turn of the crab apple wine in the wine bucket, which had to have the fruit removed and then be poured through a straining bag to remove all the pips and bits. That is now mixed with sugar and yeast and will be soon be bubbling away. I feel like an alchemist when I make wine! All that took me 2 hours, which was a lot longer than I anticipated.

I made a batch of spiced vinegar for the picked onions, and as it cooled, I put tonight's chicken in the oven to start roasting, and went outside to put the 11 white Geraniums I'd had in a border to overwinter inside (down in mum's). The needed to come in before the first frost.

Then I peeled spuds for the roast, and prepared the vegetables and Yorkshire pudding mix, peeled and cooked up 8 apples for a crumble, made the crumble mix, and cooked it.

So that's crab apple jelly done; pickled onions done; wine done; several lots of washing up done; roast dinner and apple crumble done; Geraniums potted done. I think I have earned a beer tonight!

Sturminster Newton Mill and an old recipe sheet

2011-10-12T02:33:00.001-07:00

When we lived in Dorset, we used to visit Sturminster Newton every Saturday and Monday for the auctions and the Market. We always bought our cheese on the market and then visited the Mill when we needed bread flour, which was stone-ground and wonderful stuff. After stopping at Fiddleford Manor/Mill, we drove the mile or two up the road and stopped at the Mill, for old times' sake. Sadly, it was not one of its open days. (It is now run by the National Trust . . .) Not too disappointing, as we had been around the mill many times and didn't need bread flour. I hope these few photos give you an idea of how it looks, and how serene the spot on the river Stour. Thomas Hardy and his young wife Emma lived a few hundred yards downstream from the Mill and would have known it well. I dare say they walked to Fiddleford too, as there is (I have only NOW found out) a beautiful walk along the river between the two. Amongst my loose recipe sheets, I found an egg yolk yellow sheet with a picture of the Mill and "Sturminster Newton Mill Recipes" stamped on the top. So I shall add a couple of recipes at the bottom of this posting.

We finished our little outing by parking in the market place at Stur (what the locals call the town and we always have too). Sadly, it is much altered from our day, and the big cattle market was finally closed in 1998 and is now covered over with housing and everywhere much-altered. The buildings where old Dicky Burden used to hold his auctions, and quickly sell the best lots to a spot by the door (!) (e.g. himself!) are no longer there. We have many happy memories of days spent there, seeing who bought what (and where it ended up next at auction, often being bid up by the new buyer lurking at the back of the crowd!) and for how much. We made quite a few purchases there, many of them very good bargains. Nothing went unsold - even if he had to drop the starting price to just 10 pence (this was 25 years ago), he would sell it, even if it had to be for 11 pence!

Anyway, I had £10 burning a hole in my pocket when I went through the doors of Hansons, the BIG fabric and craft warehouse. I could have spent it a hundred times over but in the end came out with a handful of fat quarters with which to make pretty borders for pillowcases (some as presents). Money well spent.

STURMINSTER NEWTON MILL RECIPES

Freezer Cakes

1 oz fresh yeast or 1/2 oz dried yeast
1 tsp baking powder
1 lb wholemeal Stour Flour
6 oz sugar
2 eggs
1/4 pin milk
8 oz margarine
1 1/2 lbs mixed fruit

Beat together yeast, eggs, baking powder and milk in a large bowl. Rub fat into Stour flour and stir into yeast mixture. Stir in sugar and fruit and mix thoroughly. Cover and stand overnight. Divide mixture between 2 x 1lb loaf tins (greased and lined). Bake at gas no. 2 (300 deg. F, 150 deg. C) for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. Can be frozen for up to 3 months.

DORSET APPLE CAKE

Well, I couldn't leave this one out!

6 oz wholemeal flour
3 oz demerara sugar
2 medium eggs
pinch of salt
3 oz hard margarine

Sett oven at mark 5 gas (375 deg. F or 190 deg. C), middle shelf. Greaase a 7 inch oblong dish or tin. Rub fat and flour together with the pinch of salt. Add the sugar, and the two eggs beaten. Add enough apples (sliced thinly) according to your taste. A nice sharp Bramley cooking apple is best. Put into your greased dish and sprinkle the top with a little more demerara sugar and bake for 3/4 hour. Lovely with a nice drop of cream . . .

GINGER CAKE

2 tablespoons milk
6 oz soft margarine
6 oz soft brownsugar
3 large eggs
6 oz wholemeal flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
2 level tsp ground ginger

Set oven at mark 4 gas (350 deg. F or 180 deg. C)

Grease and line a 6 inch round cake tin. Put the margarine, brown sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, ginger and 2 tblspns milk into bowl and, using a wooden spoon, mix the ingredients together until they are combined, then beat the mixture for about one minute to incorporate some air. Turn the mixture into the tin and bake for about 1 1/2 hours until it is well risen. When cool I ice it and place walnut halves on the top of the cake.

Fiddleford Manor

2011-10-11T00:03:00.000-07:00

Fiddleford Manor, near Sturminster Newton, Dorset, which we visited whilst we were on holiday recently. We were delighted to find that it was an "open house" - no-one manning it, free entry (even better!) and we could wander at will, soaking up the wonderful atmosphere of this ancient property.

I couldn't resist the play of light and leaf colours through the uneven glass.

These information boards show you what it would have looked like.

.
A small window set in the gable wall of golden hamstone.

It had a stone-tiled roof. If you look at the thickness of these stone slabs, you will understand why such robust beams were needed inside the manor.

As you can see, there was a further wing which was demolished in earlier times, more's the pity. From the Mill mentioned in the Domesday book, it became a Manor House in Medieval and Tudor times, before becoming divided into accommodation for farm workers (who probably didn't appreciate its origins!

The beams in the roof are 600 years old. You can see that in the past a leaking roof has caused rain damage, but this has all been made good now.

Shapes within shapes. We have seen a similar design elsewhere this summer - I think it was at the beautiful Manor House at Tretower (see recent post).

This beautifully carved doorway shows it was a high-status building. You can just glimpse the plank and muntin wall behind it.

The verdant view through one of the windows.

A beautiful hamstone fireplace with herringbone interior.

Just a hint of the original wall paintings remains now, but you can imagine how it must have looked in its heyday.

You can see the water damage clearly on these beams . . .
My husband strolling past the end of the Manor House. As you can see, it is a "semi"!, and has been quite altered over the years. This side has been totally restored in recent years and is now under the control of English Heritage. It is part of the Medieval mill complex and just behind my back was the mill pond. It is one of the oldest buildings in Dorset, dating from the 14th century, and at one time was used to store hidden contraband . . .

Thinking outside of the box . . .

2011-10-09T04:48:00.001-07:00

Lidl had one of their periodic weekend sales of leftovers from the special offers they have each week. Whilst we didn't need cycling equipment, bike racks (yeesh, those bargers got in the way of searching), childrens' shoes/clothes, underwater cameras, pond set up equipment, we did snaffle up some bargains. The price range was 50p/£1/£3/£5/£10.

I was delighted to pick up two pairs of long (I can shorten 'em) white tab top curtains for £1 a pair yesterday - just what I needed for mum's flat. OH also bought a 3 LED light fitting to go over my counter for £1. Only today did we notice he had bought one that had a light bulb and cover missing. But hey, today they were 50p each and we bought two more to make up a complete one with spares! We also thought outside of the box a bit and bought 5 more lots of curtains (now 50p a pair) to use as curtain backings/linings or to back cushions etc. I have to go all the way to Swanea (a 50 mile round trip) if I want curtain fabric/linings etc now, so this was £2.50 well spent. We got two big chunks of good quality pond liner at 50p a time too, which my husband assures me he can find a use for - covering up his piles of maturing tree trunks I suspect! A box of wine glasses for our daughter in Swansea was the only indulgence, as they cost £3, but she asked us to look out for some and she will be happy that they are new (she struggles with the concept of 2nd hand, but she is young yet . . .)

This morning we had a wander round the car boot sale, which was just an echo of the size it was last week, when I had NEVER seen so many stalls or buyers on that site. Today I really struck lucky and my cosmic ordering machine delivered me a brand spanking new British-made (what a rarity in this day and age) old-fashioned design alarm clock for just 50p! I nearly bit the guy's hand off . . . It's a sort of clotted cream colour on the body, and is made in Towcester, which is where my mum's rellies came from, the lace-making ones.

Then we bought a cheap teapot, a solid brass big escutcheon thingey (OH will have a use for it I'm sure, he bought it), a beautiful little green glass dish for 50p that reminded me of a cobweb (photo to follow), and a solid oak (red-stained, ugh) candelabra for 50p which OH thinks he "may be able to do something with". My immediate thought was burn it, but what do I know? Oh, and for another 50p a book on Versailles. OH again. He only bought a book on Versailles a couple of weeks back, but this one is apparently "better" . . . I can see us having a good car boot sale next spring . . .

Anyway, housework calls, and so do the New Forest crab apples. I have some becoming wine, but need to do jelly with the red stripey ones. Right, up and at 'em . . .

I wish this was a computer which could waft you the exquisite smell of these wild apples cooking.

Now in the jelly bag overnight, and will be cooked up and potted tomorrow. The jelly bag, incidentally, IS scalded each time I use it, and sterilized with lemon juice too, but that does little to remove the blackberry and elderberry and damson stains . . .

More green glass and a clever husband

2011-10-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

I shall return to my travels on Monday, as weekends seem to be quiet in blog-land. Meanwhile, here are some pieces of green glass (which I collect) that I found at the car boot sale last weekend and which for just a pound or two apiece, came home with me.

Below is a beautiful Victorian mirror which we found a reasonable middle for. It had been lacking a mirror and gathering dust in one of the stables for several years whilst we mirror-hunted. Finally we found one that would do. It is actually oval (the angle of the photo makes it look far more circular than it is). Whilst the base is solid mahogany, the mirror is Walnut, but I am happy with it.

Below is the base my husband has been working on for weeks now. We bought the top half of this cupboard on stand many years ago at auction and just had it sat on the bottom half of an old wardrobe. Then my husband finally sorted out some bits of wood for this from his "collection" and so part of a desk, part of an old (burned) staircase, and parts from two old wardrobes (all solid oak) went into making this. Everything beautifully finished with hand-cut dovetail joints and perfectly fitted drawers. This flash photo doesn't do it justice as it makes the colour look totally different.

The photo below gives a better idea. My husband copied the design along the bottom from a piece of Carmarthen-made furniture we had already. The base cost him nothing but time.

On my mind . . .

2011-10-07T11:17:00.001-07:00

Today I'm joining in with Rhonda Jean's Friday theme over on Down to Earth blog.

When we were in the New Forest recently, I made sure that I brought home several bags of wildings apples (these are apples which have grown from a pip from a discarded core, and some will later cross-pollinate with the natural crab apples). Apples from pips don't grow true - some trees which I grew from one of my apple trees here at home show two distinct fruits - one small and stripey and the other a large bland cooker which makes wonderful apple fluff. So it is with the trees on the Forest. This bright red apple looks sweet, but believe me, it wasn't as sweet as it looked like it should be! Such fruits make wonderful apple jelly though, and the wild crab apples make the best jelly (and wine) of all. I am making Wildings Apple Jelly this weekend.

I would like to preserve a lot more things by bottling, but there's the rub. It's the cost of acquiring all the preserving jars in the first place. I have basically priced the cost of a dozen 1000 ml glass preserving jars at £15 per 12 (that's a special price, they are normally offered at £20 per 12). That's a fairly big investment if you want to bottle up enough fruits to see you through the winter months and although they turn up at car boot sales, they don't turn up frequently enough! In America, some folk would have huge canning stores of anything up to 1,000 jars.

Which has made me think, we keep a reasonable store cupboard of tins and dried supplies, and do this by buying various things on offer or when we can afford it. We grow various fruit and vegetables in the garden and freeze/preserve them. We do what we can afford to do. And there's the rub - does that mean that being really self-reliant, that looking ahead to times of possible emergency when things fall apart for one reason or another, is purely the preserve of the better-heeled members of society, ones who already buy into this mindset and have stocked up? We as a family have already discovered that you need to fall back on such provisions when your personal economics make this necessary. Then the problem is to re-stock, when financially things are already tight. We have started small and gradually added to our stocks (and the glass jars!) but for some folk, even this is beyond them if they live very hand to mouth.

I could provide enough jam and chutney for ballast for the Titanic, but man does not live by jam alone! What do you do when you have a rotten summer and crop failures, or Blight on your spuds and Tomatoes, or the slugs get your beans time and time again and you have less home-grown produce than you need? On a tight budget, how do you cope with making up the shortfall of what you NEED?

Athelhampton House

2011-10-06T08:35:00.001-07:00

Before we left to head westwards for our outing on the Monday, we let the cats and dogs out for some fresh air. Stripey-cat soon manhandled a small rodent to the ground, but then it escaped, cunningly disguised as a leaf . . .

Then began the stake-out. First Big Ginger and then old Mrs Furry wanted a piece of the action.

Stripey told the others in no uncertain terms, "Nope, you CAN'T have it! 'smine." And indeed they'd have had trouble getting it, as I had noticed it creeping beneath her undercarriage . . .

Forest Cat was too dignified for all this and said that He didn't want it anyway . . . He thought hunting with packs was CRUEL . . .

We told them what would happen if they were BAD cats . . . These Scottish pussums at Athelhampton must have been Very Bad Indeed . . .

We peeped through the gates at this beautiful house. My OH has always wanted to visit here and finally got his wish.

One of the fountains surrounded by carefully clipped Irish Yew trees.

A throne fit for a King graced the corner of the Great Chamber. Supposedly the ghost of a pet ape who was unfortunately shut up in the secret passage leading from this room (and who presumably expired there) can sometimes be heard scratching on the linen-fold panelling . . .

This old chest speaks volumes about how such things were made in the past. You can just see the master craftsman measuring up the designs with his compasses. If you do quilting, you will know that similar designs got transferred onto fabrics too . . . If you look very closely at the left hand panel, you may notice that the right hand edge of it isn't 100% straight - it broadens just a tiny bit towards the bottom, a little mistake which must have happened when they were measuring up where the patterns were going to go.

The fire was lit in the hearth and threw out a very welcoming heat.

This is looking across at the far wall. Where we entered the room, this would have been to our right.

OH and I loved the beautiful carvings on this chair.

So grand . . .

This was the jail. No, wait a minute, it was the wine cellar. What makes you think they didn't trust the servants? I think this is supposedly haunted too. Probably a previous butler feverishly counting the bottles. . .

One of the absolutely stunning ceilings in the house.

The wallpaper in this doorway was carefully hand-painted. It must have taken weeks to execute.

This stunning piece of craftsmansip graced the door into the Green Parlour below.

This had to be my favourite room. It had a wonderful atmosphere and the dark green didn't matter as it was always going to be a dark room, even if you had painted it white.

How wonderful to have your ancestors' clothes squirrelled away so you could use them in displays in later centuries . . . I think my ag. lab. ancestors were lucky if they had a set of tidy clothes for church.

I wish we had more rooms to "dress" where I volunteer. The former bedrooms are for displays and exhibitions. I thought this wedding dress added a whole new dimension to this bedroom at Athelhampton.

Isn't this just SUMPTIOUS?! I adore the wallpaper, and the huge mirror, and the beautiful copper bath. I wonder who gets to polish that?!

Another gorgeous room. Not sure if I wouldn't get the heeby-jeebies in there in the middle of the night though . . .

Off of the bedroom was a small chapel for prayer and meditation.

A pretty bridge spanned the River Piddle. We noted a few small fish darting about in the clear water.

A corner of part of the gardens, with a beautiful Hamstone garden room.

Arrival . . .

2011-10-05T05:36:00.001-07:00

One of our regular customers for water outside the gate . . .

Well, our holiday seems just a pleasant memory already. OH and I are laid low with germs caught in Foreign Parts . . . I have to say, as one who NEVER has a headache, the one which accompanies this current Bug is a blighter and even Ibuprofen struggles to cosh it.

The rain it is falling, the wind is picking up and the big old pine tree across the lane is starting to thresh its branches and leaves are fluttering along the lanes and fields. The plans I made yesterday to carry on tidying up the garden, have now been abandoned in favour of drier indoor pursuits. I have washed, measured and cut up a gallon of crab apples for wine, and these are now releasing their juices into a gallon of cold water in my brewing bin. Now I have to save up for 3 1/2 lbs of Demerara sugar . . .

I have plans to start a Christmas present for one of my daughters today, so I will go and look for the x-stitch design I know I still have (being a hoarder).

As for the photos, I have SO many I had better try and post twice a day or it will be next month before I share them all with you. We stopped just outside Wimborne for some fresh air, at Badbury Rings, a favourite place of ours when we lived in Dorset. The National Trust have made it a bit more "orderly" since we still lived in the county, fencing things off and putting out picnic tables . . . We preferred it wild and woolly. The drive up beneath the double row of 365 massive beech trees takes some beating, although there are quite a few gaps which were the result of the hurricane back in 1987, as well as deliberate fellings of diseased trees since then. HERE is a link to photos of the wonderful avenue.

On our first full day in the Forest, we had a gentle amble along a route well-known to us.

And also drove to the nearest town for a newspaper and some food for the week.On the way home we found ourselves involved in a little vintage car rally.

It was a couple of days before the sunshine caught up with us, so these photos look a bit moody and monotone.

Some of the wildings apples and crab apple trees which we harvested to bring home with us for wine and jelly making.

Catching up with friends . . .

2011-10-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

On the cusp of the Dorset border, we stopped again, to meet up with a dear friend. We wandered across a meadow, so peaceful, and on the other side was a lake . . .

a peaceful one, a magical hidden spot.

Two little girls played in their den . . .

and my husband was pleased to relax in the sunshine . . .

And somewhere, a friend was fishing . . .

And another good friend was such good company. It was good to meet up again. Cheers Danette!

Getting away . . .

2011-10-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

Just LOOK at the amazing art work of these Medieval hinges . . .

We began our holiday last week (which was partly a working one, as we were house-sitting and animal-sitting for a friend) by stopping off in Wells on the way. OH wanted to explore after I had told him how beautiful the city and Cathedral were from my visit back in the spring. It didn't disappoint and to our delight, it was the day for a street market which had some wonderful stalls. We wished we'd had the money to buy some of the gorgeous spun glass balls and baubles, and loved an antiques/collectables stall where we did part with a little cash to start off some Christmas shopping (just a stocking filler). There was a stall selling wonderfully fresh pots of herbs (mine have all gone totally over now) and other stalls selling local produce.

OH loved the Cathedral, as I knew he would, and we sneaked in some backstage internal photos this time. Shhhhhhhh! Don't tell! We still didn't have time to fit in a visit to the Museum or to visit the Bishop's Palace as we only had enough change for an hour's parking, but there is always Next Time.
The Cathedral from the edge of the Close.

Above and below - I loved the fanlight above this door. A beautiful Regency cottage in the Close.

The fabulous stairway and fan vaulting of the Chapter House steps, leading to the circular Chapter House. This dates from 1306. History of Wells Cathedral HERE.

This little chap was carved into the bottom of a pillar at the entrance to the stairway above.

Looking through a window at the top of the Chapter House steps out onto the Museum and the School of Music.

Market Stall selling a profusion of herbs.

Looking down the street from the market. Further down there is a water running by the kerbside, just as it does in Cheap Street, Frome (only there the runnel is in the centre of the street).

You can see the water in this view. The creamy coloured stone marks the entrance to the Bishop's Palace.

Market cross or butter cross, I'm not sure which.

Tomorrow - meeting with friends and ever onwards . . .

Back from our hols . . .

2011-10-01T19:32:00.001-07:00

Just briefly popping in to say we're back home, but having taken over 300 photos, it is taking forever to download them and I have run out of batteries for my camera! Hopefully later today I can do a posting.

An Autumn evening walk

2011-09-23T02:36:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was yet another "glum" day for me. Family worries have dragged me to a very low ebb in recent weeks. I forced myself to go through the necessities, but there was no satisfaction in a job completed and even jam-making was a chore. Just before tea I suggested to my long-suffering husband that we drove up the hill overlooking our valley to get some fresh air. I'm glad we did as it cheered me up. The sun came out just as we parked the car, and the views were soft and the colours of the landscape muted, awaiting rain.

We made a fuss of two Welsh Cobs (mother and daughter?) who came across to us, and noticed that we had looked in the wrong place for blackberries, as there were a lot more up here, and larger than the miniscule ones I have been forced to pick along our lanes.

Although we didn't walk far, the views lifted my spirits and I felt better for having "touched base".

I shall now be away from the computer for a few days. Hopefully I will have lots to post about on my return.

Looking towards the Towy Valley.

I am sure I have never noticed this little cottage and outbuildings before. I shall have to go and check it out on the map, and how it is accessed.

Back down the hill the distant fields faded to the palest jade.

Whilst above us, storm clouds threatened and the sun turned the field an acid green.

There is Arab blood in many of the Welsh Cob bloodlines - 100 years back perhaps, but it still shows - look at the profile of this little lass, with her dished face and big jaw.

Looking across the valley, where I was trying to work out if Jim had put his TB broodmares in the long apostrophe-shaped field.

Neighbours' farms across the valley.

It looks like it will rain soon, judging by the lowering clouds.

The soft colours were so beautiful.

In praise of Cats . . .

2011-09-18T00:22:00.001-07:00

What a miserable day out. Rain just falling as if someone's taken the stopper out of the clouds. NOT a car boot sale day, that's for sure. I have a date with some windfalls so I have decided to turn them into this year's Mincemeat for Christmas and beyond.

I thought I would share some recent cat photos with you . . .

Cat in a box. Miffy, mum to the boys, proving that Every Box Attracts Cats! This one has apples in it . . .

Brotherly "love"!!!

Alfie in the office (where he is currently sat at my feet, looking at Lucy, who is on my lap).

Tippy having a stretch. He is currently off hunting again, being the Wilderness Cat, but now the rain has set in, I have a feeling the wanderer may return.

A smug-looking Alfie out on the patio. He is very loving and affectionate with a BIG voice!

This is Little Whale (aka Jarvis) proving that if you shut your eyes you can't see anyone!

Above and below, my favourite, Lucky, who is an Old Lady now - at least 17 and possibly older. She has heart problems and has to be on medication, but she is a good girl about taking it in a dab of butter. We used to see her around the place, long before she came to us, desperate for food, one winter. She worships me, as I was the one with the food . . . She only has half a tail, but we don't know how she lost the rest of it as that happened before she came to us.

This is little Banshee, who I found as a tiny kitten on the side of the lane one day. She is a quirky little madam and my husband's favourite. He gives in every time for her loud demands for Cheese - and QUICK about it! She is very imperious, and has never grown beyond the size of a six month old kitten, so is a wee girly.

Here is Lucy, aka the Racing Snake! She hunts a lot and prefers her own caught food to tinned food, unless it is Whiskas : ) She is on my lap right now. She just has one eye, after her sister Fluff (below) dabbed her in the other one and despite veterinary treatment, she had to have it removed. It doesn't affect her hunting, but she doesn't go for rabbits any longer.

This is Fluff, Lucy's sister. They are both about 14 now I think, but still very sprightly. She has a funny temperament - you have to warn her if you are going to pick her up - especially if you are going to move her somewhere else. If you just pick her up she will have you! She is too handy with her claws, this one.

This is Amber, who is such a pretty puss-cat. She came to us for help when her owner went into a nursing home and three cats were abandoned. We took them all in, but the other two, Timmy and the first Snowy, have passed on now.

Here is Gypsy, who knows she shouldn't be on the table (but does anyway!). like all cats, if you have a recipe spread out, or a book open, they cannot resist sitting in the middle of it, all the better to help you. Darling Snowy had a PhD in this! Gypsy has managed to get the loose recipe AND the open book to keep her derriere warm!

Trapped Welsh Miners

2011-09-16T03:10:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be aware of the four miners trapped underground in a small Welsh mine in the Tawe valley above Swansea. Gleision Colliery, at Cilybebyll near Pontardawe, is a small privately-owned coal mine. Nothing like the scale of the deep shaft mines that used to litter the Welsh valleys further East and where my maternal grandfather was a miner, in a colliery in Aberbargoed, back at the beginning of the 20th C. He left following long-term strike action around 1910 and walked to Newport to sign up with the Army. .

Anyway, this is a small drift mine, but there are extensive workings and some of these are close to long-abandoned and forgotten workings over a century old. When I checked up about this mine on-line, it was mentioned that it always had severe water problems . . . One of these old mine workings may have been breached yesterday morning when, having set off a small detination to bring down more coal, a sudden influx of water flooded the level. Two men managed to escape, and they rescued a third, badly-injured miner, who is now in intensive care in hospital. This left 4 men unaccounted for. Sadly, the falling water levels from constant round-the-clock pumping, revealed the body of one of the 4 trapped miners. Four families wait in fear to discover which of them has lost one of their menfolk. . . . Friday teatime update: another two bodies have been found, but there is still hope that they may find the one remaining miner alive . . . Further update: they have just found his body. R.I.P. four good men: fathers, sons, husbands, brothers or whatever. They will be missed.

It is hoped that the remaining three may have survived in other dead-end tunnels in pockets of air above the flood levels. No contact has been established, however. We must wait and see. Please remember them in your thoughts and prayers.

Autumn gardening

2011-09-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

From windfall apples reel drunken wasps,
And a cat curls asleep in the border,
Coat rusty with age and lifted with purrs.
A hollyhock unfurls crimson skirts, and
A moth stutters like Morse code from flower to flower,
Discarding each daisy thrice visited.
White-bellied spiders teeter from leaf to stem,
Hurrying from the gardener's hand,
As it pauses, cuts,
And summer's magic collapses to the ground.

In praise of older men - husbands that is!

2011-09-14T01:42:00.001-07:00

When I was in my teens, my idea of a nice lad was someone who had nice eyes, a lovely smile and if he was the DJ too, he was ultra cool.

In my 20s, I still looked for nice eyes, but a sense of humour became important, and sharing common interests.

In my 30s, and married to the man with the nice eyes and sense of humour and the shared interests, the ability to change a nappy and a tap-washer were required (not necessarily at the same moment in time!)

In my 40s, I wanted my man to deal with fractious teenagers when my hormones were all over the place and I couldn't cope.

Now, in my late 50s, I find that my lovely man's most important attribute is to be able to make furniture from scratch and to mend things. When my wheelbarrow collapsed yesterday, I did not doubt for a moment that he would be able to mend it. And he did. Bless him.

Volunteering, and back to normal???

2011-09-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

Well, this is the first day in I don't know how long when I can say - tentatively, so as not to tempt the fates - that I feel "normal". For starters, I didn't have to phone in to say that I was unable to volunteer at the "Big House" today because of illness. Yet all of August was spent doing just that. Even last Monday when I thought I would be fine to go in, having volunteered the previous week, there was a spanner in the works and I found myself in A&E having various tests and back on heavy duty anti-biotics yet again. However, that turned out to be a blip and I was off the a/b's as soon as I was on them. Yeesh.

I enjoyed myself SO much today. My son cannot understand why people volunteer. He happily gives handsomely to various charities but he thinks that volunteering is "working for nothing." Not so, I have told him. I get SO much back from my 3 hours a week, as a room assistant at Newton House (Dinefwr Park). I have a chat with the other volunteers and room stewards, and as we all like old houses and history, we have lots in common. I get to "work" (yet it doesn't feel like that) in the most wonderful surroundings, in a beautiful old house set in wonderful parkland, with 100 deer in the Deer Park, old trees anything up to a thousand years old, and just soaking up the history of not just a small part of Wales, but what was part of an entire region in the control of a ruling dynasty when the Normans arrived to set their stamp on the principality.

Most of the people who visit are "the converted" and readily ask for further details about the family - Rhys, then Anglicised to Rice, and then back to Rhys again - and the castle, and how old the house is and of course, who the people are in the family portraits which line the dining room. Using these portraits (which I am still learning about) and the paintings of the castle and house in the entrance hallway, we room assistants are able to paint a bigger picture of the family and the house & castle, and their joint history and bring it all alive. I love it and it is so rewarding sharing this history with people who appreciate it.

Meanwhile, I am busy at home dealing with produce from the garden. I have plenty of windfall apples after the recent gales, lots of Autumn fruiting raspberries of huge size, a late glut of courgettes and runner beans, and I am using everything which comes our way to squirrel away for the lean winter months. Blackberries have been poor this year, but I pick those that I find and freeze them. There are plenty of Sloes, which will go in the freezer. Excess Damsons have been frozen or turned into wine and Damson Gin. Elderberries will also be frozen - they are good for coughs and tight chests in the winter months. I have made some Damson Ice Cream, and made the first batch of jam using Pineapples and Kiwi fruit from Abergwili. The jam is destined to be gifts for friends, as we eat little jam in our household, but I love making it.

Dinefwr Castle, viewed across the park. I always expect Edmund Blackadder to gallop across . . .

The de Lacys, Llantony Priory and Welsh Characters

2011-09-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Around the year 1100, William de Lacy came upon the ruined chapel dedicated to St David, at this spot in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons and some seven miles north of Abergavenny. He decided to devote himself to solitary prayer and devotion and was subsequently joined by Ersinius, who had once been Chaplain to Queen Mathilda (wife of King Henry I.) They were joined by others who set to and built a church here dedicated to St John the Baptist and consecrated in 1108. Just over a century later, a priory was begun here, and in the 3rd quarter of the 12th C, Hugh de Lacy (the 5th Baron) left monies to rebuild the priory church, which was completed in 1217. The priory remains are all that are left of a once-great Norman and Gothic building, which had been added to in the 13th C and then fell foul to Henry VIII's rape of the monasteries at the dissolution. Painted by Turner, and written about by poets Landor and Southey, the buildings slipped into decline.

HERE is further information about the Priory and Father Ignatius, who was also bound up in its later history.

THIS SECTION is a repeat of a posting I made two years back, but as it had a few photographs of Llanthony Priory, I thought it worth repeating, because of the de Lacy link between today's posting about St Mary's Church at Kempley, and the Priory, which was also founded by the same family.

This is a little extract from one of the books garnered at Hay-on-Wye last week -" Welsh Country Upbringing" by D Parry-Jones, printed 1948. He is writing of his childhood at the turn of the century . . . The view above was taken from the car park at Hay.

Below - on the top of Hay Bluff, driving towards the Priory.

"Round the farms came at regular intervals the stocking woman, a small, frail, gossipy little body, much under the influence of religion and, especially, of the revival then raging through Wales. She moreover undertook, as part and proof of her renewed faith, work on behalf of a temperance society in which she was quite as successful as in her legitimate business. There were many feet to cover and many drinkers to reform. As a potential member of this latter class, I was myself, with all my brothers and sisters, rescued at the tender age of twelve. Well do I remember my very determined resolution to abjure this form of wickedness and, in proof of my enthusiasm and conviction, did, again in the company with my brothers and sisters, some missionary work in that direction by learning one or two temperance pieces and reciting them in the Penny Readings. She was assured always of a good long rest at our home and a cup of tea, for my mother dearly loved to talk about religion. As to the attitude of my father towards her I think he liked her well enough when she confined herself to her primary business, but he became very impatient when the sideline was being pushed, possibly regarding it as a dig at him for he had his glass of beer - and enjoyed it."

Kilvert always said the little chapel at Capel-y-Ffin, with its squat proportions and leaning tower reminded him of an owl . . .

Capel-y-Ffin

'Sally'r Sannau' (Sally of the stockings, for that is the name she went by), was the last in our parish to ply that trade. Like the bidder, she too, has gone! She belonged to a fraternity that at one time walked far into the counties of England, following their trade - even as far as Oxford. Two hundred years ago they carried messages from one home in the district to a son who was at the time a minister near that city. I often try to picture what the lot of these poor women must have been, for they were exposed to terrible hardships and dangers. It rained, I suppose, in those days as it does now. Where did they get their clothes dried, where did they put at night, or were there kind people in those days that took pity on the poor? Sally, the last of them, has passed out of sight round the corner of the road, she walked alone, none came after her; light and frail of body she was eminently fitted to be the ghost of all her sisters that had pilgrimaged before her."

The winding road . . .

As for me, I never signed the pledge and will have a little glass of wine tonight. Purely medicinal you understand . . .