Griddy

 

Griddy is a hedgehog which was trapped in my cattle grid and rescued by the two little girls in the photo.

He is not the first one to end up in one of my two cattle grids, I rescued one myself and have since filled in the grid nearest my house along the drive. But Griddy was trapped, the ladder out had rotted and he was very lucky that the girls saw him and had the sense to get in touch with the Hedgehog Preservation Society.

In spite of their ferocious appearance hedgehogs are really quite delicate. Had the girls not rescued him he could have died from hypothermia, dehydration, starvation, or a combination of all three. After 48 hours on a heat pad, warming up and resting, he was eating well and putting on much needed weight before returning to the wild. In the meantime, local craftsmen have installed a new ladder in the cattlegrid. In future there is a way out for any creature that falls into it.

The local representatives of the Hedgehog Preservation Society kept me informed of developments and when Griddy was ready for the great outdoors again, they came to me and asked if I would have him to be released. I was gratified to hear that they could think of no better place for a hedgehog than my garden and the surrounding banks, overgrown with brambles, shrubs, hedges and furnished with piles of wood and plenty of hiding places for such a shy creature. I know he is still here, he leaves me signs in the form of black hedgehog poo, although he has possibly started to furnish himself a winter den for hibernation. The weather is still rather warm and I hope he is eating as many slugs as he can find before he withdraws. Any food I leave out is usually gone in the morning, I sincerely hope it's not the marauding cats who eat it.

Autumn in the Garden

In spite of the month being October there are still areas of wonderful displays. The hedge is full of berries and hips; does that mean we are going to have a hard winter?  Some say so, but I am not sure; our winters have been rather mild in recent years. 

The hedges are magnificent, wildly overgrown and full of life. I love it that all kinds of creatures have taken up residence. I am providing them with water in large shallow trays; It's such a pleasure to watch  birds by day taking a bath and surprise hedgehogs coming for a drink at dusk. Soon the latter will take up cosy winter quarters in wood and leaf piles which I have deliberately left in various nooks and crannies. The more birds, frogs, toads, and hedgehogs I encourage to eat slugs the better pleased I am during the summer. And if the foxes come and eat that rat of the sky, the pigeon, I don't mind either. They leave the coloured doves alone, these are too fast for predators.

The next three pictures are showing part of the drive. It's a difficult area to cultivate because there  are several trees and the ground is shaded and dry. I think various kinds of conifers might be suitable, I am busy studying Pinterest ideas. Algorithms can be quite handy, Pinterest obviously knows what takes my clicking fancy. Maybe a visit to a plant nursery is in the offing during autumn when the time is right to plant plants shrubs and trees.

I don't know why I have so many cyclamen everywhere, perhaps the birds help

plant the seeds.

Last year I planted a weeping cedar along the drive,

it's doing quite well.

 There's a Mediterranean  pencil pine under the ash tree,

in a year or two it will add a few inches and become more of a picture.

For now the normally boring ash tree itself and its butter yellow autumn leaves

draw the eye. 

I am glad that I have recovered my gardening mojo, the opening in the summer was a great success; several hundred people came to visit during the last weekend of June. ( More of that some other time). The back garden was the showstopper then, the drive borders on the front of house, which are quite spectacular now, less so. You can't have everything. 

Would Raving and Ranting Help?

 

The ancient Greeks had a word for it, they called it HUBRIS, closely followed by NEMESIS. I can’t say that I was surprised when the long-expected news broke. Contrary to the reaction from some (only some) parts of the international media I am also not going into hypocritical overdrive. Does anyone think he is going to learn from this? Probably not. Our pound shop version said at first that he now knew the score, but it looks like he has long forgotten it again.

So, it’s autumn now. At first I didn’t want to believe it, I carried on digging and forking and pulling up, but then it started to rain. And rain. The days drew in markedly and there’s a definite chill in the air. In spite of the rotten quality of the photos (oh, damn Google, will they ever get it right?) you can see the difference in colouring.

I am staying in bed much longer in the mornings and going to bed ever later in the evenings. Some days I will have a nap in the afternoon. The weekend was dismal, I didn’t see a soul. Whatever am I going to do with myself for a whole dark winter? The PM  has warned us all that it will probably go on until Christmas and beyond. After feeling no serious ill effects during spring and summer I believe winter will be a whole different kettle-of-fish. Enough already! While the weather is awful I read, and read, and read. A book a day is nothing, sometimes I finish one and start another within hours.

I feel like constantly moaning and complaining, except that fulminating without letup is so tiring! Do you know what I mean when I say I mutter curses under my breath, slam around in the house, find fault with everything and everyone? The other day I got cross when collecting medication from the surgery. They’d left out my lifesaver COPD inhaler and I had to go back to claim it. “We had to wait for it to be delivered”, said the woman at the window. Not a bit of it, I don’t believe it; at other times somebody would have made a note on the packet telling me so.

There’s something else which annoys me every time I open a new packet of pills: they stick sticky tape over the ends now. Both ends.You fumble and fumble to get this tiny bit of tape off, if you succeed the bit of tape then sticks to your fingers and you stand over the open kitchen bin trying to get it off and deposit it inside. Of course, it won’t come off, it’s too small and too sticky. You have to go and find a piece of dry kitchen roll and transfer the remaining fraction of tape from your finger to the paper. You could, of course, just cut through the tape while it’s still attached to the pill packet but what do you do with that? Plastic sticky tape is not meant to be recycled. 

Oh, dear saints in heaven, life is getting ever more complicated. And Google definitely isn’t helping. Getting these two mean and fuzzy photos on took ages. Grrrr!

Doing Well

Sitting in the comfortable chair in my study, feet up on the footstool, book open on my lap. I am calm and quiet, reflecting on life as is and life as was. With the single exception of missing Beloved, then as now, I am content. There is no help for it, as Carson McCullers put it so movingly:

“the way I need you is a loneliness I can’t bear and there is nobody who can fill that loneliness except for the one who is no longer here”,

but bear it I must. Being alive brings the obligation to embrace unpleasant things as well as the pleasant ones. Even the most determined 'look on the bright side’, and all the insistence on 'positive thinking’ doesn't provide us with a constant diet of flowers, sunsets and cute kittens. Accepting that ‘life is hard and then you die’ is a clarion call to living life, warts and all.

So, I am content. The patter of soft rain on the window tells me that doing outdoor work is not advisable for now, whereas a spot of meditation is. Yesterday, I spent many hours outside gardening, doing hard and dirty work, like mulching, potting up, cutting ivy, carrying heavy loads until I could barely drag myself to the bench in my ‘woodland garden’ (a small patch of beeches and hollies and yews. I sat there, not moving, doing nothing much at all except taking in the sounds of nature, birdsong, the murmur of unseen small creatures, the soft rustling of beech leaves in the gentle breeze.

Autumn cyclamen are appearing in all parts of the garden, a welcome sight particularly in areas which are otherwise just green, like the view from the compost heap towards the leaf mould enclosure. Everybody who comes to help in the garden admires my compost. “Did you make this all yourself ?” , asked WW (Wiry and Willing - who is fast becoming a worthy successor to "Old Gardener”);  he sunk his hands deep into the heap, rubbed the compost between them and smelled it. “It doesn’t stink at all”, he said. “Lovely”. If I am remembered for nothing else but my compost when my end comes I am satisfied. Others leave great deeds behind, works of art, pearls of wisdom, empires and the destruction of empires. Leaf mould and compost are like me: practical and useful and given to long periods of rest and just being.

For me gardening is therapy, it fulfils my need for outdoor creativity, the result is pleasant to the eye and beneficial for health and wellbeing. I am currently reading a book by Sue Stuart-Smith “The Well Gardened Mind” sub-titled 'Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World’;  she says:

“Like a suspension in time, the protected space of a garden allows our inner world and the outer world to co exist free from the pressures of everyday life........
there can be no garden without a gardener. a garden is always the expression of someone’s mind and the outcome of someone’s care.”

For now the world within my hedges and walls is my castaway haven and this morning, looking out of the kitchen window while putting on the kettle for my morning brew I saw movement round the foot of the bird table. My blackbird fledglings are back, dad had brought two of them and they were all three picking busily at the ground. I call them ‘my’ fledglings although they may be another family entirely, but it feels good to believe that I have done my modest little best to help them survive during their most vulnerable time. I sincerely hope mum and dad call an end to breeding now, this must have been their second clutch for this year’s summer; in a good long summer garden birds with a ready supply of food and clement weather can have three sets of young.

The rain has stopped, should I cook my dinner or go outside ? Yesterday evening I was so tired I couldn’t bear the thought of cooking,  so all I had was a bowl of rice crispies. Perhaps I had better prepare a meal before I go out.

Good Intentions

Under the huge weight of the pink rambling rose stretched along the middle halfway up the picture are a brick wall, a wooden trellis and a garden door. The trellis is broken, the wall is cracked and the gate is held shut with string. HH (handsome hunk, how could you forget) will come and mend, as soon as the rose has finished flowering. The rose will be chopped and chopped and chopped, until there is little more than it’s thick trunk. That beauty is more than twenty five years old  and still going strong.

I feel like time is standing still. Time was when things just happened, then they were over. Time just passed. We always come to the end of things, it’s a kind of relief to know that. Is that true still?

Urspo, in a slightly pensive post, reminded me of Beckett's ‘Waiting For Godot’, a play exclusively about waiting, waiting for an event that never happens. Is that what happens to us? Will there ever be a vaccine and a solution for Covid19?  Or will we sit, like Vladimir and Estragon, in this desert of humanity’s own making for evermore? Will it help if I turn a blind eye and do what Voltaire suggests in Candide :”Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” I want to take this line literally, without looking for Voltaire’s social criticism. Candide exposes the failings of his society but at the end of the novel, Candide and his companions find happiness in raising vegetables in their garden.  The garden represents the cultivation and propagation of life, which, despite all their misery, the characters choose to embrace.

A lesson to be learned, all the way from the 18th Century. Tending one’s garden (whichever way you read that) is the only way to live.

I have said before that in these uncertain times I turn to either non fiction or novelists who amuse me. Nora Ephron is one such, she can cheer me up during the darkest days. In Heartburn she has a paragraph which seems to be written for 2020:

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

Tired of Covid, tired of this Vale of Tears we find ourselves in, I will turn my attention to happier thoughts. Will you?

Sheer Escapism

Fully autumn soon, the nights are drawing in, there’s a chill in the air and the leaves of the Japanese ornamental cherry show just the faintest tinge of burgundy. Millie is still with me, she seems to be having a reprieve in her general health - not the arthritis, alas - and I have decided to shut the back door at night. It keeps the warmth in and she has a more comfortable time of it in the scullery. If I have to clean up after her, so be it. It won’t be forever. And it doesn’t happen every night either.

The hedge cutters are here, another sign of autumn. Raindrops are dripping on them but they are hardy young men; “it’s only water”  said the one I took round the perimeter of the garden to give instructions on what needed trimming. True, but I myself still sheltered under a big umbrella. And I needed his arm to help me over a very steep slippery grassy bit without falling over. He promptly fell over himself, should have asked me for my arm in return.

There is so little that is pleasant in this world at the moment that I am seriously keen not to add to the misery for myself. Yes, I am still obsessed with current affairs, yes, I still shout curses at politicians whenever they appear on TV spouting barefaced lies, yes, I still dread what is happening to our climate and the environment. What to do? Withdraw from the whole unholy mess of it? Could be. Escape at least occasionally. Evenings start earlier, earlier evenings require indoor activities rather than balmy nights spent outdoors. Reading, TV and maybe closer attention to this blog of mine again, after several years of neglect.

Which brings me to another question: are you old enough to indulge in bad taste books, films, TV shows without embarrassment? To my surprise quite a few of the ‘ladies who lunch’ admit to doing so. Well, in that case, so do I. Not exclusively, of course. I couldn’t possibly live on a diet of sweets and chocolates, burgers and ready meals, neither can I feed my brain exclusively on pap. However, a Georgette Heyer Regency romance, a cosy mystery from the 'Golden Era', a Mary Stewart adventure, a Robin Hobb fantasy, even a Scandi noir thriller insinuate themselves on to my Kindle now and then. (I am too embarrassed to put hard copies on bookshelves). All of the foregoing have one thing in common, they all end happily-ever-after. As for TV, well, the ladies admit to switching on certain channels which run endless repeats of British and American sitcoms, British country village thrillers and long running soaps. I have to be very tired before I give ‘Midsomer Murders' another go - it’s too much like painting-by-numbers - but it’s been known to fill the odd otherwise sadly depressing space. Morse, Endeavour and Shetland are more to my taste. I can take Agatha Christie's Miss Marple or Poirot as well, if needed. I am not so good on films, but a romcom would hit the spot nicely too.

So, there you have it, Friko’s image as culturally high-brow is shattered. I always knew it and now that escapism has become ever more urgent I am old enough to blow a raspberry at anyone who feels judgement coming on. Not you, obviously.

For those who like natural history and the science of it here’s a recommendation which is neither pap nor instant escapism: Peter Wohlleben’s ’The Hidden Life of Trees’, an informative study and fascinating look into the enchantment of trees that can talk and sometimes walk - no it’s not a fairy tale. You’ll gain a whole new perspective on the amazing processes of life, death and regeneration of woodlands. The better sort of escapism.

Miscellany, or This and That, if you prefer

Aconites

 Hellebores

 closed crocuses

 jonquils

 open crocuses

all pretending it’s spring. The last few days have been sunny and much milder than normal. Is climate change showing its claws?;  maybe we are going to pay for the sudden display of nature’s kinder side in March. It was pleasant enough this morning for me to grab the secateurs and chop back some spent perennials. I must ring old gardener and ask him to come and restart our gardening year. Something to look forward to. The sun has brought out my own sunnier side; a frequent first thought on waking is : why get up, there’s no one to care and nothing to do : but then Millie starts scrabbling on the carpetless floors, I shout at her furiously - she can’t hear me, being completely deaf now - and the day has begun in earnest.

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I believe I have grown up; many years ago I bought Diana Athill’s “Instead of a Letter” in hardback, it may even have been a first edition. She died not long ago, at age 101. The blurb on the original flyleaf said that Athill had “written this autobiography in order to discover the truth about herself and about what her life has been for. Her book is uncompromisingly honest. Yet although she discusses with unusual frankness matters not usually discussed by conventionally reared daughters of British colonels, she is never embarrassing because nothing embarrasses her.” Why I did not appreciate this frank and honest account of her privileged childhood,  falling deeply in love at an early age, before being jilted by her lover, mystifies me. I still remember exactly the space on my bookshelves where her memoir sat, yet I must have given it away decades ago. The other day I searched for it in vain, having read several others of her memoirs since and loved all of them. So I ordered “Instead of a Letter” from Blackwell’s in Oxford and instantly fell in love with this classic of modern memoir finally, and for the first time. 

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My study is all finished now, the computer is downstairs, books and music and TV have been installed. Instead of climbing upstairs  I can now get to my computer more easily and it’s more fun to sit and type, for short periods of time, unplanned and unhurried. My painter, who is also a friend, was looking over my shoulder during a break and asked what I was doing. “Tinkering with my blog”, I said. “Blog? What’s a blog”. I explained and he came up with this remark: “So, this how it is, a man in a shed, a lady at a keyboard.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The problem is that he is now one of the few people in Valley’s End who know, but I shan’t let it cramp my style.

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A bit of housekeeping to finish, Google no longer lets me comment on Google+ blogs. Sorry, Google+ bloggers who visit here.

Can’t stay away

in spite of feeling that I have nothing to say. I am feeling a little sheepish about having been away for so long.

It’s been up and down, mostly up, the past two months. In fact, most of the time it feels like I’ve turned the corner; you may not understand when I say that I am coming back into myself, that I am not on the outside looking at the strange ‘me’ I was for more than a year, but that that ‘me’  and the ‘I--myself’ I have always been are closing in on each other. Of course I am often sad but being solitary is not in itself a dreadful thing. Having decided to stay not only in Valley’s End but in my house until such time as I either must, or wish to move, has taken one major decision out of the equation. Sure, there are several other decisions to be made but they are not as life changing as a move. Which means that I can take my time over anything else. And if I don’t want to do anything, well, I won’t. In any case, perhaps the decision will be made for me when the idiots who call themselves ‘our government’ back themselves into such a corner that they take revenge on EU citizens living here without British passports and expel the lot of us.

I still follow the news obsessively and what sad reading it makes. Is humankind really turning into a nasty, mean, hateful, selfish, greedy, unkind mass? Sometimes I’m glad my years are numbered except that I feel guilty for leaving a huge mess behind for the next generation to clean up. Does every generation feel like that? Statistically things are getting better, poverty, disease and wars are decreasing, it just doesn’t feel like that. Perhaps the current older generation is the first without first hand experience of war, wide spread hunger and lack of basic necessities. We have food, clean water, shelter; we brought up our children to expect the same for themselves and their children, we live in peace and security. And still the world feels like a hostile place and far too many are viciously opposed to grant these blessings to those human beings who lack them.

What do I do? Stop reading and watching the media or get involved? My quiet little backwater allows me little personal involvement other than perhaps make donations to organisations that try to make a difference.

Organisations that deal with the continued existence of our planet are close to my heart and hand. When I look at my garden I could weep. This being  the first year that gardening has featured on my pleasure list for several years, when old gardener and I have worked hard on at least two days a week, it’s been all for nothing. Or nearly nothing. Clumps of herbaceous perennials have dried up, shrubs are drooping and even trees are shedding leaves from the stress of coping with temperatures way beyond our experience. From Algeria in the west, to the Arctic Circle in the north and the Baltic States in the east a huge swathe of land is sweltering in unnatural temperatures. Similar conditions are devastating Japan, Africa, Canada, North America, Australia. Sweden, country of snow and ice for months on end has asked for help with huge forest fires. The global forecast is for more rainstorms in winter and heatwaves in summer. Here in the UK the effects are relatively mild, although we have hardly any rain this summer and scorching temperatures, the heath fires have been put out and we have so far only reached the lower 30sC. Too hot for me, at any rate. I hardly move between midday and 5 o’clock. I have read an awful lot and also watched quite a bit of afternoon TV. Of course, I am lucky, there’s no need for me to move if I don’t want to. I go to the air conditioned gym to cool off.

For the first time in a thirty year marriage I am marrying our books. We always had his and her shelves before, now I am sorting through both, discarding some and reorganising the rest. Boxes and boxes go to charity shops, some antiquarian books I hope to sell, novels are shelved in alphabetical order, others arranged according to subject matter. Any of the novels I will never want to read again go into the give-away piles. I seem to have chosen to read  many more non-fiction books than fiction recently, have also started to buy new ones which is possibly rather stupid of me. Out with the old - in with the new.

For everything there is a season and not just a season but a whole new chapter of life. This is my fifth chapter: childhood and youth, a first very miserable marriage, a period of hard work and child rearing, and a second very happy marriage. I am settling into this latest, and probably last chapter of my life with renewed hope and the realisation that even now, and on my own, there are joys to be had.

Trying to Stay Cheerful . . . .

but it's not easy in the depths of winter, at this late stage in the season. I had a post planned about the turf wars breaking out among the more aggressively territorial birds, like blackbirds, thrushes, robins et al. Every morning before break of day a thrush sat in the very top of the tall conifer in the garden and shouted out her war cry to all and sundry :”this is occupied land, enter my territory if you dare.” The thrush has been absent for days now, not a peep out of her. The icy Siberian winds, bringing heavy snow and the nastiest weather for years, frightened even the hardiest bird species. Instead of heralding spring they have been squabbling on and around and under the feeding stations. Twice every day I went out to feed them and clear some patches of snow for the ground feeders. It’s been a losing battle. Warmer temperatures are on their way. Hallelujah!

This is a country full of weather watchers, The leading news stories have all concerned themselves with travel conditions, weather reports, endless pictures of people stuck on the roads in cars and lorries, on trains halted midway through journeys, unable to move. Surely, if you don’t use winter tyres or chains, you stay at home when snow is falling in such quantities as we had this past week? And if you have to make your journey, surely you take shovels and blankets and hot drinks and other life saving equipment? As well as said winter tyres and chains? Nah, let’s all complain about the authorities not doing enough to stop the snow.

Anyway, I feel better now. Besides, I think I air this rant every winter.

So, staying cheerful. The more I am cooped up at home the less active I become. I’ve been binge watching ancient episodes of The Big Bang Theory, until I want to chuck something at the screen when Sheldon is at his most opprobrious and the others just humour him and fall in with his wishes. Even Penny just sighs and rolls her eyes.

I have also been binge eating chocolate. It feels like my waistband is shrinking. It can’t be my waist expanding, can it? TBBT, chocolate and frequent warming, calorific snacks, hours reclining in a large, comfy chair, occasionally nodding off for forty winks, none of these promote healthy and active cheerfulness. Ah yes, the gym was meant to provide for that. But guess what, I haven’t been to the gym for a good two weeks, partly due to other engagements and partly due to my car being stranded in the garage.

I had started to enjoy the gym, there is something addictive about regular exercise; the thing is if you, for whatever reason, stop going, the addiction wears off and lethargy sets in and you have to fire yourself up all over again. Tuesday and Friday morning old biddies and old chaps go and use the treadmills and stand bikes, medicine balls, weight training machines and lots of other apparatus whose names escape me. There we all are, turned inwards, counting squats, stretches, pulls and pushes, knee bends, etc.; the fitness instructors give you exercises and homework to do, so many of everything, and we perform, silently, lips moving with the effort of counting, breath getting shorter and muscles beginning to ache.  A friend and I were sitting on two adjacent bikes, both pedalling madly, like a couple in a two seater pedalo on a boating lake. Except that we were going nowhere.

Reading has helped to pass the time; there is a pile of unread books awaiting my attention but, instead, I searched for something utterly enchanting on my shelves. Quite unexpectedly, I lit upon the small row of Michael Innes’ crime fiction; I think nowadays these stories would be called 'cosy mysteries’. Innes’ real name was J.I.M. Stewart, he was an academic and serious writer of literary criticism, but his crime fiction is a delightful mixture of crime, erudition, adventure and a charming picture of an imaginary England which, if it was ever real, disappeared between the wars. I chose ‘Christmas at Candleshoe’, an amusing tale, beautifully told, of some eccentric country folk, and a gang of boys prepared to defend the dilapidated manor and its nonagenarian owner against all comers, particularly a group of shadowy thieves bent on removing long buried treasure. The book reads as if it had been a pleasure to write, with Innes indulging himself gleefully. I shall reread the others I have by and by. I am looking forward to reacquainting myself with Sir John Appleby next.

Instead of an Excuse

So many posts unposted, so many blogs unread, so many comments ignored or not left, so many emails not replied to, so much writing left unwritten.

I don’t really know what happened, why I have barely glanced at my computer for the past two plus weeks (really? yes,  I just counted 17 days). I have been feeling rather tired, am I simply under the weather? A bit depressed?

There have been days full of sunshine,

gloomy, foggy days,

working days,

snapping sparrows bathing in the dog bowl

during idly looking out of the window days,

and days full of magnificent autumn colour.

In other words, nothing out of the ordinary. Now that it’s November, most of the leaves have gone and the nights have turned mildly frosty. There’s a bitter North-Easterly blowing and Millie’s walks are ever shrinking in length. She’s not too unhappy about it, she has started to limp after strenuous exercise; I am not going to ask more of her than she can do.

The sad thing is, I miss writing, blogging and visiting blog friends. I feel guilty for not replying to emails, which is a bit silly. I throw half an eye at the blank, dark computer screen, sigh, then sit down with a trashy thriller for an hour.

My attention to detail appears to have gone into hiding too. I ordered a new printer+ on the internet and when the thing turned up it was massive, far bigger than the space allocated for it. It was an office printer, wide format, with  facility for legal papers, large and small sizes, envelopes etc., as well as a fax machine. I have no fax number and no need of a fax. When ordering I forgot to look at the specifications and, most importantly, the size of the gadget. Printers have gone down in price since I bought the previous one and as I couldn’t be bothered to pack the thing up again and return it, it now sits in a different room, staring at me, balefully, every time I pass it, accusing me of sloppiness.

Sleep is hit and miss too. No wonder I am often tired. I love to go to bed late, get a book ready, wriggle into a cosy position, and feel grateful for having a warm, peaceful and comfortable space to put my head at the end of the day. Sometimes, just when I am at my most snuggled in, my mind suddenly insists that sleep is a waste of time, and how I could much better spend my time thinking, dreaming, reading, going over the past day and organising the next one. Fatal! I might have allocated anything from five minutes to an hour for this state of being between waking and sleeping but, once I am embarked on this route, sleep flees. Two, three, four times I rise again, for a drink of water, a visit to the loo, a sleeping pill, another sleeping pill. I do eventually fall asleep to wake to another complicated day and, given half a chance, I grab a nap after lunch. But then again, I could be reading instead of napping?

All Or Nothing

Clematis Tangutica in October

The phone rang: “Sorry, Mrs. Friko, I have rammed a chisel into my hand. It doesn’t look good, I’d better go to A + E.” So said Paul, aka New Gardener, five weeks ago. He required surgery and a long process of healing.

The phone rang: “Sorry, Mrs. Friko., I can’t come on Thursday, I’ve hurt my back. I’ve an appointment with the Physio.” So said Old Gardener three weeks ago. He was unable to move without pain for two weeks and unable to bend for another week.

“The mind of the gardener is, in a way, the mind of the chess player.

He makes a move after having thought out what the ultimate effect

of that move may be. He visualises the end of the game.” *

Late September, early October, after the long hiatus of high summer, when gardeners take a well deserved break and spend a little time glorying in the fruit of their labours and admire the ravishing colours of their borders, it is time to pick up the pieces and continue the game. It’s actually a busy time in the calendar, pruning, tidying, clearing paths, transplanting and planting, clipping rose bushes, dividing overgrown clumps of herbaceous perennials, generally planning the coming spring's changes. 

No help for it, I had to knuckle down myself. Except, I seem to have become strangely feeble, lacking not just energy but also strength enough to dig holes, transplant small shrubs, do serious weeding. It’s hard to get down on my knees and even harder to get up again. As for pruning fruit trees, forget it. How did I ever do all these things myself? What happened to me? 

Sitting down, going for gentle walks, snipping here and setting in the earth there, I forget how old I have become. The disparity between spirit and flesh springs to mind. When I can’t fall asleep I now-a-nights spend a lot of time gardening in my mind. Having Austin and Paul has made a huge difference and I’ve rediscovered my pleasure in creating an outdoor space that’s worth looking at.

Then, last week, the phone rang: Hi Mum, I’ve got a bit of time to spare. Would you like me to come for a couple of days and catch up on jobs round the house? How about from Monday to Wednesday?"

“Yes, please.”

Then Paul rang.: "My hand is much better, would you like me to come back next week? I can make Tuesday."

“Yes, please.”

Then Old Gardener rang: “The Physio has helped, I could come over on Tuesday and give you the morning.”

Goodness me, no. Absolutely not. How would I cope with supervising and ordering about three of them? “No, please. But if you can make it Thursday, that’d be great.”

Which means that between Monday and Thursday my garden has been in intensive care, with operations being carried out at a tremendous pace. Old Gardener left just before lunch today. He’s coming back on Monday, Paul is coming back on Tuesday. At this rate I shall run out of jobs by the end of this month. They know of each other, could they be making themselves indispensable, each in his own way? My son won’t be back for three months, he’s out of the running. It was lovely to have him, even better to have got through a list of tasks which needed urgent attention, but having busy people around makes me want to get out of their way and take a nap. As that was out of the question, it being politic to show willing to chip in occasionally, I feel as tired as if I had done the work myself.

The unmistakable smell of autumn is the smell of decay, shot through with the bitter fumes of smoke. With the help of my son Old  Gardener was deprived of one of his favourite activities, namely lighting bonfires. He is a bit of a pyromaniac, bringing with him a supply of spent oil just on the off- chance. I believe it might even be illegal to use spent oil.  Watching a large pile of prunings, both of trees and shrubs, growing to unmanageable proportions fills me with dread. The last time Austin took it upon himself to set light to such a pile, immediately upon arrival and before I could give explicit permission for the deed, there was a massive fire going in a wooded part of the garden. He badly scorched a branch of the beech tree which is clinging on for dear life anyway, a yew hedge and  one side of a yew pillar. I wasn’t keen on a repetition. When I remonstrated he said: " they’ll grow again, they’ll be back next year.”

Solon, my son, took it upon himself to break up, cut and even saw through each bit of pruning, stuffed what could be stuffed into the green council bin for collection and otherwise filled two huge builders’ bags (the sort they deliver sand and grit in) and took them to the tip. It was a boring and repetitive job, but the stuff is all gone. And I am inordinately pleased. Austin was quite downcast this morning when he saw the empty space where the raw ingredients for a fire had been. “I see you’ve got rid of my bonfire,” he said.

*Richard Wright:  The Practical Book of Outdoor Flowers 1924

The Joys of Autumn

October, and uneven patches of the ornamental Japanese cherry tree are turning red, while other parts of it hold on to green leaves. The nights are turning cool and soon  the first drifts of leaves will cover beds and lawns. It was already dark when I looked out of he kitchen window at half past seven this evening  and there are still three weeks to go before we change the clocks. By eight the central heating had switched itself on.

Just when I was about to give a deep sigh and moan 'where has summer gone', I remembered that I like autumn, and even winter is not so bad when you think about all the advantages the cold season brings. For a start there is the drama of it, a foreboding of endings; of death, essentially. Spring and summer are much less sexy,  simply too hot and sweaty, doing any kind of work is an effort and only evenings bring relief. Travelling to work on the Underground, the air thick with vaporised commuter sweat mornings and evenings, heatstroke, hay fever, discomfort, irritation and short-tempered exchanges with fellow commuters, co-workers, and other shoppers in the supermarket, that’s summer.

Give me the crisp months of respite. Winter clothing, doesn’t that sound cosy?  Snuggling up in several warm layers, wearing  big, baggy jumpers and coats which hide wobbly bellies and long sleeves to make flabby upper arms disappear. Bliss. And the food! Carbs are allowed again, stews and casseroles and soups! Forget about the lettuce leaf, the raw food salads, barbecues and picnics under vicious attack from wasps and other pests. The only meats are cold meats, semi raw chicken, charred sausages and mozzarella which has curled at the edges. No, civilisation reigns again,  bringing hibernation food; there’s meat and gravy and potatoes, great piles of roasted vegetables, all eaten indoors, at the table or from a tray in front of the telly. and red wine tastes ever so much better in front of the fire than on a muggy night in the garden.

And what about the telly! In the UK all channels suddenly rediscover what they’re for: namely entertainment, and possibly education (good old Beeb, keep your hands off, Tories and Murdoch!), not endless repeats of programmes which weren’t interesting the first time round. We are spoilt for choice all of a sudden, from mid-September onwards. New series start, thrillers and costume dramas and must-see one-offs jostle for viewers. True, it’ll all be over when the Christmas Specials arrive, the crowd pleasers, game shows, unfunny comedians and sitcoms, but until then there’s a glut of entertainment to keep us quiet during the long evenings.

Bedtime isn’t bad either. In summer, after a day of the sun sitting on our South facing windows, the bedrooms are far too hot to allow for comfortable nights. Few private houses in the UK have air-conditioning and even wide open windows hardly lower the temperature. I like the feel of a covering but there are nights when even a cotton sheet is more than I can bear. Now, with temperatures back down to the low teens and under, the feel of a cosy duvet is perfect.

Thick socks, hot cocoa, guilt-free reading and TV sessions, baked apples with cinnamon and toasted almond flakes, box sets, walks in the woods while leaves are drifting, game stews and afternoon tea in front of a fire, hats and scarves and gloves, and the mists rising from the valley floor, these are my favourite seasonal things.

Soon it'll be time to dread Christmas but then, as many of us remind each other at the beginning of October: “In three months’ time it’ll all be over and we can look forward to a new beginning.

But for now and first of all, here’s to a happy autumn!

Colours of the Equinox

In his poem 'September 1815' Wordsworth has it that

While not a leaf seems faded, while the fields,

With ripening harvest prodigally fair,

In brightest sunshine bask, this nipping air,

Sent from some distant clime where Winter wields

His icy scimitar, a fortaste yields 

Of bitter change . . . . .

Yet, there is still colour to be had in the garden. True, with the sun’s rage mellowing, summer has vanished, afternoon shadows grow long and there is a definite nip in the air when day lowers itself into the horizon. Autumn birdsong is less noisy, sweeter, more leisurely than the sounds of Spring, when the season's work must still be done. It’s the brief moment before trees wear the red, gold and amber uniform of Autumn and, finally, small beacons of light, the autumn bulbs, corms and tubers beloved of gardeners everywhere, come into their own.

For me the arrival of cyclamen is a pleasure every year at this time. I almost forget them, until I see the ivy-like leaves appear and wait for the curled stems to deliver on their promise, and produce dainty, delicately leafed flower heads.

The sight of a mass of cyclamen in full flower is enough to take your breath away. As if by magic, the carpet of white, pink and purple blooms of cyclamen hederifolium reappears year after year, the individual tubers becoming as large as plates eventually. I didn’t plant  many originally, in fact, only a very few of them; I must have been assisted generously by ants, birds and self-seeding, because new flowers, at first just one or two blooms, grow in all sorts of rocky cracks and shady nooks where none were before. There are varieties that flower in Spring but I love my autumnal show. September, October and sometimes into November is the time for cyclamen, when many other plants have lost interest and withdraw into themselves, prepare for the first cold winds of winter and huddle together in brown clusters.

For those of you who might like to try and grow cyclamen, here are a few facts from the website of the Royal Horticultural Society:

A delightful tuberous perennial providing colour often when little else is flowering, particularly in late winter or early spring. Hardy cyclamen species and cultivars are ideal for naturalising under trees, on banks or in a shady border and planted in association with other early-flowering woodland plants such as snowdrops, winter aconites and primroses

Common name Sow bread

Botanical name Cyclamen

Group Tuberous perennial

Flowering time Mostly autumn and winter 

Planting time Autumn, winter (when ground is not frozen) and early spring

Height and spread 5-13cm (2-5in) by 8-15cm (3-6in)

Aspect Partial shade

Hardiness Fully to frost hardy

Difficulty Moderate

PS: After reading the first comments, I think I need to add a PS. Indoor and outdoor cyclamen are slightly different varieties. The plants you buy in pots for the house need cool rooms, warm central heating will kill them, so keep them in a coolish corner.  The indoor varieties will not survive outdoors. The outdoor varieties are fully hardy, down to frost and snow, they won’t like being brought indoors.

The Miracle of Spring

Come sweetheart, listen, for I have a thing

Most wonderful to tell you - news of Spring.

Albeit Winter still is in the air,

and the Earth troubled, and the branches bare,

yet down the fields today I saw her pass -

The Spring - her feet went shining through the grass.

She touched the rugged hedgerows - I have seen

her fingerprints, most delicately green.

And she has whispered to the crocus leaves,

And to the garrulous sparrows in the eaves.

Swiftly she passed and shyly, and her fair

Young face was hidden in her cloudy hair.

She would not stay, her season is not yet,

But she has reawakened, and has set

The sap of all the world astir, and rent

Once more the shadows of our discontent.

Triumphant news - a miracle I sing -

The everlasting miracle of Spring.

John Drinkwater

English poet and playwright

1882-1937

. . . .and has rent once more the shadows of our discontent . . . .
Triumphant news indeed. Whose spirits do not lighten on days such as these.

Blogallimaufrey

Following news sources online is a mug’s game. There are too many sites which concentrate disproportionately on hyped and blown up bad news. Headlines scream at you, deliberately phrased in such a way that you are drawn in against your better judgement. Result: depression and feeling down-hearted. Yes, bad stuff happens all the time, but concentrating on it to the exclusion of good stuff doesn’t make it better.

Living in a phoney bubble of privilege and positivity is plain stupid, we must face reality. After all, we are part of the human race, living at this time,  constantly confronted with the awfulness of traumatic events. 

Desperate refugees pressed up against barbed wire, children with huge hungry eyes, mass shootings, politicians in the UK all but shredding each other over the EU referendum; and then there’s the surreal and well nigh unbelievable spectacle of Donald Trump. 

But there was better news too more recently:

What, really?

Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall? I can’t have been the only one whose face cracked into a huge sneery grin when the news came through. Finally, something to make me giggle. I loved the pictures of the happy couple, (particularly the close-ups), arm in arm, Jerry in flat shoes, so as not to tower over her shortish groom who's 84, and looks every day of it. 

And so Rupert plays his part. Shifting

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.

However, it doesn’t do to make fun of Murdoch. At 84 his money bags can still cause our craven government to kowtow and let him have all the best programmes on the BBC for a song. Even for the man who can, and has, bought himself everything his mean and desiccated heart desires, the other man’s grass is always greener.

Not that you could mistake him for a sheep; a wolf in sheep’s clothing, more like.

Paul knocked on the back door today. The celandines are out in the hedges.Yes, it’s that time of year, March, the most exciting and provocative month in the garden, full of promise, with blizzards one minute and sun as warm as in May the next, with thunder and lightning, frivolous snow flurries, fierce storms pelting you with sleet and hail and soft breezes to make you throw off your hat and gloves. Yellow-gold March, with daffodil, coltsfoot, aconite, buttercup, dandelion and marsh marigold all vying for the attention of the earliest insects.  

Permutations, Perambulations and Pictures

Millie is throwing me a dirty look from under lowered, speckled-white eyebrows: “Can we Please go out? It’s a lovely day.” 

“Oh, very well then.” She’s right, it’s chilly but the sun is out and I really shouldn’t waste the morning. I’m still very much up and down, given to mood swings, feelings of depression one minute, hopeful the next. A brisk walk in bright sunshine would surely do me good. 

It is indeed a cheery morning. We go up the old track leading out of Valley’s End towards Bishop’s Castle until we get to the crossroads, where we turn right, with our backs to Bicton Hill.

Ever since we’ve first lived here I have called this crossing of two field edge footpaths “Gallows Corner”. I can no longer remember who told me this but today, wanting to find out more about this gruesome, now disappeared, relic of past justice I asked several long time residents and local historians; none of whom had ever heard of it. Mr. Wells remembered the stocks next to the Town Hall, now the village museum, where wrong ‘uns, who had celebrated market day a little too carelessly, were shackled by their legs; I suppose they were lucky not to have been thrown into the lock-up proper from where they wouldn’t even have been able to see the fun, there being no window in the mouldy cell. On the other hand, well-meaning burghers might have pelted them with rotten vegetables?

Having walked along 'The Modems’ (again, I must find out why this track across the hill on the Southern edge of Valley’s End has this name), towards Radnor Hill we climbed the stile conveniently cut into the hedge into the next field.  Radnor Hill is mainly limestone, discovered and quarried by the Romans when they colonised this part of the country in the middle of the first century AD, and even today there are remnants of very early quarries on top of the hill, with several smaller and more recent quarries nearer the base.

Back down in the village, having slithered down a still muddy and steep path, via the old pool which has caused so much controversy and falling out of neighbour with neighbour, and along a small stretch of road past the entrance to the alms houses, we turned left to the allotments and the kissing gate, which leads to a track between two fields.  A kissing gate is a type of gate which allows people to pass through, but not livestock. The normal construction is a half-round, rectangular, or V-shaped enclosure with a hinged gate trapped between its arms. The kissing gate is often the subject of chatter about the origins of its amorous-sounding name. The prosaic answer is that it derives from the fact that the hinged part touches – or ‘kisses’ – both sides of the enclosure rather than being securely latched like a normal gate.

That hasn’t stopped many clinging to a more romantic notion: that the first person to pass through would have to close the gate to the next person, providing an opportune moment to demand a kiss in return for entry. I know which answer I prefer.

Kissing gates are often found at the entrance to church graveyards but there is no evidence that this has any symbolic significance.

Once we are through the gate - I have to hold it open for Millie and she snakes through without demanding a kiss - the field track to 'The Green’ lies ahead. (in spite of its name, ‘The Green’ is our tiny industrial estate consisting of three low and rather attractively built structures - one even has arched windows, like church windows. The industry pursued here is entirely rural, causing neither pollution nor noise.) The lower slope of Radnor Wood  is getting closer.

Three ponies and three sheep live in the paddock  at present. The field on the left has some kind of crop growing, possibly rape. Or perhaps winter wheat? I have no idea why just three sheep, when they are so plentiful everywhere else and are certainly never given any special treatment.

One of the ponies comes to inspect us. I often have an apple in my pocket, perhaps that’s why. Millie and the pony sniff each other but then lose interest. (‘The Green’ industrial estate is visible over the hedge on the other side of the paddock). At the other end of the field edge track we climb a stile and return to the village and the ford across the river.

Snowdrops and daffodils brighten he banks of the river. The waters have receded, although the river ‘was out’ when we had those endless heavy rains earlier this year and at the end of last year;  the levels have sunk, roads are clear and 4x4s can cross the ford again. I wouldn't like to try crossing in my small and ordinary car but then, I don’t have to. Valley’s End has a perfectly good humpback bridge built as recently as anno 1450 and still going strong. Well, with the fairly regular exception of lorries crashing into it, causing the locals no end of amusement while watching desperate drivers trying to extricate themselves without doing too much further damage. Many times drivers who had miscalculated the angle from road to bridge simply shot off, leaving the scene of the crime in as great a hurry as our narrow country lanes would allow. But, no more. Valley’s End has installed a camera! The guilty party will be caught and made to pay! Unfortunately, the parish finances are none too healthy and I am not sure that there was enough money in the kitty for both camera and film.


Millie was right to get me out. I am feeling much better. Tired, of course, after little in the way of exercise for several weeks, but I might take heart and go off again tomorrow.

A Walk On The Mild Side

An early spring day,

soft and mellow,

a slight haze in the air;

too good to spend all of it indoors.

 We start off at the confluence of two small local rivers, just beyond the castle

and what was once the castle fishponds.

 They’re streams really,

but we call them rivers,

the Clun and the Unk,

which should, by rights, become the Clunk,

but the Clun wins out.

 we’re following the Unk upriver now.

 

 Just Millie and me,

aunt Josephine’s walking stick,

a small camera,

and Eva Cassidy.

Sheep have been here before us, leaving gossamer strands of fleece behind

on sere bramble fronds

Eva often comes along on days like these,

her bitter-sweet voice is just what I need.

Millie walks ahead,

as usual following her nose

and the delectable scents only she can detect.

We meet nobody;

it’s just us, all the way.

 Eva is still with me,

but quietly enough so I can hear the birds;

they are making good use of this day too.

Each one is marking out his territory,

the robin loudest of all.

 And all the while there’s the sound of the river,

gently flowing and tumbling over rocks,

pretending to be a waterfall.

Somebody died here,

a hen pheasant probably.

There’s nothing left of her apart from a handful of feathers. 

Millie takes a cursory sniff, but quickly loses interest.

Some other creature has eaten all there was.

We haven’t gone far at all,

an hour maybe,

but it’s been worth it.

Just the other side of the castle is home.