What happened to the Promise of Spring?

Yes, yes, I know, it's only March and I live in the northern hemisphere where March often has a sting in the tail, but, come on, my jonquils are flowering their tiny little hearts out! Or rather, have been.

And this is the scene in my garden now:

The ancient beech in the field over the wall  

the border bed between me and the castle

the view into the village

the Japanese ornamental cherry tree.

I love it when the snow accentuates the perfection of the

tree's bone structure

It's quite sad; for the first time in years (covid years) I had formally invited some ladies to come and join me for lunch. I planned it like in the old days, a proper lunch, with a starter, main course and pudding. Simple fare, but much fancier than my solo lunches. So what happens? First one rings up to say she can't make it out of her front door and the other one rings to say she can't make it down the hill from her house into the village. Actually, they would probably not have made it down my drive from the road either. Even a  delivery man refused to drive his van up to the house, but rang to say the drive had disappeared. I KNOW that, silly man, so I suggested he could just carry the stuff up. "Oh, but I am wearing ordinary shoes," he said, "my feet and trousers will be soaked." I am afraid that I said, "that's not very intelligent, you must have known about the snow on your delivery round." You'd think their depot would encourage them to carry suitable footwear for their rural deliveries, wouldn't you? Apparently not. I stayed heartless. His final feeble excuse was that, yes, he knew it had been snowing for 24 hours, but nothing like this in the town he came from. Pathetic.

So, for the last two days and the next two, I am eating the vegetables I had defrosted for my lunch party, a mediterranean mixture of red and yellow peppers with courgettes, shallots, a carrot, celery sticks, sun dried tomatoes, lots of herbs and spices. I didn't want to risk refreezing the dish. Also, four individual portions of tender chicken thighs remained on the menu. Luckily, I could freeze the smoked salmon starter and the garlic bread to go with the main course. But the chocolate puddings still smile at me every time I open the fridge. And there I was, hoping to scale down my consumption during lent!

Life is hard.

PS: because I am still having problems with commenting on some of your blogs I will try and answer any questions or  remarks that require a reaction under your comments  here in future.

We've never had it so good.

All the windows are shut, on both sides of the house. Curtains are drawn, as are blinds. The only door wide open is the kitchen door, mainly to aid the heat from the ever-on Aga to escape. England is sweltering. There are two more days of extreme heat forecast before thunderstorms are predicted. All heat waves in England end in thunderstorms, we desperately need rain. This is all so very un-English; very few houses in the country have AC, up to now you are more likely to need functioning insulation to keep your house sheltered from the winter cold, also normally a moderate affair, Moderate temperatures is what the weather amounts to here, winter and summer, with rain more often than not. Not any longer.

Climate change is here. Many parts of the world suffer far worse than we do. Because I keep the windows wide open during the night and early morning and then march through the rooms sealing everything hermetically, it is bearably cool. I cannot imagine what people in small flats without easy access to greenery have to live with. Just like it was during lockdown, unimaginable. 

The weather has captured the main part of the news. The elderly are warned to stay hydrated, keep out of the sun, work as little as we can get away with, forget about BBQs because of fire danger. There is this panic in the air, as if heat is an enemy threatening our very existence.

As if we didn't have enough to contend with; after Covid - which is still rampant and predicted to be worse during winter - came Ukraine. The Russians are occupying the biggest nuclear power station in Europe which happens to be in Ukraine. Shelling and bombardment put the plant at risk and we are back to the fear of a nuclear holocaust in Europe. 

Want more? How about the energy crisis? Millions of people  in the UK face energy poverty. Eat or heat, that is the question. How do you tell your children that you cannot afford to keep them fed as well as warm? Energy bills have doubled this year and will again from October and then again increase in January. Add to that increased food bills, crops dying in fields and shortages on supermarket shelves, hosepipe bans and water shortages.

But there is always the government to make things better, isn't there? Oops, the Tories are shredding themselves and each other in a farcical fight to 'appoint' a new prime minister, after having finally got rid of the utterly incompetent and endless liar Johnson. So no help there, I'm afraid. 160.000 mostly white, mostly old, mostly middle-class members of the Tory party are about to decide this country's fate.

I have always felt that politics have no place in this blog, although nobody can possibly have got the impression that I am right wing. If I am to continue writing here then politics may come into it now and then.

So, some of you have asked, what happened, why have I gone awol? Thank you for your concern but I needed to withdraw for all sorts of reasons.  I have not been ill, nor more than usually depressed; all the same, I've missed writing. Maybe I'll catch up now.

The Dreaded Plague and a Very Expensive Haircut

First it was Brexit, then the floods and now Coronavirus.
The various news media have all been obsessed with just one subject at a time and there’s no getting away from it.

I have started to look at my friends with a very gimlet eye and those that I know to be of the hither-and-thither-shuffling persuasion I will not see much of while this whole virus business is going on. I have no problem with people who travel, use distance public transport and have a hectic social life at any other time, but not now. Over 70s are encouraged to remain relatively stationary and as most of us don’t go out to work, a few weeks of fixed aboding shouldn’t be too onerous. I have some extra provisions in, plenty of books, a garden for pottering, birds to watch, music to listen to, fellow bloggers to interact with, and locals whom I can see when the need moves me. I am on steroids for asthma and therefore have a weakened immune system. Deliberately exposing myself to catching the virus would be silly. It’ll be unlucky enough to catch it involuntarily.

So this is me for a bit.


I went for a haircut the other day, a regular 5-weekly event which takes a fairly small outlay and a car journey of no more than 30 minutes total there and back. It was one of the cold and wet specials England goes in for with abundant gusto and I was looking forward to getting back beside the Aga. It’s a very narrow, winding country road which makes it difficult to go fast and I was taking my time, a typically rolling English road made by the rolling English drunkard. Almost back in Valley’s End the disaster happened. I hit a deep pothole, filled with water and therefore invisible, and first the front tyre, then the back tyre, burst. It was an explosive sound and I was momentarily thrown and quite scared. Once I collected my wits I knew I couldn’t stay where I was, anyone coming round the bend would have hit me, so I limped the car a few hundred meters, very slowly, leaning on its right side, until I could safely pull it off the lane. It’s never a bad idea to be close to your particular mechanic, ever since we moved here we’ve used the same chap and it only took him 10 minutes to come and rescue me. He drove me home, then picked up the car. He was back before evening, all four tyres present and correct.

Insurance companies don’t cover pothole damage. This is deemed to be an ‘at-fault’ claim. So, as well as paying an excess, you could lose some of your no-claims bonus, and risk higher premiums in future.

I was interested in the etymology of ‘pothole’  : a depression or hollow in a road surface caused by wear or subsidence. From dialectal pot (“pit, hollow, cavity”) +‎ hole in Middle English.

Some say potholes are so called because of the potters who dug up chunks of clay from the Roman Empire's smooth roadways, more than 3,000 years ago. That explanation is more romantic but possibly less likely than the ordinary etymological one.

Allegiances

It is time for all the heroes to go home

if they have any; time for all of us common ones

to locate ourselves by the real things

we live by.

William Stafford

It’s quite unbelievable, we have had the fourth flood! Five, if you count separate floods on two consecutive days. And it’s not over yet, there is more heavy rain to come by the end of the week and showers in between. Shrewsbury town centre is still under water. I was supposed to go to a funeral in the town yesterday. I’m afraid I chickened out, together with three friends who were going in the same car. We went to the local pub instead and drank a toast to the deceased. We weren’t exactly proud of ourselves but we felt safer and quite relieved once we had come to a decision. It doesn’t do for the old and infirm (one of us was in a wheelchair - one in her early nineties -  one disabled and only me reasonably mobile) to be foolhardy.

My image as a high-flying, brainy, intellectual and altogether smartypanty, (yea, sure) if foreign, pillar of our particular society is taking a thorough beating. There I was, at a party for people on the losing side of the Remain/Leave partition, every member an academic, artist, engineer and professional, all vocal and committed to our joint cause. All talking absolute sense (that is, if you are on our side of the argument), with the debate hotting up a bit as the evening progressed. This was the first party I had been invited to since I’ve been on my own, all previous invitations have been to small groups, lunches and dinner parties. Whenever I find myself in such company I instantly feel like an impostor, a fraud, somebody who shouldn’t really be there. My reaction to such discomfort? I talk, I argue, I debate, tell stories, until many eyes are on me. Afterwards, at home, I feel utterly embarrassed.

This time there was an additional embarrassment: my frequent attendance at the 'Ladies who Lunch’ was brought up by a gossipy guest and it seems that it is by no means a secret that I have truck with Leavers and right-wingers. There were nods all round when I asked if everyone in Valley’s End knew. Luckily, this was cause for good-natured hilarity and I was teased mercilessly, rather than shunned and berated. Having felt uncomfortable about the Ladies’ conversation a few times now, I will try and see less of them, although I have no wish to offend them. Yes, their opinions can drive me mad, but they are kind and welcoming every time.

Like I said, this was the very first larger party I attended on my own. I knew a few of the guests and the hostess is a fellow foreigner and we therefore can get together and vent about ‘the English and their quaint customs’ and find we have a lot in common.We’ve both been here for decades. But, I did miss Beloved, all the others were coupled and went home  two-by-two. No matter how welcoming and friendly people are, it takes quite an effort to find your personal shaped niche to settle into by yourself.

I am off to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford with two friends tomorrow - both eminently able-bodied. That means I won’t have to look after anyone but myself if we get stuck in a flood somewhere. The play, “The Whip" is brand new, not sure that I will enjoy it. “Electrifying, compelling”, says the blurb.

On the Home Front

Valley’s End is flooded for the third time in just a few weeks; storm Dennis was worse than last weekend’s Ciara. In my twenty years here I have not seen the bottom field, where I regularly walked my dogs,  as deep under water as this morning. The rain has been incessant and there’s more to come  next week. I am so sorry for my neighbours who live along the river bank and whose cottages and houses are inundated with muddy brown river water from further up the valley in the Welsh hills.

I have stopped slavishly following the news, I just can’t bear it anymore. There is never anything good on offer, just the same endlessly miserable, spiteful, nasty, mean reports and opinion pieces, full of doom and gloom. It is all too depressing. Instead I watch the birds busily devouring everything I put out for them from my kitchen window. I have been wondering: all those tiny creatures like siskins, blue tits, gold finches, nuthatches, what happens to them during storms?
Are they blown off course? Or do they shelter in the hedges during
the worst of the weather? I have whole families of gold finches
(middle picture) landing on my feeders, would they be the same
birds as the ones before the storms? They love sunflower hearts, perhaps they fight for the right to return? As soon as I fill the container the gold finches are back. The others are all happy with peanuts, fat balls and mixed seeds. As their name implies, nuthatches love peanuts best. (the bird with the go-faster eye stripe)














The previous week we had one good day and Paul and I worked in the garden, the first time this year. It was still very cold and the wind had already started, but there was a bit of sunshine and we managed a decent three hours.

I’ve told you about Paul before, he isn’t a patch on old gardener, but I’ve got used to him. He actually volunteered a comment or two while we were having our tea break. Last autumn he was still deep in the clutches of depression, barely able to function. Sometimes he seemed to be falling asleep on his feet. I can’t just turn him off while he is so poorly, I’d feel mean and unkind; I think he is glad that I am still employing him and perhaps that’s why he seemed brighter this year. It is also possible that he has recovered a bit, he has treatments and sees somebody regularly.

This person, who is a kind of health visitor, also helps him in practical ways. Paul has no other income than the money he makes from gardening
and a few artistic things like designing and
creating greetings cards, bird boxes, trugs,
and other woodworkings, large and small.
He is a creative soul and when he feels well
enough he spends time in his workshop.
He lives on an amount that wouldn’t cover my utilities bills, much less food and drink and treats. For years I and another employer have tried to push him into applying for benefit payments but he always insisted that he didn’t want to do this. This health visitor has persuaded him and helped with filling in the relevant forms and I am very hopeful that he will at least receive some financial assistance. I know people who are so good at milking the system that they are doing very nicely, and have done for years, yet someone like Paul, who certainly deserves help, goes without.

As you can see from the picture snowdrops will soon be over but the hellebores are only just coming into their own. Roll on spring.

Trials and Tribulations

After three hot days the rain is back. From my window it looks like the whole world is weeping. Summer? What summer? I have that English disease of always complaining about the weather, whether it’s godawful or, as it occasionally is, only mildly godawful.

Things started out ok, I had a medical - which my surgery forces on people over 70 with underlying conditions like dodgy hearts or kidneys or whatever - and the results came back fine. I’ll live to complain another day.

Then I called the vet to the house to check Millie over. He came prepared to do the foul deed but she was having a good day, gave him a little wag and went to her treats corner all hopeful. Apparently, she is on her last legs, riddled with arthritis, has a heart murmur and water on the lungs, both of which make her pant, wheeze and cough intermittently. Her organs are weakening and her toilet habits leave much to be desired. The vet gently pointed out that things aren’t really fair on me now, what with her special needs, but damn that dog, she looks at me still bright-eyed, follows me around, even climbing the stairs, and eats like a pig. (How do pigs eat? Are they much slandered?) I just couldn’t do it. The vet says she may deteriorate next week or next month, that it won’t be long now and every day I dread the evening when I have to shut the kitchen door on her and leave her in the fast cooling scullery with the back door open. Last night I shut the back door. I had taken her out down the drive for a few yards about midnight and she actually did a big poo, to my relief.  Surely she wouldn’t do another one during the night? She did; I know she cannot help herself but cleaning up after her is far from undiluted joy.

On top of it all Beloved is getting in on the act. I woke up with a start at seven on the dot this morning because he called to me. “Are you awake?” I swear it was his voice. My dad once spoke to me clearly like that too. A long time ago. I hate being woken up abruptly and called out “I am now, leave me alone.” If only. It took a couple of seconds to remind myself that he has been gone for more than two years. Is his spirit fluttering around somewhere in the cosmos making sure I treat our dog properly ? If so, he should have woken me up an hour earlier, I could have let her out sooner and might have gone back to bed after feeding her.

Things get worse, if you are at all squeamish stop reading now. The night before last I committed murder, involuntary frog slaughter. It caused me a lot of stress and I can’t see why those of you still reading shouldn’t get stressed too. Once again the back door was involved. It’s wide open all summer long, not just for Millie’s sake. Normally, I lean it against a chair at night, stopping it from flying open under a sudden gust of wind. And also so I can hear the noise of it being pushed open by a burglar, which would cause me to jump out of bed, grab the truncheon I inherited from my dad, fly down the stairs with a blood curdling yell and lay about me, scaring any intruder into fleeing for his life. That’s the plan, anyway.

So, night before last, I was ready to shove the door against the chair, or vice versa if you like, and it wouldn’t shut. I tried again, pushing a bit harder. Still no luck. I looked down into the corner of the frame and the body of the door where the obstacle appeared to be and found a frog, very dead by now, bleeding over the doorstep, having been squeezed out of his life.  The silly creature had come in out of the cold several nights earlier and I had forgotten about his habit of seeking shelter just inside the frame. I hardly slept all night, envisaging his final horrible minute. I kept telling myself his death throes can’t have lasted very long, him getting squeezed would compare to one of us being pushed against a wall by a juggernaut, which would see the end of us in no time flat. But still, harming any creature, (apart from one of the current crop of politicians, of course), is wholly against my nature.

The pictures are of Millie and the frog in happier days.

"Have A Nice Day Out”,

my friend said. "Enjoy yourself, stop worrying, I’ll look after Millie for the day." The man who arranges such things in Valley’s End had promised a rip-roaring time at the Malvern Theatre for Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rough Crossing’, a play to make us laugh until we peed ourselves.

I took him at his word, booked the trip, paid an exorbitant amount of money up front for coach and ticket and looked forward to the entertainment. Except the nice day out turned into an (almost) unmitigated disaster.

It started as I left in the morning on the way to the bus stop, about 15 minutes walk away from the house. It was blowing a gale, with driving rain. All the way there my umbrella turned itself inside out, every few steps I had to stop and right it. No matter how I held it, into the wind, against the wind, sideways on, the damn thing flapped and creaked and dripped. By the time I got to the bus stop I was drenched, trouser legs sodden from the back of my knees to the hems. Did I say it was also bitterly cold? A little chap walking by on the other side of the road as I was struggling laughed happily. “A bit wet today, isn’t it?” Hahaha. Sadist.

Some of my fellow theatregoers assembled at the bus stop shivered but others were made of sterner stuff. The shelter would normally accommodate six or seven people but a man in a motorised buggy, who had been the sort who feels “entitled” long before he became slightly disabled, assumed that everyone else would gladly leave the shelter to him and stay exposed to the elements. I didn’t, I had been the first to arrive, and I stayed perched on my little seat. Make of that what you will.

The bus arrived and we climbed on board. Luckily, the heating was on and gradually, during the two hour journey, my clothes dried on me. When we got to Malvern the rain had stopped. The mass exodus from the bus duly effected, a large knot of people formed on the pavement, everybody was making arrangements for the hour before lunch and where to have it. Didn’t they have time during the two hour journey to do that? I needed the loo and made for the theatre, shouting to a couple of friends that I would meet them at ‘The Italian’ in an hour’s time, wanting to visit a posh supermarket first to buy some of their famous ‘cook’s ingredients’ to take home to my back-of-beyond-village where such things are only dreamt of, never available.

Of course, I bought too much, now being burdened with an extra load of groceries, my large handbag (purse), my wet umbrella. True, I can’t blame anyone else for this oversight. I am still not a good walker, still limping when I’m tired or when the effort of walking straight and upright gets too much. I no longer use a cane, though. Malvern is a hilly town, I frequently had to stop on the way to the restaurant to catch my breath and straighten up. Gosh, I am an old crock!

The next two hours were a pleasure, I enjoyed my Tagliatelle Bolognese and we all had a couple of glasses of wine, not something we usually do at lunchtime. Everybody got merry, greatly helped by the waiters who flung their ‘per favores’, their ‘pregos’ and ‘grazies’, their ‘signoras’ and signores’ around with wild abandon, who burst into song while sinuously weaving  and undulating between the tables and made much of their giant pepper mills. I bet they were from Roumania really.

Finally it was time to go to the theatre and take our seats, having left coat and groceries at the cloakroom. Stoppard can be a bit of an acquired taste but he has written some really good stuff. Sadly, ‘Rough Crossing’ is far from good, it has the thinnest of plots:

Two famous playwrights, one jealous composer, an unorthodox waiter, and a mistimed lifeboat drill… let the sharp Atlantic winds turn to gales of hysterical laughter as our colourful characters become tantalisingly tangled in a Stoppardian string of absurd events…

If only. The Art Deco set looked splendid and promised much. The moment the actors appeared the promise evaporated and within the first ten minutes several of our coach party were sound asleep. The sound was bad, the dialogue barely distinguishable, the action messy and incomprehensible. The cast (all fairly recognisable TV actors)was lacklustre and seemed tired and bored. We were all disappointed and two of my friends decided they’d had enough and left at the interval, as did several of the others. I had nowhere to go and, in any case, couldn’t face lugging my groceries around, so I stayed to the bitter end. The action perked up for the last ten minutes but by then I’d given up on the play and was simply waiting to be released from captivity. All I wanted was to get on the bus and go home.

But my trials for the day weren’t over. I couldn’t swear to it but I may have, in fact, actually peed myself, even if for quite another reason as the one promised. When I came out of the loo right at the end, before climbing back aboard the coach, I felt a dampish kind of warmth spread over my belly. Yes, the front of my trousers was wet. I had been hovering over the toilet bowl, being loath to sit on the seat which appeared a touch insalubrious. But I had also been sprayed with warm water as I washed my hands afterwards. Enough to cause a damp patch in my trousers? We will never know. Suffice to say that I kept my coat on the whole journey back to Valley’s End and the first thing I did back home was to take a quick shower.

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.

Back to . . . .

. . . . . . a bit of this and a bit of that.

Still spending hours reading rather than writing or doing anything else creative. Still obsessed with the news, both here and across the world. How very foolish of me to search for items on Brexit, the humanitarian catastrophes currently unfolding in the Yemen and Somalia and Myanmar’s Buddhists' genocide of the Rohingya people in Asia. Who knew Buddhists are no less cruel than adherents of any other faiths can be, given half a chance and a great enough measure of hatred of ‘the other’? And then there’s the good old USofA and that magnificent example of how a democracy works.

So why do I feel this obsession? You tell me, I have no idea. As if life weren’t miserable enough already.

Book reading is different though, I am sticking with delightfully lightweight fare. I have just finished a tale by Amor Towles, a writer new to the bookshelves. 'A Gentleman in Moscow’ covers 32 years in the life of a Russian aristocrat who has been sentenced to house arrest in a small attic in a luxury hotel in Moscow. Should he risk leaving the hotel he’d be shot. In spite of these 32 years coinciding with the most harrowing period in Russia’s recent history the story is uplifting: how to make the most of a bum deal. I enjoyed it greatly. Grand literature in the Russian classic tradition it is not but tragedy is not what I’m after.

For much of the week I am ok but weekends are hard. There’s the poetry group, the German Conversation group, there’s a bit of shopping, a chat with a friendly soul while out with Millie, tradespeople and repairmen, hedge cutters, old gardener and Kelly the cleaner, the pleasure of a meal at the pub when family old and new come for a visit, or with other pensioners for the ‘seniors’ deal’. Only Kelly and old gardener come regularly once a week and I now spend quite a bit of time chatting with them rather than letting them get on with their jobs.

I remember the time after my Dad’s death when my own Mum must have been very lonely.  She used to ring me at least once a week, usually on Sunday morning. I remember feeling impatient with her, she’d ramble on and on about nothing much. Often she’d say “If only you had stayed in Germany”. Poor Mum. Even though I flew across and stayed with her every few months, particularly during her last couple of years - leaving Beloved, my relatively new husband,  alone - she had few friends and was unable to adjust to life on her own. Poor Mum indeed. I hope I will do better.

For quite some time I have been fretting over renewing my passport. I am still a German national and will forever be one. Now, after Brexit, I am even less inclined to apply for British citizenship. On the whole, people reassure me that after all these years living here, working here, paying my taxes and having British husbands throughout (one at a time) I will not be summarily deported. But if I were I’d simply sell up and move back to Germany, although I’d prefer not to. My life has been here for so long now I’d probably find settling in Germany difficult. So, I needed to renew my passport which cannot be done by post. After Beloved’s death and completion of the necessary paperwork following on, I finally had the space and time to go to Cardiff (or Liverpool) and apply with the Honorary German Consul in either of these cities. A train journey would get me there. That is until my leg and hip turned on me. I was in perfect agony for more than two weeks and the thought of travelling by train became a nightmare. In stepped my son. “Mum, I have a few days off in October, would you like me to come over and do whatever needs doing?”  Would I? Would I? He took me to Cardiff by car and we even had enough time to spend hours in my favourite department store where we had lunch, afternoon tea and a leisurely stroll around the ladies’ clothing floor. I came away with a very smart and rather expensive jumper. It’s so long since I bought myself anything at all in the clothing line that buying this jumper (sweater?) felt like a real treat. I  really am most grateful for my son’s kind deed. And what’s more, I should have a passport within six weeks, one of those European Union passports with fingerprints and eye recognition. As soon as I have sorted myself out I shall probably do some travelling again.

I have had no further news from my daughter other than a pleasant note in reply to my email, but I am still hopeful; she’s been on holiday and may be short of time. It would be nice to be on good terms with both my children. However, as I said in the previous post, I will expect nothing and appreciate everything.

As I sit here writing, Ophelia is roaring around the house. It’s a storm now, not a hurricane, but it is quite frightening enough. My main concern is about the beech tree holding on to it’s roots. Millie and I ventured out this afternoon but not for long and no further than the field. And keeping well away from trees. The forecast is for gusts of 80 - 90 mph to continue into the night. As I am (I didn’t say WE, there’s progress!) quite a way inland from the West Wales coast perhaps the strength of the wind will be less by and by. Should I go to bed or stay up? What do people in the hurricane prone regions do? I still have electricity.

I have enjoyed writing this post; I know it’s pretty anodyne and waffly, but yes, I enjoyed it. Perhaps blogging will become a pleasure again.

The Weather Outside is Frightful . . . .

with skies of unrelieved grey; wet and grey and muddy underfoot. As if Christmas on its own weren’t bad enough. However, I survived, as I hoped I would.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, it was a toned down English version, an English Christmas without the paper hats and streamers; without the family rows, and bored kids; without endless hours of television. Even without a turkey. Dear kind friends took pity on us and gave us a Christmas dinner of roast goose instead. All very civilised, with good conversation and enough goodwill to solve half the ills of our planet. Sadly, nobody takes notice of sensible, kindly, friendly and peace-loving folk like us.

Christmas is usually a difficult time for me. It’s the time when I’m most aware of being in voluntary exile. The Christmases of my childhood were slow and modest and contemplative ones, festive, with an unchanging order of events, lasting for at least three day, including Holy Night (Christmas Eve in the UK), Christmas Day and the second day of Christmas (Boxing day here). Nowadays, I do my best to forget, ignore, avoid all old-country-ways but all it takes is a sliver of Silent Night sung by a children’s choir on German TV and a secret tear rolls down my face. Ah well, there’s sentiment for you.

We had promised ourselves that we would finally broach our very small collection of decent French reds which we bought many years ago from a proper French dealer in the Loire region. "After all, we don't know what next year will bring; will we still be around to drink it?” We use this phrase rather a lot now. I chose this Gigondas from 2002 to start us off, entirely suitable to go with roast beef on Boxing Day. Beloved took the bottle between his knees and operated on the cork, which promptly crumbled and broke off halfway through uncorking. I had a go and broke the remaining bits of cork. I’d managed to poke a hole through though and laboriously and very slowly emptied the bottle into a plastic jug by means of a paper towel lined funnel. From there it went equally slowly into a glass jug.

And what do you know, it was still drinkable. Not that either of us knows what a 14 yr old Gigondas, chateau-bottled, tastes like before it’s messed around by a pair of rank amateurs. Cheers.

TV was an acceptable part of the festivities too; we watched the final, very final and very stickily sweet  two-hour-long episode of Downton Abbey. All’s well that ends well with not a dry eye in the house. Even the below-stairs lot gets paired off. Most of Doctor Who passed me by, the tremendous noise irritated me; Then there’s the Dickensian, a rather messy soup of most of Dickens’ novels which goes on for twenty half-hour-long episodes (will I stay the course?) and Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, a stylish adaptation to my mind. I like a bit of mindless murder and mayhem, particularly when it’s done in muted colours, bristling moustaches and kind elderly gentlemen being sweet to damsels in distress.

But the best thing about Christmas, as in so many Decembers of our gradually warming climate, are the snowdrops, bravely poking out from the muddy ground. Harbingers of spring? Or foolhardy little treats just waiting to be nipped by frost and covered by snow?

Blow, blow, thou Winter Wind

Winter floweringViburnum

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round.

And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

So let us welcome peaceful evening in.....   *

Blow, blow, thou winter wind....  **

Indeed the wind blew fiercely and relentlessly for most of the week, and Beloved and I, looking out upon a scene of battle from behind the sheltering window glass, congratulated ourselves on the timely removal of the horse chestnut tree. The stiff and naked limbs of our one remaining giant, a stately, ancient beech tree, swayed heavily in the gusts coming up the valley from the West. So far, the river Clun has risen merely to within an inch of the top of its banks, any more rainfall will see the castle meadow flooded and Millie will have to paddle for her afternoon constitutional.

Inside, it’s been a very quiet week. Fearful of being blown off the road into hedges and ditches I left the car in the garage and made do with the village grocery shop for items like fresh milk and bread. Even that was a struggle, catching a lull in the rainstorms. There will be plenty more such weather, the forecasters say, to do with global warming and man-made climate change. If that is so then I will not be able to keep many appointments during winter, which take me away from the village. As it is, an afternoon meeting of German conversationalists was cancelled because nobody fancied getting trapped on flooded roads. I did, however, have a very pleasant hour long telephone conversation, in German, with a fellow blogger, another German lady living in the UK.We have only just started this contact and are still in the early stages of exchanging life stories.

So, for most days we did what the poet said: we put our feet up, drank tea, wrapped ourselves in cosyness and welcomed peaceful evening in. We had a short, two-hour power cut one night;  there was enough light from the sky for me to go outside through the nearest door, grope my way around the terrace at the back of the house and through another door into the scullery where the torches live. Armed with a torch it was easy to find candles and matches. I was almost disappointed when the lights came back on. We so rarely sit side by side, exchanging quiet thoughts and comfortable silences.



* from  The Task by W. Cowper
** from As You Like It by Shakespeare

My Friend The Tree Is Dead*

For the average German the forest is more than just the sum of the trees. When trees are threatened, Germans go on the warpath. I well remember the time of the late 70s when “sour rain” (i.e. acid rain), supposedly coming from Scandinavia, caused the great dying of the forests, particularly coniferous forests like the Schwarzwald (Black Forest). At the time the damage was thought to be irreversible. In Germany the forest is not only a cultural landscape formed through forestry and the result of modern recreational activities ranging from GPS-guided hikes to treetop trails. Much more than that, the woods and trees possess great symbolic, spiritual and fairytale-like charismatic powers and have always been celebrated in German poetry, art and music. Many of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm are set in Enchanted Forests.  In this way the forest is deeply rooted in the German consciousness – not only when we are using the woods for recreational purposes.

Two millennia ago, when Germany was 90% woodland, (compared to about 20% now) the army of Hermann defeated the then greatest military power on earth, the Roman army, by setting an ambush in a narrow corridor between  impassable swamps on one side and hilly, thicketed forests on the other, the great battle of the Teutoburger Wald in 9 AD. The victory gave the woodland warriors a symbol of invincibility in the forest.

Even hard-headed German politicians subscribe to the cult of trees; in a 1983 interview Chancellor Helmut Kohl said : mythology,  Germans and the forest, they all belong together.

still standing - beech and truncated horse chestnut

Which brings me to the death of our own ancient horse chestnut. It has been sickening for some time - a few years ago we lightened its load by having the sail trimmed drastically - but during the recent gales on two consecutive days and nights it finally gave up the fight. During the first night the left hand fork came down and the next night the long branch on the right collapsed. No one was hurt but the garden beneath took a direct hit. My heart broke when I saw the terminally damaged giant.

the left fork

There was no help for it, the tree had to come down completely. Tree fellers moved in and set to work, trimming what was left of the canopy, power-sawing, chopping and chipping mercilessly, and carting the slaughtered remains away.

There is now a great gap in the hedge, allowing clear views across the valley; you’d say that’s not so bad, but it also allows the wind coming up the valley funnel newly opened access to the garden, probably bringing down several smaller trees which were damaged in the giant’s fall in the process.

The damage to the woodland garden is considerable, tree fellers trampling all over it during the removal of the horse chestnut hasn’t done it any favours. Fences are down, the leaf mould enclosure is no more, and a few terracotta pots have been shattered, their contents lost in the general mayhem.

As a dedicated tree hugger minus one very special specimen I am very sad.

*Title borrowed from a German song by Alexandra
 "Mein Freund Der Baum Ist Tot".

Late Bloomers and New Arrivals

Millie and I go for little walks again, mainly around the castle. She is quite happy to revisit her favourite nooks and crannies and avidly reads the news left on every tussock by her friends. In her turn she leaves little messages for them. Like me, she is saying: I’m back!

There are still visitors of the human family kind around too.

After climbing onto the castle mound they take time to admire 

the beautiful scenery of the South Shropshire Hills.

Having had to ignore the garden for almost the whole of spring and summer

I finally found time and energy to have a wander around this month.

Considering it’s November, there are still a lot of treasures to be seen:

drooping fuchsia lanterns

 the silver seed heads of clematis in a rosemary bush

 variegated eleagnus and virginia creeper growing on the house wall

set each other off to perfection

 two varieties of geranium peep out from their foliage

amid fallen leaves

 a mophead hydrangea  

 shiny yellow flowers of hypericum  Hidcote

 and the South African osteospermum

and the next day the fog descended and 

stayed with us for three days.

Millie and I didn’t stay out for very long and to judge by the dearth

of messages left for her, neither did her friends.

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.