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It's a puzzle

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  I can hardly believe my eyes. Our air plant has changed to red and it has sent out two flower buds. I have had it years. It gets covered in dust and occasionally one of us will put it under the running tap then it goes back on the window ledge. It sits on a ceramic lily pad with an ornamental frog looking on. But the flower is unremarkable, after all these years, you would think it would be spectacular. Kew gardens have a lily that blooms every two years and that flower is huge and well worth seeing. Birmingham Botanical gardens had a plant this year called the sapphire flower, it has taken ten years to bloom and now it will die. I wonder if that will happen to our air plant. I do not know what happened to the person in our supermarket who was stopped by the store detective. She was old and struggling with her trolley but went through the self-serve counter without difficulty. I noticed that she had bought a pan, but it had a grey tag on secured by a complex of metal wires. All w
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Almost too late

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  Why did I wait so long to do this? It is so easy. Voting by post means that I could sit at the kitchen table and take my time. I posted the voting slip a week early, but if you do that you cannot change your mind. Mind you, there are lots of people who do not vote at all. Many of the people in Hull near where I was born do not vote. They had the lowest voter turnout in UK at the last general election. Shropshire fares better thank goodness. Some people think that it should be compulsory to vote, I have a friend with dual nationality and she has to post her vote abroad at their election time otherwise she will get a fine. Another thing that some people have stopped doing is getting their Covid jab. Some relatives have had Covid again, so I booked online for a jab, but then I was ill and had to postpone, then I was away and so it went on until I found that I was running out of time when the spring booster vaccine was available. Again, I went online to change the date. When you want
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The end or the beginning

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  It cannot be all over, can it?   Last week we had mid-summer’s day and that means that from now on we are heading for longer nights. It hardly seems possible.   I have noticed that the house martins on the building opposite have only just started visiting their nest again, so they will have to get a move on if they are to rear a brood. Our blackbirds have had no such hesitation. They have reared a nest full of young in our cow byre. The door is always closed so the parents used to go in through a small missing window. The nest was safe from predators there and the nestlings grew without threat. But when it came to flying out the task was not so easy. They had to negotiate the hole in the window and that was not simple. One young one was left behind and so in the end I had to leave the door open and hope it survived. I was hoping that my tomato plants survived too. I was given them by a gardener friend last week. Our greenhouse plants have not done too well this year I think that
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What it says on the tin...

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    ‘Advanced warning this road will be closed…’ A yellow sign went up on our little road again and although road closure might not be a good thing, in this case I stood there with some neighbours thinking that it was a good sign. Could it be that our pot-holed road was going to be renewed any time now? I had a letter saying that between April and August this year the surface would be renewed (better than filling potholes the letter said). We were full of hope. But soon the notice was removed without any closure nor any improvements, and the road was still full of holes. We left for a bit of a break in Norfolk carefully dodging the huge open craters. On our adventures we came across another big road sign. ‘No boarding without Ferryman’s permission’ it said. When was the last time you spoke to a ferryman? A ramp dropped and we drove on, along with a motorbike. Chains pulled us across the river Yare to the other side. It seemed so old fashioned, but it saved us a thirty-mile roun
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Makes you think

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  I have been there at last. I have walked through the gates into that hidden sanctuary. It was open day at Horatio’s Garden at The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital near Oswestry.   There are seven Horatio’s Gardens which have been developed and the eighth in Sheffield is being built. We are lucky enough to have one in Shropshire designed by Bunny Guinness, and ever since I first heard about it, I have wanted to go in. My dream came true last weekend when it opened for the National Garden Scheme. I have waited five years to see this secret garden. It runs the length of a busy road and I expected noise of traffic but all that disappeared somehow in the peace of the garden with its glorious tumbling colours and rippling stream. There was a little café at the end and you could buy plants but mostly we wanted to sit and enjoy the peace and calm. I met a volunteer who is a trained gardener by profession and she told me that she had met Olivia, Horatio’s courageous mother.   Her youn
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Getting older

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  “They must think I know nothing.” I was in the hairdresser’s having my hair cut yesterday. As I have grown older my hair has gone more and more unruly. When I leave, I will look quite respectable but as soon as I wash it all the good work has gone. It does its own thing again and flies away. “It’s as if I haven’t learnt a thing or two as I have grown older.” This woman was about my age, but her hair looked immaculate even before she had it cut and styled. I do not know how some people do it. “They must think we are stupid,” she persisted. I thought at first, she was talking about our MPs, but no, she was talking about her children. She was going to a wedding in London and they had asked her if she could manage the journey. She said that she had worked in London for most of her life and of course, knew her way around. She had quite a lot of treatments on her hair with silver paper and a guided heater. She looked beautiful of course. Afterwards, I had to go to the hospita
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Deadly

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‘Nearly all of them have been lost,’ I was told at a talk by a lecturer from Wolverhampton University. It was called ‘Understanding Hay Meadows’. We have two hay meadows – Oak Meadow and Goose Bottom and they are full of wildflowers, the ones I remember from my childhood. I also heard about research and groups trying to preserve and regrow these meadows. At the talk I learnt that since 1945 we have lost 97% of our traditional hay meadows. Does it matter? Well, it means that we have also lost a great number of our creatures and insects. It began to happen quickly in the war. My father, who was a farmer, told me that in the last war the government encouraged farmers to plough their traditional grass fields and plant them with crops, so that we could be more independent as a country. And that is what he and his brother did. Meadows called, Far Side, Half Moon and Cabin were ploughed and planted with crops. Mostly corn was grown but Home Field was planted with potatoes which were becom
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