When all is complicated

-


‘Thank you for your purchase… We are pleased to receive your order… Your order is with despatch team… Shipment scheduled to be sent… Your package is on its way… Shipment with our delivery service… Your order is on its way… Delivery tomorrow…Delivery today… Out for delivery now… Delivered’

You may be familiar with the emails you can get if you order online. For my last order I had twelve separate messages. Then at the end ‘How did we do?’ I did not take the survey. Somehow it is all too much. What happened to ‘Thank you for your order' and then a delivery? How we have complicated the world until it is almost not understandable.

The garden and the seasons are more predictable. Now we are in October we are well and truly into autumn. Our luscious fruit and vegetables have suddenly stopped. The few remaining tomatoes hang limp and green, the peppers, aubergines and courgettes have withered overnight. We had our final sweetcorn meal for lunch yesterday with butter (low fat margarine) running down our chins.

But all is not lost. The pumpkin is a gleaming golden orange and the spaghetti marrows are ripening to a pale yellow matching the autumn sun. We have begun picking and storing the apples for the winter. Not all varieties are ready at once and we keep a keen eye on our calendar and on those that begin to drop. I gently lift one in my cupped hand and if the stalk snaps and the tree lets it go, if the tree gives it to me, then the fruit is ready to pick.

Our little country road is also being prepared for the winter. It has been closed. We have had potholes here for the last few years. They were all shapes and sizes and some were repaired. But the deep ones were left. It was almost impossible for me to cycle down the road because I could not risk the jolt of dropping into a hole. Traffic got confused if I suddenly swerved to the other side. Then one day someone came and painted a line round each pothole and now, at last, the deep holes are being scraped and filled. It has taken so long that I would think that the original repairs to the shallow holes need mending again!

One last thing I always did in autumn was take the post cards down from my kitchen cabinet where they were displayed. But not many people have managed to get away this year and no one sends a card now, we are back to the email message which is not quite the same. 

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)




Our spaghetti marrows drying in the autumn sun

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home from hospital (again)

-
Image
Bang, crash flash. It was not a thunderstorm but noises in my head as I gradually came back to consciousness. My operation was over and I slowly checked my senses I could hear the theatre nurse on my right, I could smell the disinfectant air, I could feel my fingers and I could see. But could I read? I remember when my mother had a brain operation (mine was not this) they asked her as she came round from anaesthetic, ‘Who is the Prime minister?’.  She knew it was Harold Wilson – not too difficult as he had quite a long stint in the job. But if they asked me the same question, I think that I could have been forgiven for not knowing because we have had so many different ones recently. In any case, my brain seemed to be working as I squinted to read a notice on the wall it said, ‘Quiet Please’, and of course all I wanted to do was to shout out in joy that it was all over. When I was waiting the long weeks before my operation, I read a poster telling me how to prepare. Lose weight (I a
Read more

The dangers of living in the country

-
I know that you might think that living in the country we do not get to see people very much. And it is true that I cannot walk out of my door and have a natter with a next door neighbour and I can’t just pop in to a cafe and catch up with friends who happen to be there. But you would be surprised how often I do meet up with friends – it’s just that you have to make more of an effort and it all has to be arranged and planned and when we do meet – we never stop taking – you see there is so much to say after only having our pets for company. Well, anyway, I am trying to tell you about what happened last night. Now the nights are drawing in we all agreed to meet up for an evening meal in our nearest town to cheer ourselves up. I offered to pick up a friend in a nearby village and drive to the nearest town miles away. What a good time we had catching up on news and ... well, just talking to a person and not a cat or bees or the like. But at the end of the evening I was dismayed to find tha
Read more

Baby sparrows fall

-
Image
We have ‘July drop’. This is not a disease, thank goodness, but something perfectly harmless that happens to apples each year. Little apples, which have not developed fully, fall to the ground. It is nature’s way of thinning the fruit naturally. Ours have been dropping for some weeks now, but this year we had frosts late in the spring and so the fruit is not too plentiful. I am hoping the drop stops soon. We are relying on our apples especially at this time when we are trying to be self-sufficient in vegetables and fruit. Two baby sparrows had July drop here too. They fell from their nest, somehow, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was a bird of prey that they were trying to escape from or the wind that broke up their flimsy nest structure. In any case, I heard their parents chirping from the trees and the nestlings soon toddled off into the nearby long grass. The ‘common’ house sparrow is not now so common, in fact it is on the RSPB red list which means that there is cause for concer
Read more