Summer Trials

-



 

I have been caught out again. We were halfway through making courgette gratin when we came across this word. ‘Meanwhile make the sauce’. How mean was that?  Mr T had been cutting tomatoes, courgettes and onions from our garden, cooking them and layering them and now we are at a full stop whilst the sauce is made. I could have been getting on with that if I had known. I have underlined the ‘meanwhile’ in red now so that it will not happen again.

But what is happening again is that the woodpecker is pecking into our home-made clothes prop. I think it is made from a hazel with the branch forking at the end. Holes have started to appear, drill- like holes, into what can clearly seen as burrows from little tunnelling creatures. None of this really matters and it is good that the woodpecker is finding food but soon the prop will collapse and we will need another branch.

The woodpecker pecked our old bathroom window frame and now we have had to have a new one to go with the new bathroom. And one final touch is that the curtain has finally arrived. I could have made it myself, it would have been quicker and simpler, but it was a bit of luxury to have it made. It took ten weeks to complete (with a lot of begging phone calls) but now it is up at last and our journey with the bathroom, which began many months ago, is finally finished.

The village show at the weekend took our minds off day-to-day matters. I had a stall to sell the books I have written and it was good to meet so many people.

“I always read your column,” said one kind person and she came back later to tell of her wins in the flower table. There were horse shows and a dog show with spectators sitting on bales of straw. One woman bringing her dog had got lost in the hills and her Satnav had been taking her round in circles. There is not much of a connection in the hills and there seemed no solution as time went on and she must not miss the entry time.

“In the end I stopped and asked someone,” she said, “it was much easier and he just told me to drive to the big oak tree and turn left to the farm gate then right and straight on.”

Our flowers would not win prizes, but the sunflowers are out and beaming all over the garden and as the seeds form nothing could be better for the blue tits who are feeding there already.

(Taken from my column in the Shropshire Star)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Flying through the air in summer

-
Image
Here come the butterflies searching for flowers rich in nectar This is the Peacock with the Holly Blue butterfly They are back! Now the buddleias are in flower the butterflies are here to drink their nectar. I especially love seeing the beautiful red ones. There are whites too, of course, they have been here for some time. We don’t like the whites as much, because they lay eggs on our cabbage plants and, when their larvae hatch, they eat the leaves. But there is another ‘white’ butterfly that has just appeared. It is not quite white, in fact, this is the male and is very yellowy, the yellow of butter. I wonder if this where ‘butter-flies’ got their name. The female is harder to spot as she is a cream colour. I like them in the garden because they do not eat our cabbages, their caterpillars eat buckthorn leaves. Once you have seen them with their big yellow wings flopping around you will never mistake them for cabbage whites. There is something else flopping around our garden, but
Read more

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