How life used to be

 

It has arrived at last. We have been waiting for nearly three months, but our new table is here. We had to ask the delivery people to move the old table into the garage for us., which they did and it stands there dejected amongst garden tools. Our new table is splendid; I have never had a new table in my life.

Our farmhouse table was mahogany with huge carved legs and two ‘leaves’ that you could put in if a lot of people came for dinner. You had to crank a winding handle at the side and turn to expose a big gap in the middle. This where we played table tennis, where my mother ironed our clothes with a hot flat iron from the coal fire and where my cousin had her tonsils out with the local doctor operating.

When they moved to their retirement bungalow they bought a drop-leaf second-hand table from a sale room. Mr T had a table he rescued from a chicken shed and I had an ancient writing table from an ‘emporium’. So, this is my first new table after 81 years. We are still waiting for the matching chairs.

And I am still waiting for my electricity usage recording app to work. It has stopped sending updates and there is not a lot I can do except wait and hope. You seem to need an app for everything these days, even parking and supermarket shopping. I wonder if my phone will get full and say ‘that is enough, you cannot have any more apps’. Things are moving so quickly it is hard to be sure of anything.

But I understand what is happening in the field next to us. It is haymaking time and although the machinery has changed (and I bet the farmers have apps) the process is the same. The farmer cut the long, lush grass and then turned it until it was dry enough to make bales. All familiar procedures except the last when the hay was rolled and sealed into huge black plastic cylinders. There are eleven of them in the shorn field looking like giant black puddings. When I was little the bales were rectangular, tied up with thick yellow twine.

The remarkable thing about the field being cut was the change of birds. The gulls came over and circled probably looking for worms, then the swallows and house martins swooped in catching flies which were taking advantage of the warm air above the dried pale stubs of grass. The buzzard came last and is here now. Using the telegraph pole as a lookout he pounces, glad of an easy target of creatures with nowhere to hide.

(Taken from my column in The Star)